Secretary of State Clinton and Secretary of Treasury Geithner co-authored a Wall Street Journal op-ed today on the Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) with China. The op-ed suits the Dialogue perfectly: it seems to be an important piece of work but there’s actually little to it. The two Secretaries tell …
Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has a problem. His Labor Party government wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 60 percent from 2000 levels by 2050, but opposes building nuclear power plants– the one clean, abundant, and affordable energy source known to this planet. Ziggy Switkowski, head of the nation’s main …
Remember when China was going to stop buying American bonds and the world was going to end? This hand-wringing was always wrong-headed; perhaps now it will finally cease. In May, net official Chinese holdings of U.S. Treasuries jumped $38 billion. This is the flip side of the return of large-scale capital …
The Chinese government is blaming the violence in its west on a woman named Rebiya Kadeer. They are calling her a “an ironclad separatist colluding with terrorists and Islamic extremists.” The Chinese Communist Party has a long and estranged relationship with the truth. And the vilification of Kadeer ranks right …
China has two faces. There is the face of Chinese economic success, the managers of China’s reserves, the CEOs of China’s quasi-private enterprises, the English-speaking, tailored diplomats everywhere from Beijing to Washington. And then there is the face of the People’s Armed Police and the crackdown in Xinjiang. There is …
The front page of the business section of the New York Times today notes recent Chinese state intervention in trade. The Times is right to make this observation, if six… or eight… months late. But recent Chinese moves are neither new nor particularly important. The intervention in trade is long-standing; recent …
Only in China…. You may have already heard that manufacturers selling personal computers in the PRC will now be required by the Chinese government to install a software program called Green Dam to filter out pornography and sexually explicit material. As could have been easily predicted, a couple of days …
If the Obama administration succeeds in passing the Waxman-Markey energy tax, and it works perfectly, it will only reduce global temperatures by nine hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit. In other words: it will do nothing. The only possible benefits from Waxman-Markey occur if the rest of the world, including the …
The draft resolution on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs reportedly agreed to by the security council’s permanent five members, plus Japan and South Korea, is nothing new. In fact, it is full of references back to unenforced provisions of previous resolutions, particularly from October 2006. More than anything else, …
