While there has been a shift in language on domestic consumption at the recent China’s annual Central Economic Work Conference, leading economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know®, does not see a change in policies for China’s economy in 2026 toward supporting the sluggish domestic consumption, he says at a debate at the Asia Society.Read More →

Social commentator Zhang Lijia, author of  “Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China, used a visit with her daughters to the Nanjing memorial hall to discuss the recent tensions between China and Japan in the South China Morning Post. “In a region where history is unresolved, even forward-looking security policy is dragged into the past. The ghosts of the 1930s still whisper. It is tempting to ask: why can’t Asia reconcile as Europe did,” she asks herself.Read More →

When you do not acknowledge your own history, the same mistakes can be made again, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein, analysing the recent tensions between China and Japan. Japanese are rewriting history, he argues in the Thinkers Forum, from the hundreds of thousands of sex slaves in China and other parts of Asia, to today.Read More →

Leading China economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know®, looks at what is known about the upcoming 15th 5-year plan, bound to be approved by the National People’s Congress in March 2026. Most of the known information suggests no major changes, with an ongoing focus on manufacturing rather than consumption, as in the past, he tells Keith Yap in the Front Row Podcast.Read More →

For years, the growth of AI was built on scaling up its GPUs, but innovation expert Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, sees now a move to more collaboration. Nvidia is not the only winner anymore, as competition is growing and AI models can develop through more experience and need less capacity to grow, as China’s Deepseek proved earlier this year, he says at the Big Bang Future Lab.Read More →

China’s financial system is much tightly controlled by the government compared to what the world is used to, says financial expert Victor Shih at the BBC. China has been spending trillions of US dollars in loans to both the developing and the developed countries, including to the insurer of the CIA’s pension fund, writes the BBC.Read More →