Category: Thinking About China

China’s Failed Economic Strategies

Commentary China’s economy is unraveling because its economic strategies are failing. Such is the way with communists. Beijing’s primary economic strategy is to revive international trade and investment ties with the West, especially Europe. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sees Brussels as more compliant than Washington, which is true though even the European Commission last…


Germany Challenges China

Commentary Berlin has revised its approach to Beijing, replacing its once accommodating and sympathetic posture with something more wary and hostile. Washington, no doubt, will claim that Germany has followed America’s lead in making a similar change. But given Berlin’s comprehensive approach, the product of considerable compromise, the Germans seem to have taken the lead, much…


Will the Yuan Replace the Dollar?

Commentary With the International Monetary Fund (IMF) now allowing countries to pay dollar-denominated debt in the Chinese yuan, what does that mean for the U.S. dollar? It’s no secret that both the Chinese and the Russians and many other countries want to downgrade the dollar’s influence and even de-dollarize global trade. That’s certainly happening, and…


The Curious Case of China’s Missing Foreign Minister

Commentary If it turns out to be true that China’s missing foreign minister is under “discipline inspection” by the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) own internal party police, he will likely disappear into the little-known secret detention system known (to a few) as Liuzhi. These strange disappearances, often lasting several months, up to half a year,…


Weak China Policy Does Not Serve American Interests

Commentary The world’s superpower continues to send diplomats to genuflect before the throne in Beijing. Blinken’s China Trip Leading the parade of American supplicants to Chinese leader Xi Jinping was Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Despite Mr. Blinken’s claim of “progress” being made during his visit last month, most serious longtime China watchers have panned his visit,…


The West Leaks Chip Tech to China

Commentary The U.S.-China chip war is heating up. The world’s two largest superpowers are clashing over semiconductors that determine increasingly more of our lives, from when the smart toaster pops in the morning to what we write to our friends, family, and colleagues using ChatGPT in the afternoon. The latest silicon wafers, with transistors as…


The Shame of the Silence of the West

Commentary There is a strategic price that the West will pay—and is paying already—for its failure to take a moral stand against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for its policy of genocide and other forms of persecution against its own people. The West won the Cold War because it had built global prestige and, therefore,…


Data With Chinese Characteristics

//Commentary// China released its latest GDP figure showing strong 6.3 percent year-on-year growth in the second quarter. There is, of course, a low base effect in play, given the 0.4 percent year-over-year growth in 2022Q2. A simple way to adjust such an effect is to sum the two numbers that differ by four quarters. The…


The CCP’s Genocide Against Falun Gong Rages On

Commentary In a summer marked by the war ravaging Ukraine, rampant inflation, heat waves, and other global disruptions, one additional dismal human milestone must be acknowledged in all its horrific totality. July 20 marks the 24th year since the beginning of the persecution of the peaceful practice of Falun Gong by the Chinese Communist Party…


China Commission to MLB, US Firms: Stop Subsidizing China’s Abuses

Commentary Baseball may seem as American as apple pie, but many of its most popular bats and gloves are made in China and owned by a company implicated in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) forced labor abuses. Just hours before baseball fans were gathering in Seattle for the MLB’s All-Star Game Tuesday, across the country,…