The promotion of Xi Jinping to the “core” leader of the communist party was only the start of a year of promotions in the party to get a new generation of leaders in place, tells political analyst Victor Shih in the New York Times. Shih does not expect only Xi´s friends are going to make the grade.Read More →
The move by Blackstone not to sell a landmark California hotel to the Anbang Insurance group for security concerns shows domestic volatility in the US and serious risk for Chinese companies looking for investment opportunities, says business analyst Shaun Rein to the South China Morning Post.Read More →
The central government is encouraging its downstream agencies to engage more in sponsored venture capital deals to stimulate innovation. That is not a guarantee for success, says financial expert Victor Shih in Bloomberg and might cost the tax payers a lot of money.Read More →
Award-winning journalist Ian Johnson reports in ChinaFile on the monthly trip poet Liu Xia makes to visit her husband, Nobel price winner Lui Xiaobo, and her slowly increasing production of new poems. “A small, fragile woman with extremely short-cropped hair that sets off her high cheekbones and bright, wide eyes.”Read More →
Yum´s KFC has lost substantial turnover, as anti-US protest turn against the fast food chain caused by the tension in the South China Sea, says business analyst Shaun Rein to Reuters. The stores have become a lightning rod for nationalistic feelings and lost sometimes up to 25%Read More →
Business analyst Shaun Rein will be staying most of October in Australia, both Melbourne and Brisbane. He is there at an appropriate time, when politicians seem clueless about China, and when not clueless do just the wrong things.Read More →
China´s State Council, the state´s highest administrative body, has encouraged government agencies to act more as venture capitalists, it announced on Tuesday. A receipcy for disaster, says financial and political expert Victor Shih to Bloomberg, where the tax payers have to suffer from inavoidable disasters.Read More →
China has been claiming huge success in their “fox hunt”, an effort to retrive corrupt officials who fled abroad to escape prosecution. Canada was a main safe haven for them. Business analyst Shaun Rein explains in the Globe&Mail why helping China is a good idea, despite misgivings about the country´s judicial system.Read More →
Forty years after Mao Zedong passed away, the country and its people are still struggling with the legacy of its former leader. Time to get clear on that legacy, writes Zhang Lijia, author of her autobiography”Socialism Is Great!”: A Worker’s Memoir of the New China on her weblog, and time to move on and change into a modern society.Read More →
Ai Xiaoming is one of China´s leading documentary makers, and all of them are officially banned in the country. Journalist Ian Johnson sits down with her for the NY Review of Books and discusses how it is to make banned documentaries, and (amongst many other subjects) why China has no intellectuals.Read More →
If the presidency of China over the G20 in Hangzhou has showed anything, it is that a more self-confident nation needs the rest of the world not as much as in the recent past, says political analyst Arthur Kroeber to LA Times. “The U.S. has less leverage to get things it wants.”Read More →
China´s economy seems to have steered clear through the turbulance of the past few years, says economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® to Bloomberg. “I’d guess that Xi Jinping is feeling pretty confident about things.”Read More →