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| China’s markets may be full of bubbles ripe for a short-seller, and if Mr. Chanos can find a way to make money shorting them, God bless him. But after visiting Hong Kong and Taiwan this past week and talking to many people who work and invest their own money in China, I’d offer Mr. Chanos two notes of caution. First, a simple rule of investing that has always served me well: Never short a country with $2 trillion in foreign currency reserves. |
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| India has for so long been obsessed with the security of its north-western frontier and relations with Pakistan that issues on its eastern borders have been neglected. But various events are forcing New Delhi to focus on some interrelated security challenges in the east and northeast. So the four-day state visit to India by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed of Bangladesh that began Sunday has an importance far beyond the ceremonial. |
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| C. H. Tung, the first Chinese-appointed chief executive of Hong Kong after the handover in 1997, offered me a three-sentence summary the other day of China’s modern economic history: “China was asleep during the Industrial Revolution. She was just waking during the Information Technology Revolution. She intends to participate fully in the Green Revolution.” |
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| Operating without strategic clarity can have costs beyond the loss of trust and political goodwill. In 2002, for example, Roh Moo-hyun was elected president of South Korea amid a groundswell of anti-American sentiment. Like Mr. Hatoyama, he made inflammatory statements about being independent of the U.S. alliance, but had no real vision behind them. |
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| The article didn’t make for pleasant reading, especially for people like myself who think that efficient railway services and other forms of well-run mass transport are a subtle but nifty measure of a country’s level of civilization and, in most cases, of its social and economic fabric. It was a report in the Financial Times on Dec. 27 of the successful initial runs in China of an ultra-high-speed-train service, which provides an amazing under-three-hours link between the 1,100 kilometers that separate the cities of Guangzhou and Wuhan. |
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| Any system can fail, often for unexpected reasons. The future political and economic stability of China and Asia as a whole are matters for speculation. Nonetheless, the trends, the durable fundamentals, and the leading indicators all suggest that Asia, led by China, will be a leading force in the innovations that transform the world in the 21st century. The stronger global integration becomes, the better the odds of a smooth and broadly beneficial outcome. |
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| Rather than reciting the same worn-out formulations, Western diplomats must acknowledge the favorable developments on the ground and abandon their policy of boycotting Hamas. Instead, the United States and its European allies should signal their acceptance of a Palestinian government that includes Hamas. Such an approach would encourage Hamas to further reinvent itself and increase the chances for Palestinian reconciliation. |
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| It is hard to miss the self-congratulatory mood in Beijing’s corridors of power these days. The Chinese Communist party was practically written off after its army crushed the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square on June 4 1989. At home, it faced a shocked and resentful population. Internationally, it was isolated. The fall of communism in the former Soviet bloc further demoralised its members. A sense of impending doom permeated Beijing. |
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| After serious food shortages last year that degenerated into violent riots, the Senegalese government was eager to attract Chinese investment. Africans desperately need to modernize their agriculture both to insure their food security and to earn hard currency by exporting it. China needs to deal with its growing food demand and Africa seems to offer the solution. |
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| Greenpeace has declared that it “cannot support this bill in its current state.” And some influential environmental figures — most notably James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first drew the public’s attention to global warming — oppose the whole idea of cap and trade, arguing for a carbon tax instead ... The legislation now on the table isn’t the bill we’d ideally want, but it’s the bill we can get — and it’s vastly better than no bill at all. |
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