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Debt forgiveness: China appears to be ahead in making friends and influencing people in the developing world
In today's era of profligate public spending in the Covid crisis, it is harder to criticise the massive financial mismanagement in the third world that again spawns calls for debt forgiveness.
One notion that gained a brief currency 20 years ago when it last came up as an issue was "sovereignty foreclosure". It was assumed that debt forgiveness was a licence to re-borrow as the mega projects that occasioned the debt in the first place would have to be abandoned unless borrowing was renewed. But this time, attached to renewed loan agreements would be the loss of national sovereignty until the debt was fully and finally re-paid and such strictures would be embedded in the conditions of renewed borrowings.
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Yet a new trading bloc - is it necessary, or would a renovated and enlarged ASEAN good enough to serve Asian needs?
The centrality of China in the intra-Asia trade is obvious. It's market share of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations' (ASEAN) total bilateral trade flows increased from 11.8 per cent in 2010 to 18 per cent in 2019. Conversely, Japan's share of ASEAN trade flows fell to eight per cent in 2019, from 10.9 per cent in 2010.
One might have thought that would have been a satisfactory trajectory for China's market share growth. But no. Now we have a rival and overlapping trading bloc called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which now includes China, Japan, South Korea as well as Australia and New Zealand.
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Disappointing hopes that Great Lakes ports represent a permanent rescue for shipping from supply chain chaos
There is a natural tendency to see a current situation as a condition that can be safely extended into the future and from which, future behaviour can be predicted.
Few situations are more susceptible to such mistreatment than the one in which we find ourselves today - more specifically the one describing Great Lakes ports as something of a shipping panacea. In an otherwise sensible piece written for the BBC by Stephen Starr, such a specious hope has been advanced.
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Despite a mutual loathing, the western political left and right share hostility to China - albeit in differing amounts
Hostility towards China is about the only policy shared by the parliamentary left and right in the West, albeit in differing doses. Nonetheless, it seems sensible to brace for something like a cold war economy in the coming year or two.
To date, China has banned Facebook for not complying with Chinese censorship rules. Google mostly has largely given up as well, and Amazon announced it would close its Chinese Kindle operations.
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