The plan to ban immigration by US President Donald Trump will be mostly hurt US tech companies who cannot recruit talents anymore, says business analyst Shaun Rein to the BBC. “Now, with the immigration ban, more top Chinese, Indian and other foreign talent will seek jobs in tech hubs globally like Shenzhen, Seoul and Bangalore rather than Silicon Valley,” Shaun Rein adds.Read More →
China has been betting on two horses: restarting the economy and preventing the coronavirus from spreading. Political analyst Victor Shih sees how local officials put their bets: they prefer the virus from stopping over a risky restart of production, he says at CNN.Read More →
US president Trump might be doing his best to upset China in every possible way, but US-China relations are no longer top priority for either country, says political analyst Victor Shih at NBC News. “Fundamentally the big problem on both sides is that you now have leadership which no longer considers having good bilateral relationships as a highest priority,”Read More →
The West could have known about the dangers of the corona virus when China started to fight it. But the West preferred to watch on, in stead of jumping into action, writes Beijing-based journalist Ian Johnson in an opinion piece in the New York Times.Read More →
The national fight against the coronavirus has also triggered off help in temples, churches and mosques, writes author Ian Johnson of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao in the New York Times, but not all help has been appreciated. Religious groups have been donating large amounts of money, a feature hard to imagine even ten years ago, he writes.Read More →
Veteran China watcher Kaiser Kuo discusses at the Wilson Center what China wants. Does it want to topple global order, and trying to impose change on the outside world? A wide-ranging discussion, also including Jiayang Fan. Is it exporting its ideology of just pragmatic?Read More →
While messages from the coronavirus are mixed, to put it mildly, the current economic crash course might only be over by April/May, in the most optimistic scenario. Numbers of infected people and deaths by COVID-19 still vary to much to support any scenario at this stage, while it is also unclear whether the rest of the world can contain the virus.
Footage from metro subways still show empty carriages, as the central government tries to encouraged migrant workers to return to their workplaces, local governments – including the big cities – advise returning migrants to put themselves in a social quarantine for two weeks to be sure they do not carry the virus. The dilemma is obvious: different government make different choices when it come to prevent major economic damage or keeping their cities save from the virus. Read More →
Fighting the Covid-19 virus and saving the economy might not go very well together, says political analyst Victor Shih in Al Jazeera. While there is very little international supply chains can do at this stage, as Chinese governments make decisions, says Victor Shih, the message for the long run is: diversify.Read More →
China’s Hubei province shocked the world as the number of confirmed coronavirus patients spiked because it started to use different way to diagnose patients. Political analyst Victor Shih sees it as a proof that the government is using different sets of tools to manipulate the number of patients and deaths, he tells to Reuters.Read More →
Beijing-based Journalist Ian Johnson describes the governmental corona-action in Beijing and explains why it has more to do with lack of trust in the government than health, in the New York Times. “Considering the underlying distrust, it’s hard for the government to say what many epidemiologists are saying: This outbreak is serious but not catastrophic.”Read More →
The US gained very little in its trade agreement with China, says trade veteran Harry Broadman on NBC News. The text on trade secret does not add any value, and the US firms and consumers pay the price for tariffs, he says.Read More →
By trying to take on China alone on trade, the US failed to achieve real results in its first trade deal, says trade-veteran Harry Broadman to Bloomberg. China did not adhere to the multilateral trade deal it closed by joining the WTO, but Donald Trump failed to address the issues related to that.Read More →