Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein explains why China has the upper hand in the current trade war with the US. For anything the US does not want to send to China, China has an alternative to hit back, he says at the Thinkers Forum.
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Many observers wrongly see the current trade war between China and the US as a Cold War 2.0, says political analyst Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel. If American politicians started this war without seeing the difference from a cold war, it might be tough to bring it to an end, he adds.
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How did China change from an economic laggard into a booming country? China veteran Kaiser Kuo dives into the country’s 40-year transformation for the World Economic Forum. For example, how it succeeded in becoming a digital giant.
Kaiser Kuo:
The Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping has as its current focus the development of “new quality productive forces.” What this means is that innovation will, it is hoped, become the main driver of growth, with an emphasis on quality growth over quantity or rapid expansion. This translates more concretely into a renewed emphasis on basic science, “hard” tech like new materials and semiconductors, artificial intelligence, supply chain efficiency and rationalization, and green and sustainable development.
Xi Jinping would like to see physicists doing physics, not designing sophisticated financial products or social media advertising algorithms. Whether these strategies will succeed in navigating China through its next phase of development remains an open question, but if China’s past record is any indication, one might reconsider betting against it.
Other developing countries might look to China’s experience for lessons, but the unique combination of historical context, cultural factors, and policy decisions that shaped China’s rise may not be easily replicable. When its own rhetoric speaks so often of “Chinese characteristics,” it may be less likely that China will seek to push its own developmental model, though doubtless some of its features will prove attractive. As China continues to evolve, the world will be watching closely to see how it addresses these challenges and what new pathways it charts for future growth.
Those challenges are numerous: Environmental degradation, rising labour costs, and an aging population pose significant hurdles. Maintaining the stability that has been so crucial for China thus far, while allowing for experimental approaches, improvisation, and creative thinking that will drive economic dynamism in the future will require careful balancing.
Much more at the World Economic Forum.
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The Trump administration is pretty clueless on China, and that is only one of many issues when both countries are going to deal with each other, says leading economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, in an interview with the Australian broadcaster ABC. Both can inflict huge damage on each other, but neither is in a position to win a full-blown trade war, he adds.
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For a week, US President Trump has been speculating on how a call with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, will solve their trade issues. Harry Broadman, a former US trade representative, explains in Politico why Trump is wrong.
Politico:
Trump’s expectation that a call with Xi can reboot U.S.-China trade talks on those issues and render substantive results defies the diplomatic and policymaking protocols of China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party.
“Trump is a deal maker. Xi Jinping is not a deal maker — he’s a Party guy at the top of an administrative superstructure,” said Harry Broadman, a former assistant U.S. trade representative in the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. “I cannot imagine that Xi would get into specifics — at most they might agree on certain principles but that’s not likely to satisfy Trump.”
There’s also a risk that a call between the two leaders could backfire for Trump by undermining longer term trade negotiations with China.
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China is having the upper hand in the trade war with Trump and can replace almost every product it purchases from the US with products from other countries, with the exception, perhaps, of semiconductors, says Shaun Rein, a Shanghai-based political analyst and author of r, at CNBC. China might push back harder than the US or Europe might be thinking, he adds.
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While the world is getting used to live sessions from the Oval Office in Washington, DC, few experts know how the Politburo in Beijing is making its policies. Political expert Victor Shih, author of Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation, explains in the Dwarkesh Clips how the relations between Xi Jinping, other members of the Politburo, and outside experts work out.
A full session is available here.
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Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein, in an extensive interview at Forbes, says that after a very bearish 2024, China’s economy has found its way upwards because of Trump. “People rallied together and said, ‘We’ll deal with lower incomes. We’ll deal with bad sales. We want to make Trump bend’, he tells Forbes.
Forbes:
Long-time China market researcher Shaun Rein chalked up one of his three international business bestsellers in 2018 with “The War for China’s Wallet,” a look at how to sell to the country’s more than one billion consumers. At a time when investors, multinationals and politicians are awaiting a relatively brisk post-pandemic spending recovery in the world’s second-biggest economy, Rein has some good news: it’s coming soon.
“I’ve been in China for 28 years. Last year was probably the most bearish I’ve ever been on the economy,” Rein said in a Zoom interview from Shanghai earlier this month. “Youth unemployment hit 18.8%. Companies weren’t hiring. Fixed asset investment went up only about 0.1 percent. Last July and August were as bad as the height of Covid in terms of confidence and spending. Average retail sales only grew three to four percent year-on-year. People were scared,” even though personal savings totaling $20 trillion, among the world’s largest, he said.
In the last two months, however, Rein’s outlook has reversed. “This is the most bullish I’ve been on China in the last six years,” said Rein, the founder and managing director of Shanghai-headquartered China Market Research Group. Harvard-educated Rein’s other books include “The End of Cheap China” in 2012, “The End of Copycat China” in 2014, and last year’s “The Split: Finding Opportunities in China’s Economy in the New World Older.”
A catalyst for his new, upbeat view is that the hardest punches thrown by the Trump administration in this year’s trade war have yet to prove very damaging to China’s overall economy. “The Chinese feel that China has beat Trump with the tariff and trade war since Liberation Day, and they had the resolve to push back hard. They were not going to bend down because they wanted to push back over a century of humiliation. China bent down during the Qing Dynasty to the Western imperial powers. China wasn’t going to do that again.”
“People rallied together and said, ‘We’ll deal with lower incomes. We’ll deal with bad sales. We want to make Trump bend.’ And Trump did,” Rein said. “By going from 145% to 30% tariffs, Chinese felt they beat Trump. I don’t want say there’s exuberance in the country, but there’s a lot less anxiety than at any time I’ve seen in the last 7-8 years.”
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One-third of global wealth will come from China in the future, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein in a debate with George Galloway on this latest book, r. One of the achievements of current leader Xi Jinping is that he has been able to diminish the gap between rich and poor Chinese, says Rein. China used to be an unfair society, focusing on the rich, but Xi focused on the poor and middle-class Chinese, a group that counts for 400 million people and might grow to 800 million.
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China’s President Xi Jinping met last week with the country’s major tech leaders, for the first time he did so since 2018. Business analyst Shaun Rein, author of r, discusses the importance of this policy change after the country’s tech industry suffered from a major crackdown in the past years, he tells at the Thinkers Forum. China’s industrial leaders heard it is ok to make money again after a long time, he added
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According to Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein in The Global View, capital is moving back to China, and the country will be back in business in six to 12 months. In the short run investors in the stock markets have to be careful, as China’s stock markets behave more like volatile retail markets where institutional investors have little influence. He adds that the tech markets will especially be booming again now Xi Jinping showed his full support for the sector.
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China’s President Xi Jinping turned against his erstwhile handpicked ally Admiral Miao Hua, a member of the powerful Central Military Commission (CMC). Political analyst Victor Shih explains at CNN this change in Xi’s long-standing struggle against corruption.
CNN:
As the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China heats up, the PLA Navy has also seen a drastic increase in the procurement of warships and other weapons, providing ample opportunities for corruption, said Victor Shih, a political science professor at the University of San Diego.
But there could be another potential reason behind Miao’s downfall, Shih said, for “being too obvious in his attempt to foster a faction in the military.”
Xi has repeatedly warned against the forming of factions in both the party and the military. “Of course, the only person who is allowed to do that is Xi himself,” Shih added.
Miao is seen by some analysts as having recommended multiple associates in the Navy for promotions to key positions, including Rocket Force Commander Wang Houbin and Defense Minister Dong Jun.
The announcement of Miao’s investigation came a day after the Financial Times reported that Dong had been placed under investigation for corruption, citing current and former US officials. The Defense Ministry dismissed the report as “sheer fabrication,” and days later, Dong made a public appearance at a security forum…
Miao’s downfall comes less than a year after former defense minister Li Shangfu was removed from the CMC.
The powerful body had six members – all deemed as Xi’s loyalists – serving under the top leader when he began his unprecedented third term two years ago. If Miao is also removed, it would leave two vacant seats.
Shih, the expert on Chinese elite politics, said many dictators, from former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to Mao, have eventually turned against their own proteges.
“Once all of their real competitors are gone, a dictator can never think to themselves: ‘Oh well, all the threats are gone. I can just relax.’ Because they always think that new threats could emerge, including from people who once were very close to them. This happens over and over again,” he said.
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China has started to push capital into its sluggish economy, but economists have different opinions on what the government wants to achieve. According to Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know®, its financial measures are more about stabilizing its economy, not about a full-blown stimulus as it did in the past, he says at the ChinaFile.
Arthur Kroeber:
China’s economic support measures are better described as stabilization than stimulus. Unlike in previous full-bore stimulus programs, for instance in 2008 and 2015, the aim today is not to engineer a boom but simply to halt the deterioration in economic conditions evident in the past few months, and stabilize growth at around the target of 5 percent.
China’s long-term economic strategy has not changed. Xi Jinping’s intent, as outlined in the Third Plenum decision this past July, is to shift capital from real estate and infrastructure into technology-intensive manufacturing. The aspiration is that the productivity gains from high-tech industries will deliver the long-run growth that China needs, offsetting the impact of a declining population and other negative factors. Another key goal of this strategy is to ensure that China becomes self-sufficient in core technologies, enabling it to withstand the pressure of U.S. containment policies. The leadership is fully prepared to tolerate a period of relatively sluggish growth as the price of making this structural shift.
But the stabilization policies of the last month show the limits of this tolerance. They also reflect a judgment that the contraction of the property sector, now into its fourth year, has gone far enough, and that policy should shift from restrictive to modestly supportive. The final policy move, expected in early November—issuance of long-term central government debt to swap for provincial debt—is a long-overdue recognition that the financial position of heavily indebted provinces is unsustainable, and that direct fiscal support from Beijing is needed.
Over the next year or so, the economic package is likely to succeed in its limited aims: reversing the decline in housing sales, and providing local governments with relief from interest payments so they can pay back wages to their employees and overdue bills to the companies that supply them with goods and services. This should be enough to stabilize GDP growth at somewhere close to the 5 percent target. The benefits to the rest of the world, however, will be modest. Neither consumer spending nor commodity demand will enjoy a dramatic pickup. And Beijing’s steady commitment to its investment-first growth strategy means that other countries will still face the challenge of intense competition from low-priced Chinese imports.
More opinions at the ChinaFile.
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China’s massive financial stimulus is good for the short term, but the economy needs more structural change, away from real estate, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein to CNBC. While it is good Xi Jinping moves away from politics and ideology and turns to the economy, more is needed to restore long-term confidence in the economy by the consumers, he adds.
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Independent Australia reviews Ian Johnson‘s latest book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future and supports his effort to avoid pressure from the government to forget the past. “Johnson gives us access to some of the recent events that have already been obliterated from Communist China’s official history, from the murderous disasters of Mao’s crackdowns on critical thinking to the cult rise of Xi Jinping.”
Independent Australia:
What China’s Mao took from Stalin’s Russia was what Pulitzer-prize-winning writer Ian Johnson, in his must-read new book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, calls the imposition of cultural amnesia. Nasty and divisive as a so-called history war might be here, in China, it’s deadly.
Johnson gives us access to some of the recent events that have already been obliterated from Communist China’s official history, from the murderous disasters of Mao’s crackdowns on critical thinking to the cult rise of Xi Jinping.
In the display halls devoted to Xi’s rule in Beijing’s National Museum of China, along with videos of him delivering speeches and copies of his many books, preserved in a glass case, there’s even a receipt from a modest restaurant meal eaten by the great leader. Not even the Elvis museum has that kind of object-reverence.
It was in that museum that Xi announced his Chinese Dream policy, effectively rewriting the Communist Party history to ensure no criticism of what actually happened (including the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre) would trouble his plans to lead China back to (mythic) glory. Make China Great Again.
To read about Xi Jinping’s attitude towards history is like reading Blainey on steroids, pumped up and enormously dangerous.
Two years before he took over as Party President in 2012, Xi gave a keynote at a national meeting of historians — who were, in fact, functionaries tasked with (re)writing the official history to make sure it conformed to Xi’s idea of patriotism.
Johnson writes:
‘He laid out a five-point program that called for publicising the party’s history, including its “great victories and brilliant achievements”, and the “historical inevitability” of its rise to power. Especially young people, Xi said, had to be made to appreciate the party’s grand traditions and the heroism of its leaders, and must “resolutely oppose any wrong tendency to distort and vilify the party’s history”.’
Ah, yes. Young people must be “made to appreciate” their leaders’ heroism. And “wrong tendencies” must be stamped out. Including the tendency to demonstrate and wave banners that criticise those in power.
In the China described by Ian Johnson, standing between the brute strength of Xi’s government and the continuing trauma of repression are the “underground historians”, those who find ways to gather evidence, record testimony and disseminate information. The second half of his book and his conclusion express hope that the new technologies for communication are making it possible for these underground historians to connect with others and archive history.
Having worked for most of his life in China as a correspondent for influential American news outlets, Johnson is himself part of the networks he now considers crucial to the counter-history that challenges the official amnesia imposed by the Government.
Talking about the United States, Johnson points out that the lack of interest in China, the fact that fewer and fewer study the language, could be countered by bringing:
‘…inspiring people to come for residencies, to mentor, and to lecture – rather than as refugees when they are at the end of their rope – (which) would expose our societies to the living traditions of Chinese civilisation.’
That’s why the denigration of history that is critically engaged with the past is so dangerous; it cancels the curiosity, intelligence and commitment of those who write to help us understand history, calling it negativity, or, as Xi does, “nihilistic”.
More in Independent Australia.
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