Make Sense of the world
Unique insight from 2,000+ contributors in 80+ Countries
The TED website describes Kishore Mahbubani, a career diplomat from Singapore, as someone who “re-envisions global power dynamics through the lens of rising Asian economies.” This description is not just apt for Mahbubani but also for his new book, “Has the West Lost It?” The title may...
President Xi Jinping, the modern-day emperor of China, clearly has a deep sense of history. On September 8, 2013, he gave a speech at Nazarbayev University in Almaty at the invitation of Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Xi quoted a Chinese saying — “ near neighbor is better...
Dark times loom for the US economy in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s latest threat on August 1 to levy 10% tariffs on some $300 billion of imports from China. In response, China allowed the yuan to weaken against the dollar and thereby cushion the impact for Chinese exporters. In...
People around the world, including Americans, have argued that the world can get along without US leadership. Today, they may want to scan the global landscape. While acute crises and violent conflict may not seem imminent at the moment, the view isn’t a hopeful one. For Americans, naively...
After US President Donald Trump, in his tug of war with China over trade, formally accused Beijing of currency manipulation, the Chinese shot back with this message: “Today some in America are obsessed with American privilege to the point of destroying international rules and the international...
It is easy to sympathize with anxieties over the extradition bill and worsening living standards that prompted the current eruption of protests in Hong Kong. But many people are talking and behaving as if the territory will not be fully integrated with mainland China by 2047. This is fanciful. The...
Wired takes a new look at China’s social credit system that has been nearly unanimously maligned in the West as a totalitarian tool that should frighten any freedom-loving citizen of a Western democracy out of his or her wits. The Chinese claim it is an efficient management tool. Wired clearly...
The world’s governments and peoples must decide how to address the increasing surveillance and data collection — and the resulting loss of privacy — that digital formats provide. In recent years, much of this attention has focused on the rapidly building surveillance and data aggregation in...
The headlines grabbed attention: “China’s economy grows at slowest rate in nearly 30 years,” noted the Financial Times in a typical example. China’s GDP growth in the second quarter had slowed to 6.2%, the smallest gain since 1992, back when the country’s economy was first shifting into...
The next steps by the likes of China and Russia toward segmentation of the internet, and the way private companies respond, will make or break the World Wide Web. On February 12, the Russian State Duma passed a bill to create a “sovereign” internet, demanding independence from global servers...
Donald Trump is making political waves by deploying warships. But is the United States gambling with its credibility as an international force for order? Since 2002, the most important security conference in the Asia-Pacific region has been held annually at the Shangri-La Hotel in Singapore....
