Haass: We must get China into the tent

China’s Independence Fantasy
Zachary Karabell 6/27/2009 12:00:00 AM
China is not happy. That's the title of the bestselling book in China. The five nationalist authors say it is time for China to "split from the West," particularly the United States and the Treasury bonds that Beijing holds to the tune of $1 trillion. This desire for greater distance from America is growing: in a May poll conducted by China's Global Times, 87 percent said they were against buying more U.S. debt. Shortly before U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner arrived in Beijing in early June, a survey of leading Chinese economists showed that 17 of 23 think U.S. bonds are "risky," that U.S. stocks pose a potential threat to the Chinese economy, and that the Chinese government should diversify its assets away from U.S. markets and toward energy and mineral resources. When Geithner assured a group at Beijing University that American bonds are a "safe" investment, they erupted in loud laughter—a rare outbreak of rudeness from an elite crowd in China.
BUSINESS
If It’s in the Ground, It Can Only Go Down
Ruchir Sharma 4/11/2009 12:00:00 AM
As playwright Arthur Miller once observed, "An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted." And most of the illusions that defined the late global economic boom—the notion that global growth had moved to a permanently higher plane and housing prices from Miami to Mumbai would rise indefinitely—are now indeed exhausted. Yet one idea still has the power to capture imaginations and markets: it is that commodities like oil, copper, grains and gold are all destined to rise over time. Lots of smart people believe that last year's swoon in commodities prices represented a short pause in a long-term bull market.
GREAT POWERS
Bringing China Into the Fold
Richard N. Haass 12/31/2008 12:00:00 AM
Yet there's an adage common in business and management literature he'd be wise to keep in mind: "Don't let the urgent crowd out the important."
CRISIS WATCH
Why Beijing Is In A Risky Place
George Wehrfritz 11/22/2008 12:00:00 AM
Workers are losing factory jobs at the fastest rate in decades. Automakers—having failed to anticipate today's sales slump—are lobbying politicians for bailouts. The stock market is a crash heap, home prices are down by 35 percent or more in many cities and toxic assets have begun to weigh heavily on banks. America in 2008? Try China, where the global economic downturn now looks certain to end the country's 30-year growth boom, posing the greatest leadership challenge to Beijing since pro-democracy demonstrations threatened one-party communist rule back in 1989.
China Shouldn’t Be Inscrutable
Fareed Zakaria 8/2/2008 12:00:00 AM
With the Beijing Olympics starting at the end of this week, you might think this would be an occasion for serious analysis and reflection about China—how to understand the country and its changing society, how to handle the regime. Instead, we've mostly heard a familiar recitation of clichés. Conservatives rail against a "rising autocracy" and exaggerate China's military strength. Republican Sen. Sam Brownback went to Beijing and discovered—surprise!—that the Chinese government engaged in espionage. He fumed to CNN that the authorities could "listen to anybody and everybody and their communications and their recordings." One month earlier the senator had enthusiastically voted for the FISA Amendments Act, which allows the U.S. government to do pretty much the same thing.
BUSINESS
The Modern Silk Road
Stephen Glain
The most hard-boiled forms of human enterprise tend to be the most prolific. Thus commerce along the legendary Silk Road flourished as it did for some 1,600 years because it was negotiated between merchants, not ministers or politicians. Having predated the nation-state and the borders that define them, the world's main commercial artery was lightly taxed and regulated, and free of the political set-asides and subsidies that weigh on today's free-trade agreements. For better or for worse, there were no labor unions demanding living wages for workers, no environmental groups clamoring for high emission standards and no human-rights organizations calling for boycotts of authoritarian regimes.