Some phenomena occur and become highly visible in the wrong place, at the wrong time. TikTok, an app created in China, came into prominence as a major source of expression and entertainment for the youth of the United States only in the past two years but rose, in that short time, to the status of...
It is a recent tradition among occupants of the White House, as they head out of office, to play a few practical jokes on their successors. The Clinton administration jesters, for instance, removed all the Ws from White House keyboards before handing over the keys to George W. Bush’s transition...
For decades, the Chinese government has sold to the world the notion that the Chinese economy can defy gravity, maintaining double-digit GDP growth rates year after year in the 1990s and 2000s, and staying above 6% for all of the previous decade, according to official government statistics. The...
By banning TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expanded its ongoing military confrontation with China to include trade. While it will keep his voters happy, the brewing stand-off has exposed the yawning gap between global geopolitics and Modi’s propaganda....
When China established itself as the epicenter of global manufacturing some 20 years ago, its lure was evident. Chinese labor was cheap, and more than a billion potential consumers had whet the appetite of many large businesses. Although, over the past decade in particular, the country’s...
Sino-US relations have been a marriage of mutual economic convenience that worked rather well for both countries for several decades. What is commonly referred to as “Chimerica” — where China produces products and purchases American treasury bonds, and the US purchases Chinese products and...
The US and China are the two biggest economies in the world. Over the decades, the two countries have been opponents, friends, frenemies and rivals. The US joined the European powers in the exploitation of China, opposed the spread of communism and fought Mao Zedong's young nation in Korea. This...
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...
On the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Dani Rodrik posed a controversial question: “Is Export Led Growth Passé?” Writing on September 11, 2008, this famous Harvard professor argued that advanced economies were unlikely to run large current account deficits and import as they did in...
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...
