Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific
Author: Derek Scissors, Heritage Foundation
The US government suffers from understandable but harmful confusion concerning Chinese economic reform.
Market reforms have been most often implemented gradually, and that slowness is misperceived to be moderation. In fact, when market reforms have occurred, they have been clear and powerful. Read more…
Author: Michael G. Roskin, Macau
Blind human-rights advocate Chen Guangcheng has given diplomacy a shove, causing a great racket that may startle the US out of its preferred ‘quiet diplomacy’ approach to human rights.
So far, this approach has allowed Beijing to ignore the issue of human rights violations. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum
In 2010, China became the second largest economy in the world, overtaking Japan, signalling an important turning point in many aspects of China’s role in the world economy, from the balance of economic power to its role in the global financial system.
Certainly if China, the United States and Japan are to continue their current trend growth rates, then China will overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2030, many would say even as soon as 2022. Read more…
Author: Yu Yongding, CASS
After the Chinese government launched its so-called Pilot RMB Trade Settlement Scheme in April 2009, efforts to internationalise the renminbi have made impressive headway.
By September 2011, RMB deposits in Hong Kong reached RMB622.2 billion, and it was widely expected that the amount would surpass RMB1 trillion by the end of 2011. Things turned out otherwise. Read more…
Author: Wang Xiaolu, NERI
Economic imbalance in China — as indicated by the country’s very high investment rate, large export surplus and low proportion of domestic consumption — represents a long-term structural problem.
According to official statistics, the ratio of final consumption to GDP dropped sharply from 62.3 per cent to 47.4 per cent over the past decade. Read more…
Author: S. Mahmud Ali, LSE
International security literature has developed a new sub-genre focusing on the upcoming ‘Asian Century’.
Explanations of precisely what this term might mean still vary widely, but the changing power relations between the US and its presumed peer rival, China, lie at the core of the discussion. Read more…
Authors: Luke Deer and Ligang Song, ANU
China’s leaders have taken on an ambitious 12th five-year plan to rebalance China’s economy away from investment-led growth and toward more consumption-led growth.
A useful way to think about economic rebalancing might be as a policy to tackle the structural challenges arising from the dynamism of China’s transitional economic structure. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum
The boom in resource prices, fuelled by China’s surging industrialisation and steel demand over the past couple of decades, has lifted Australia’s terms of trade to a 100-year high.
Resource exporters around the world have been enjoying good times. Read more…
Author: Rajiv Kumar, FICCI
According to some media reports the Delhi BRICS summit, fourth for the original grouping with Brazil, Russia, India and China as its members, and the second since South Africa was co-opted at Sanya, did not set the Yamuna River (in New Delhi, where it was held on 29 March) on fire. The outcomes were perceived by some as below expectations.
Expectations have been high since the Sanya summit, hosted by China last year, which generated unprecedented media hype and high-voltage atmospherics. Read more…
Author: Joseph Cheng, City University of Hong Kong
The election of a new chief executive in Hong Kong on 25 March — voted on not by Hong Kong’s 7 million inhabitants, but an Election Committee comprising 1200 members representing professional or special interest groups — was both ugly and controversial.
Hong Kong’s citizens were reminded just how interested Chinese authorities are in controlling the special autonomous region and were disappointed by collusion between big business and the public administration. Read more…
Author: Li Mingjiang, RSIS
The recent annual sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) — two of the most important political events in China — demonstrated the extent to which the country’s elite aspire to safeguard China’s interests in the East Asian seas.
But in his report to the NPC, Premier Wen Jiabao also vowed to prioritise efforts to improve relations with neighbouring countries. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum
China’s economy grew at its slowest pace in three years, with growth at an annual rate of 8.1 per cent in the first quarter of 2012, hit by slowing exports and a weak property market.
There are those that see the deceleration of GDP growth over the past year as a significant turning point in Chinese economic fortunes.
Author: Barry Eichengreen, UC Berkeley
Everyone by now has grown accustomed to, if not physically weary of, articles extolling China’s economic dynamism and rehearsing America’s decline.
While the US is only starting to recover from its most serious recession in nearly 80 years, China glided through the global financial crisis largely unscathed. Read more…
Author: James Laurenceson, UQ
Five years on, the US economy remains sluggish after the bursting of a house-price bubble.
More recently, the focus has been on China — the world’s second-largest economy — and whether it too might be overwhelmed by a similar event. Read more…
Author: Peter Drysdale, Editor, East Asia Forum
Building a stable international order in Asia and the Pacific, in which a major international conflict remains unthinkable, requires a number of elements.
Understandably much of the focus on thinking about avoiding the unthinkable, to date, has been on the how to manage the rise of China’s power and its impact on America. Read more…