China

BY KATHERINE MANSTED Benjamin Clayton’s recent post is another outing in a long line of U.S. power pessimism, which history will ultimately prove wrong. The world has a penchant for predicting U.S. decline. Indeed, reports of U.S. decline predated its rise. Charles Dickens famously wrote that, to its 19th century citizens, America “always is stagnated, […]

BY JEAN-BAPTISTE LE MAROIS Most climate change awareness campaigns feature stranded polar bears on drifting ice sheets, or sea levels creeping over the island of Manhattan. But are these strategies convincing? The “protect the planet” approach has proven to be too weak of a public narrative to mobilize voters. Instead, imagine opening the newspaper to […]

BY HAIYANG ZHANG Over two thousand years ago during China’s Han dynasty, a Chinese imperial envoy blazed a land route via Central Asia that derived its name from the lucrative silk trade. Then, during the Ming dynasty in the 15th century, the imperial court’s admiral commanded his fleet to the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa […]

BY HAIYANG ZHANG The Trump Administration recently retracted its promise to label China as a currency manipulator—and rightly so. While there was merit to such a claim ten or twenty years ago, labeling China a currency manipulator in 2017 simply misses the mark. In its semiannual foreign exchange report presented to the Congress on April […]

BY HAIYANG ZHANG A group of textile artisans protested against the newly developed labor-replacing machinery. They were afraid that the many years they spent mastering the skills would go to waste and that the machines would eventually rob them of their jobs. The violence broke out when people started smashing the knitting machines, and eventually […]

BY HAIYANG ZHANG In Europe, when the daughter of an aristocratic family reached the age of maturity, a debutante ball was traditionally the perfect occasion for a girl to present herself to the society as an adult. On Tuesday, January 17, President Xi Jinping became the first Chinese head of state to address the World […]

BY JACK GAO AND DIANA ZHOU Imagine a world where cars operate on electricity alone. Cars are silent, engineless, odorless. Gas stations are replaced by individual electric charging stations located in homes, offices, and shopping mall parking lots. Roads and pavement use friction technology to charge cars as they drive. In dense urban metropolises like […]

BY ADITI KUMAR Donald Trump declared last week that he “doesn’t mind” starting a trade war with Mexico “when we’re losing $58 billion a year.” Not only is this a gross mischaracterization of our trade relationship, it also suggests a trade policy that will harm U.S. economic and political interests. Clearly, many aspects of U.S. […]

BY JESSICA ZUCKER Standing side-by-side in the White House rose garden on September 25, U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that they had reached a “common understanding” to combat “cyber-enabled theft of intellectual property.” In a widely anticipated announcement, the two leaders also agreed to respond to requests for law enforcement […]

BY PAUL CHEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  Seven-hundred million Chinese have grown out of poverty since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched economic reform programs in 1979. Harvard’s Tony Saich summarizes the reform efforts as introducing economic liberalization while retaining political control, a governance model that […]

BY DEREK PHAM While strategic ambiguity has been a significant instrument of US defense strategy in the Asia-Pacific, emerging regional threats and power imbalances have made this strategy increasingly difficult to justify. Strategic ambiguity insulates us from hard commitments in regional conflicts not directly related to our interests and exacerbates China’s uncertainty about our motivations. […]