On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the First World War. In doing so, it ended over a century of splendid isolation from the affairs of old Europe and started another century of its partial or total domination of the globe. Almost exactly a century later, on January 20, 2017, Donald Trump entered the […]
Over the past few days, thousands of men and women gathered in Chaoshan in Hunan, southern China, the hometown of Mao Zedong, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the passing of the Great Helmsman. They were all dressed up like Red Guards, and were commemorating the time between 1966 and 1976 when Mao launched the […]
There is the spaghetti, with tomato and eggs in China or with tomato and cheese in Italy; the pizza, with good things inside (China) or on top (Italy); then the fireworks, the superstition, the amoral bond to friends and family; there is the mafia; and the history of the two empires, the Qin-Han and the […]
If you are ready to haggle over the price of something without knowing what it could really fetch for, the trick is to have your potential customer open his mouth first: “I will pay 2 pounds for your coconut”. In that moment you are in control of the bargain, because you know what the other […]
In May 2016, President Barack Obama’s trip to Vietnam reversed, at a single stroke, forty-five years of precedent policies. In 1971, then US President Richard Nixon went to China to offset the impending American defeat in Vietnam and enroll Beijing on the Western side of the Cold War against the USSR. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter […]
I am not British. But I wish I were because now and in the foreseeable future Britain has a unique role to play in the world. And if I were British, I would think about Britain’s future in the following way. Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, both the United Kingdom and the […]
As China has launched its massive new foreign policy movement with Xi Jinping’s “One Belt One Road” initiative, the country may now need also some kind of radical reappraisal of its position in the world. China has been the greatest beneficiary of the globalization drive actively promoted by the US since the 1990s – more […]
The crash of the Chinese stock market on the first day of trading in 2016 is a stark reminder of the urgent need for reform in China’s financial system in particular and its economy in general. Initial reaction from commentators pointed to some incidental circumstances — China’s disappointing manufacturing data, reported earlier Monday, and the […]
There are wide and far-reaching issues behind the fall of the stock exchange in recent weeks and the drop in business confidence in China. Initially, SOEs and politicians took Xi Jinping’s reform drive lightly. A recent commentary in the People’s Daily hinted at this, underscoring that “the uncanny, complex, ferocious, and stubborn (ways) of the […]
The resilience of the Chinese state and of the Chinese communist government has been for decades a source of deep misunderstanding in the West. One can find the first and most striking instance of this in the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Brij Mohan Kaul tried to exploit China’s weakness: in Tibet, which in 1959 experienced a widespread […]
