By terminating the grain agreement with Ukraine and attacking port facilities for export Moscow has also duped its hitherto well-meaning partner Beijing. Ukraine has traditionally been an important agricultural partner for China. Russia apparently did not consider that. Only recently, China’s deputy trade minister received his Ukrainian counterpart in Beijing to discuss the expansion of grain exports to China. Nothing will come of this for the time being.
The atmosphere in Beijing is thus likely to be modest, especially since China has an increased need for grain imports this year due to weather extremes. Whether the events will cause cracks in China’s relations with Russia remains to be seen, writes Christiane Kuehl. So far, Beijing is showing some anger but no harsh reaction. But time is running out to save the agreement.
China was also unpleasantly surprised by tropical storm Doksuri. Parts of Beijing are under water, and cars have been swept away by the floods. People have to be rescued from the mud with the help of excavator shovels. Climate researchers predict that such brutal weather phenomena will hit major cities more frequently in the future. That is why it is increasingly important to make faster predictions about weather upheavals. Artificial intelligence could revolutionize current models, writes Frank Sieren. He took a closer look at “Pangu Weather,” a novel forecasting technology developed by Huawei Cloud.
Since July 17, grain terminals in the port of Odessa have been at a standstill. Russia has made good on its threats and this time actually allowed the grain agreement to expire, which allowed Ukraine to export wheat, corn and other products across the Black Sea.
Many eyes are now on China and Turkey, the largest and third-largest buyers of Ukrainian grain under the expired agreement. Both are keen to see the agreement reinstated. But so far, attempts by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to reach out to his counterpart Vladimir Putin have failed. “I don’t think Putin trusts Erdogan as much as before,” the Wall Street Journal quoted ex-Turkish diplomat Gulru Gezer, who was once based in Moscow. Until now, the Turkish president had been able to maneuver between the opposing sides like no other.
And China? Beijing is closer to Russia than Turkey, but so far there are no known Chinese attempts to change Putin’s mind behind the scenes. After all, China, along with the United States, the United Nations and others, publicly called on Russia to return to the deal. It is hoped that the agreement will be “fully” implemented again, Beijing announced. State media reported with the same tenor.
So far, no final position can be discerned from the little that has been heard from China. Is China stoically sticking by Russia even though it is directly negatively affected? Or are the problems and costs associated with the end of the agreement one step too far for Beijing?
China’s UN Ambassador Geng Shuang stressed to the UN Security Council that the deal should be urgently re-implemented given its importance for global food security. His speech was peppered with the usual platitudes, with only one sentence suggesting possible anger: “The situation on the ground in Ukraine has been escalating and key civilian infrastructure has been attacked,” Geng said. Even state broadcaster CGTN criticized that Moscow’s attacks on Ukrainian food export facilities have raised concerns about global food security.
China depends on food from abroad despite all efforts to be self-sufficient; nearly a quarter of the grain (24.2 percent) under the agreement went to the People’s Republic. Russian attacks on Ukrainian Black Sea ports immediately after the agreement was scrapped had hit and partially destroyed some 60,000 tons of grain that were to be loaded onto a ship bound for China. That was reported by the Wall Street Journal, citing Ukrainian grain trader Kernel, that had sold the cargo. An attack on Odessa also damaged the Chinese Consulate General in the city. So trouble would be quite plausible.
The grain agreement, which was largely brokered by Turkey, had also been one of the few diplomatic successes since the start of the war. It allowed Ukraine to export over 32 million tons of grain since 2022. In return, it exempted Russian agricultural and fertilizer exports from US and EU sanctions. According to the UN Food Price Index, worldwide food prices fell by 11.6 percent as a result of the deal. China was the main beneficiary, along with poor developing countries. With the end of the agreement, Moscow is thus harming its most important partner.
In addition to China, countries in Africa and the Middle East are particularly dependent on Ukrainian food exports, including many with which Beijing has traditionally enjoyed good relations. Whether these countries will band together to pressure Moscow to relent is uncertain – but not impossible. Russia has admittedly announced that it will replace the Ukrainian grain on world markets. At a recent Russia-Africa summit, however, Putin had not really been able to convince the continent’s top leaders who had come to the summit that Russia would solve the problems it was responsible for.
China’s old-new Foreign Minister Wang Yi landed in Ankara in the middle of the crisis over the agreement to meet his counterpart Hakan Fidan and President Erdogan. Nothing is known about the concrete content of the talks – but the grain agreement was certainly discussed.
Ukraine has traditionally been an important agricultural partner for China. Before the war, for example, the country was the People’s Republic’s most important corn supplier. In 2016, COFCO Group, China’s largest agricultural group, built a transshipment terminal for grain and oilseeds at the port of Mykolaiv on the Black Sea. In 2017, Chinese engineers completed the modernization of the Yuzhny port near Odessa, which had been used for grain exports under the agreement, according to a study by the US think tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The grain from the agreement is so important to China that it even included the deal as a separate item in its 12-point peace plan for Ukraine, writes Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
Just recently, China’s Deputy Minister of Commerce Ling Ji received his Ukrainian counterpart Taras Kachka in Beijing to discuss expanding grain exports to China. Kachka was the first high-level visitor from the invaded country since the war began. China wants to import more “high-quality products” from Ukraine in the future, Beijing said afterward.
Now China has to reschedule, as it did in the months between the start of the war and the signing of the agreement. At that time, China got almost all of its corn from the US, says Joseph Glauber of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. “China changed its import regulations in late 2022 to allow Brazil corn imports which should help offset the expected decline from Ukraine,” Glauber told Table.Media.
Russia exports hardly any corn but has wheat reserves. “It is the world’s largest wheat exporter, and China could choose to buy Russian wheat to use as animal feed,” Glauber said. China uses most of its wheat imports as animal feed, he said. Other potential feed suppliers include Canada (barley and wheat), Argentina (corn and wheat), Australia (barley and wheat), and again the US (corn, millet, wheat), he said.
And this year, China has an increased need for imports due to weather extremes. A long heat wave was followed by heavy rains and, just recently, Typhoon Doksuri. “In parts of northern and central China, seedlings have shown signs of weak growth due to the heat waves since the end of last month, posing major challenges for the autumn harvest,” the Ministry of Agriculture warned in early July. That means the fall harvest is also in jeopardy – and that accounts for 75 percent of China’s annual grain production. Already, the summer grain harvest was 0.9 percent lower than last year, mainly due to persistent rainfall directly on ripe wheat in the granary province of Henan, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. According to Glauber, the quality may also have suffered from the rain.
Time is running out to save the agreement. So far, Russia has insisted that the state-owned Russian Agricultural Bank be reconnected to the SWIFT international payment system. The UN, on the other hand, has proposed a compromise: a subsidiary of the bank is to be connected to the system.
From September, the Ukrainian grain harvest will be piling up in warehouses. Alternative export routes via Romania or Poland are logistically difficult and bureaucratically complicated due to different hygiene regulations, even for China. So Beijing really has no time to hope for a distant solution but would have every reason to take action in Moscow.
China’s northeast continues to be severely affected by rainfall and its consequences. Some 9,000 rescue workers have been dispatched to Zhuozhou in Hebei province following the devastating storm of the past few days. According to state media, Zhuozhou is located at the confluence of several rivers and is one of the cities hardest hit by Storm Doksuri, as floodwaters moved downstream and inundated residential areas. The flooded area is said to be more than twice the size of Paris, with nearly 650 hectares of affected agricultural land.
State broadcaster CCTV reported that other rescue teams had arrived from neighboring Henan and Shanxi provinces to help clean up Zhuozhou. At least 20 people have died in the flooded regions. More than 134,000 people had to leave their houses and apartments. Provincial authorities maintained a state of emergency on Wednesday.
Several Chinese tech companies pledged donations of hundreds of millions of yuan to help those affected. ByteDance, for example, said Wednesday that it would donate ¥100 million ($13.9 million) to provide disaster relief in flooded areas. The company also said it had helped find seven missing people through hashtags and livestreams on its short video app Douyin. Tencent Holdings and e-commerce giant Alibaba also announced million-dollar donations. rtr
Will the United States be number three in the new world order? In his forthcoming book, former journalist Hugh Peyman argues that it will: China’s economy has already surpassed that of the US by some measures, and India’s will do the same by mid-century. He also argues that “the Rest” more broadly will pose a growing challenge to the West, which in turn continues to underestimate the challengers.
Peyman is hardly the first to predict the rise of countries that are not included in the geopolitical West (a group that includes Japan). The British economist Angus Maddison knew back in 2007 that China’s GDP would soon overtake that of the US (in purchasing-power-parity terms at constant 1990 US dollar prices), with India at number three. And the OECD estimates that India will overtake the US in GDP by 2050, and that, by 2060, the combined GDP of China, India, and Indonesia will equal $116.7 trillion – 49% of GDP – making it three times larger than the US economy.
This should not be particularly surprising, not least because non-Western countries are home to far more people. As Peyman points out, China and India each have populations four times larger than the US, so their combined GDP would be twice that of the US, even with one-quarter America’s per-capita income. As he puts it, “Population numbers dictate that the West is only 10%, the Rest 90%.”
To be sure, when it comes to GDP, the West has often punched well above its demographic weight. In 1950, the West (including Japan) accounted for just 22.4% of the world’s population, but 59.9% of global GDP. Meanwhile, Asia (excluding Japan) accounted for just 15.4% of world GDP, despite being home to 51.4% of the world’s people.
The Industrial Revolution, which afforded the West major economic advantages, together with colonial exploitation, help explain this discrepancy. In 1820, the shares were far more balanced: Asia (excluding Japan) had accounted for 65.2% of the world’s population and 56.4% of global GDP.
By the middle of this century, however, the Rest’s population will be 3.8 times larger than that of the West (including Japan), and its GDP will be 1.7 times larger. As Peyman notes, rising investment in the Rest, not least in education, has played an important role in boosting productivity and rebalancing global output and income.
These investments will continue to pay off. The McKinsey Global Institute predicted last year that in the new multipolar world order, “technology may move to the forefront of geopolitical competition.” Given that human capital, together with governance, is essential to translate technological progress into productivity growth, Asia has an edge: by 2030, the region will be producing more than 70% of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates in the G20, with China alone accounting for 35%, and India for 27%.
Moreover, while the Rest may lag in terms of cutting-edge research, they have proved adept at applying Western innovations to consumer products and services. Drawing on his experiences living in Chinese cities and studying Chinese companies, Peyman describes China’s transition to modernity, which is being emulated, to varying extents, elsewhere among the Rest. For every warning that China will collapse under the weight of a rapidly aging population, overbearing authoritarianism, a massive debt overhang, and slowing growth, there is an example in Peyman’s book of China successfully leveraging scale, entrepreneurship, and innovation to advance its goals and interests.
Unfortunately, Peyman laments, the US remains “blinded by pre-eminence,” making it “slow to see its power ebb.” In fact, it appears that most Westerners take for granted that the Rest are such a diverse lot that they would not be able to pose a coherent, sustained challenge to countries that have long dominated the world order.
But countries like China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, and South Korea have proven that given the chance, the Rest are at least as competent as many of their Western counterparts in manufacturing, exports, infrastructure investment, and governance. Indian executives are running some of the top companies in the West. Meanwhile, many Western countries are failing to achieve “social harmony, broad prosperity, and public health at home.”
Even if the West does recognize its weakening position, Peyman notes, adjusting to it will not be easy. With the vast majority of the world’s population living outside the West, the Rest will no longer accept “exclusion from global decision-making.” The Rest are not seeking to exclude the West in kind, but they do want to play a leading role in reshaping the global rules of the game – formulated by the West – for the twenty-first century.
Peyman concludes by urging US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping – the leaders of the West and the Rest, respectively – to reach a grand bargain, much like the one Richard Nixon struck with Mao Zedong in the early 1970s. Such a bargain would support greater cooperation on the major challenges of our time – beginning with climate change – while reducing the likelihood of devastating conflict.
But a bargain must also be struck between the state, whose power is growing, and market forces, which are becoming increasingly weak. Sudden, unilateral policy changes, such as the imposition or tightening of sanctions, are disrupting private companies’ operations and undermining their profitability. To uphold economic dynamism amid geopolitical tensions, the rules governing private-sector trade and investment – including any national-security “red lines” – must be clarified and respected. The country that provides such rules will shape the new global order, even if it does not have the largest GDP or population.
Andrew Sheng is a distinguished fellow at the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong. Xiao Geng, Chairman of the Hong Kong Institution for International Finance, is a professor and Director of the Institute of Policy and Practice at the Shenzhen Finance Institute at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023.
www.project-syndicate.org
These animals are currently the subject of discussion on the Chinese social web. Are the Malayan bears at Hangzhou Zoo real – or just people in costumes? The reason for the suspicion was the movements of the bears, which like to stand very human-like on two hind legs. The zoo now felt compelled to confirm the true bear-identity in an official statement.
By terminating the grain agreement with Ukraine and attacking port facilities for export Moscow has also duped its hitherto well-meaning partner Beijing. Ukraine has traditionally been an important agricultural partner for China. Russia apparently did not consider that. Only recently, China’s deputy trade minister received his Ukrainian counterpart in Beijing to discuss the expansion of grain exports to China. Nothing will come of this for the time being.
The atmosphere in Beijing is thus likely to be modest, especially since China has an increased need for grain imports this year due to weather extremes. Whether the events will cause cracks in China’s relations with Russia remains to be seen, writes Christiane Kuehl. So far, Beijing is showing some anger but no harsh reaction. But time is running out to save the agreement.
China was also unpleasantly surprised by tropical storm Doksuri. Parts of Beijing are under water, and cars have been swept away by the floods. People have to be rescued from the mud with the help of excavator shovels. Climate researchers predict that such brutal weather phenomena will hit major cities more frequently in the future. That is why it is increasingly important to make faster predictions about weather upheavals. Artificial intelligence could revolutionize current models, writes Frank Sieren. He took a closer look at “Pangu Weather,” a novel forecasting technology developed by Huawei Cloud.
Since July 17, grain terminals in the port of Odessa have been at a standstill. Russia has made good on its threats and this time actually allowed the grain agreement to expire, which allowed Ukraine to export wheat, corn and other products across the Black Sea.
Many eyes are now on China and Turkey, the largest and third-largest buyers of Ukrainian grain under the expired agreement. Both are keen to see the agreement reinstated. But so far, attempts by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to reach out to his counterpart Vladimir Putin have failed. “I don’t think Putin trusts Erdogan as much as before,” the Wall Street Journal quoted ex-Turkish diplomat Gulru Gezer, who was once based in Moscow. Until now, the Turkish president had been able to maneuver between the opposing sides like no other.
And China? Beijing is closer to Russia than Turkey, but so far there are no known Chinese attempts to change Putin’s mind behind the scenes. After all, China, along with the United States, the United Nations and others, publicly called on Russia to return to the deal. It is hoped that the agreement will be “fully” implemented again, Beijing announced. State media reported with the same tenor.
So far, no final position can be discerned from the little that has been heard from China. Is China stoically sticking by Russia even though it is directly negatively affected? Or are the problems and costs associated with the end of the agreement one step too far for Beijing?
China’s UN Ambassador Geng Shuang stressed to the UN Security Council that the deal should be urgently re-implemented given its importance for global food security. His speech was peppered with the usual platitudes, with only one sentence suggesting possible anger: “The situation on the ground in Ukraine has been escalating and key civilian infrastructure has been attacked,” Geng said. Even state broadcaster CGTN criticized that Moscow’s attacks on Ukrainian food export facilities have raised concerns about global food security.
China depends on food from abroad despite all efforts to be self-sufficient; nearly a quarter of the grain (24.2 percent) under the agreement went to the People’s Republic. Russian attacks on Ukrainian Black Sea ports immediately after the agreement was scrapped had hit and partially destroyed some 60,000 tons of grain that were to be loaded onto a ship bound for China. That was reported by the Wall Street Journal, citing Ukrainian grain trader Kernel, that had sold the cargo. An attack on Odessa also damaged the Chinese Consulate General in the city. So trouble would be quite plausible.
The grain agreement, which was largely brokered by Turkey, had also been one of the few diplomatic successes since the start of the war. It allowed Ukraine to export over 32 million tons of grain since 2022. In return, it exempted Russian agricultural and fertilizer exports from US and EU sanctions. According to the UN Food Price Index, worldwide food prices fell by 11.6 percent as a result of the deal. China was the main beneficiary, along with poor developing countries. With the end of the agreement, Moscow is thus harming its most important partner.
In addition to China, countries in Africa and the Middle East are particularly dependent on Ukrainian food exports, including many with which Beijing has traditionally enjoyed good relations. Whether these countries will band together to pressure Moscow to relent is uncertain – but not impossible. Russia has admittedly announced that it will replace the Ukrainian grain on world markets. At a recent Russia-Africa summit, however, Putin had not really been able to convince the continent’s top leaders who had come to the summit that Russia would solve the problems it was responsible for.
China’s old-new Foreign Minister Wang Yi landed in Ankara in the middle of the crisis over the agreement to meet his counterpart Hakan Fidan and President Erdogan. Nothing is known about the concrete content of the talks – but the grain agreement was certainly discussed.
Ukraine has traditionally been an important agricultural partner for China. Before the war, for example, the country was the People’s Republic’s most important corn supplier. In 2016, COFCO Group, China’s largest agricultural group, built a transshipment terminal for grain and oilseeds at the port of Mykolaiv on the Black Sea. In 2017, Chinese engineers completed the modernization of the Yuzhny port near Odessa, which had been used for grain exports under the agreement, according to a study by the US think tank Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The grain from the agreement is so important to China that it even included the deal as a separate item in its 12-point peace plan for Ukraine, writes Alexandra Prokopenko of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
Just recently, China’s Deputy Minister of Commerce Ling Ji received his Ukrainian counterpart Taras Kachka in Beijing to discuss expanding grain exports to China. Kachka was the first high-level visitor from the invaded country since the war began. China wants to import more “high-quality products” from Ukraine in the future, Beijing said afterward.
Now China has to reschedule, as it did in the months between the start of the war and the signing of the agreement. At that time, China got almost all of its corn from the US, says Joseph Glauber of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. “China changed its import regulations in late 2022 to allow Brazil corn imports which should help offset the expected decline from Ukraine,” Glauber told Table.Media.
Russia exports hardly any corn but has wheat reserves. “It is the world’s largest wheat exporter, and China could choose to buy Russian wheat to use as animal feed,” Glauber said. China uses most of its wheat imports as animal feed, he said. Other potential feed suppliers include Canada (barley and wheat), Argentina (corn and wheat), Australia (barley and wheat), and again the US (corn, millet, wheat), he said.
And this year, China has an increased need for imports due to weather extremes. A long heat wave was followed by heavy rains and, just recently, Typhoon Doksuri. “In parts of northern and central China, seedlings have shown signs of weak growth due to the heat waves since the end of last month, posing major challenges for the autumn harvest,” the Ministry of Agriculture warned in early July. That means the fall harvest is also in jeopardy – and that accounts for 75 percent of China’s annual grain production. Already, the summer grain harvest was 0.9 percent lower than last year, mainly due to persistent rainfall directly on ripe wheat in the granary province of Henan, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. According to Glauber, the quality may also have suffered from the rain.
Time is running out to save the agreement. So far, Russia has insisted that the state-owned Russian Agricultural Bank be reconnected to the SWIFT international payment system. The UN, on the other hand, has proposed a compromise: a subsidiary of the bank is to be connected to the system.
From September, the Ukrainian grain harvest will be piling up in warehouses. Alternative export routes via Romania or Poland are logistically difficult and bureaucratically complicated due to different hygiene regulations, even for China. So Beijing really has no time to hope for a distant solution but would have every reason to take action in Moscow.
China’s northeast continues to be severely affected by rainfall and its consequences. Some 9,000 rescue workers have been dispatched to Zhuozhou in Hebei province following the devastating storm of the past few days. According to state media, Zhuozhou is located at the confluence of several rivers and is one of the cities hardest hit by Storm Doksuri, as floodwaters moved downstream and inundated residential areas. The flooded area is said to be more than twice the size of Paris, with nearly 650 hectares of affected agricultural land.
State broadcaster CCTV reported that other rescue teams had arrived from neighboring Henan and Shanxi provinces to help clean up Zhuozhou. At least 20 people have died in the flooded regions. More than 134,000 people had to leave their houses and apartments. Provincial authorities maintained a state of emergency on Wednesday.
Several Chinese tech companies pledged donations of hundreds of millions of yuan to help those affected. ByteDance, for example, said Wednesday that it would donate ¥100 million ($13.9 million) to provide disaster relief in flooded areas. The company also said it had helped find seven missing people through hashtags and livestreams on its short video app Douyin. Tencent Holdings and e-commerce giant Alibaba also announced million-dollar donations. rtr
Will the United States be number three in the new world order? In his forthcoming book, former journalist Hugh Peyman argues that it will: China’s economy has already surpassed that of the US by some measures, and India’s will do the same by mid-century. He also argues that “the Rest” more broadly will pose a growing challenge to the West, which in turn continues to underestimate the challengers.
Peyman is hardly the first to predict the rise of countries that are not included in the geopolitical West (a group that includes Japan). The British economist Angus Maddison knew back in 2007 that China’s GDP would soon overtake that of the US (in purchasing-power-parity terms at constant 1990 US dollar prices), with India at number three. And the OECD estimates that India will overtake the US in GDP by 2050, and that, by 2060, the combined GDP of China, India, and Indonesia will equal $116.7 trillion – 49% of GDP – making it three times larger than the US economy.
This should not be particularly surprising, not least because non-Western countries are home to far more people. As Peyman points out, China and India each have populations four times larger than the US, so their combined GDP would be twice that of the US, even with one-quarter America’s per-capita income. As he puts it, “Population numbers dictate that the West is only 10%, the Rest 90%.”
To be sure, when it comes to GDP, the West has often punched well above its demographic weight. In 1950, the West (including Japan) accounted for just 22.4% of the world’s population, but 59.9% of global GDP. Meanwhile, Asia (excluding Japan) accounted for just 15.4% of world GDP, despite being home to 51.4% of the world’s people.
The Industrial Revolution, which afforded the West major economic advantages, together with colonial exploitation, help explain this discrepancy. In 1820, the shares were far more balanced: Asia (excluding Japan) had accounted for 65.2% of the world’s population and 56.4% of global GDP.
By the middle of this century, however, the Rest’s population will be 3.8 times larger than that of the West (including Japan), and its GDP will be 1.7 times larger. As Peyman notes, rising investment in the Rest, not least in education, has played an important role in boosting productivity and rebalancing global output and income.
These investments will continue to pay off. The McKinsey Global Institute predicted last year that in the new multipolar world order, “technology may move to the forefront of geopolitical competition.” Given that human capital, together with governance, is essential to translate technological progress into productivity growth, Asia has an edge: by 2030, the region will be producing more than 70% of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) graduates in the G20, with China alone accounting for 35%, and India for 27%.
Moreover, while the Rest may lag in terms of cutting-edge research, they have proved adept at applying Western innovations to consumer products and services. Drawing on his experiences living in Chinese cities and studying Chinese companies, Peyman describes China’s transition to modernity, which is being emulated, to varying extents, elsewhere among the Rest. For every warning that China will collapse under the weight of a rapidly aging population, overbearing authoritarianism, a massive debt overhang, and slowing growth, there is an example in Peyman’s book of China successfully leveraging scale, entrepreneurship, and innovation to advance its goals and interests.
Unfortunately, Peyman laments, the US remains “blinded by pre-eminence,” making it “slow to see its power ebb.” In fact, it appears that most Westerners take for granted that the Rest are such a diverse lot that they would not be able to pose a coherent, sustained challenge to countries that have long dominated the world order.
But countries like China, India, Indonesia, Singapore, and South Korea have proven that given the chance, the Rest are at least as competent as many of their Western counterparts in manufacturing, exports, infrastructure investment, and governance. Indian executives are running some of the top companies in the West. Meanwhile, many Western countries are failing to achieve “social harmony, broad prosperity, and public health at home.”
Even if the West does recognize its weakening position, Peyman notes, adjusting to it will not be easy. With the vast majority of the world’s population living outside the West, the Rest will no longer accept “exclusion from global decision-making.” The Rest are not seeking to exclude the West in kind, but they do want to play a leading role in reshaping the global rules of the game – formulated by the West – for the twenty-first century.
Peyman concludes by urging US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping – the leaders of the West and the Rest, respectively – to reach a grand bargain, much like the one Richard Nixon struck with Mao Zedong in the early 1970s. Such a bargain would support greater cooperation on the major challenges of our time – beginning with climate change – while reducing the likelihood of devastating conflict.
But a bargain must also be struck between the state, whose power is growing, and market forces, which are becoming increasingly weak. Sudden, unilateral policy changes, such as the imposition or tightening of sanctions, are disrupting private companies’ operations and undermining their profitability. To uphold economic dynamism amid geopolitical tensions, the rules governing private-sector trade and investment – including any national-security “red lines” – must be clarified and respected. The country that provides such rules will shape the new global order, even if it does not have the largest GDP or population.
Andrew Sheng is a distinguished fellow at the Asia Global Institute at the University of Hong Kong. Xiao Geng, Chairman of the Hong Kong Institution for International Finance, is a professor and Director of the Institute of Policy and Practice at the Shenzhen Finance Institute at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023.
www.project-syndicate.org
These animals are currently the subject of discussion on the Chinese social web. Are the Malayan bears at Hangzhou Zoo real – or just people in costumes? The reason for the suspicion was the movements of the bears, which like to stand very human-like on two hind legs. The zoo now felt compelled to confirm the true bear-identity in an official statement.
