Kishore Mahbubani interview + LinkedIn retreat

Microsoft is shutting down the Chinese offshoot of professional network LinkedIn. A reaction to an intolerable level of censorship? No. The main reason for the closure was the network’s lack of success. Our author Frank Sieren explains why this doesn’t change much for China or Microsoft: Chinese users prefer to use domestic platforms. Expats and other foreigners, on the other hand, mostly use the LinkedIn sites of their home countries. Frank Sieren is a power user of LinkedIn himself – and he also uses the international version in China, not the Chinese one.

Kishore Mahbubani is one of Asia’s most respected diplomats. He was an ambassador for Singapore to the USA and the UN. In between, he became an academic and taught at the National University of Singapore. In all these roles, he cultivated an Asia-centric view of the world. In an interview with China.Table, he now polarizes with the thesis that China has exactly the freedoms it wants and needs. Mahbubani also compares the storming of the Hong Kong parliament by democracy supporters to the storming of the Capitol in Washington by Trump supporters – both are violations of the law, he says, and both are rightly punished. On an abstract level, that’s entirely true but is likely to raise some eyebrows.

Mahbubani’s diagnosis, on the other hand, is less controversial: The US is in a pitiful state, has actually already gambled away its claim to global leadership – and a much more rational and better organized China stands ready to step into the gap. The leadership style, however, will be different: “China does not want to change the world or even improve it in a missionary way. China will not get tangled up in unnecessary wars like Iraq or Syria.”

Wishing you a productive start to the week,

Your
Finn Mayer-Kuckuk