China

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  • China's role in the global order has come with fierce debate.

    1 September 2016

    Is China's World Order Role Exaggerated?

    China’s status within the prevailing global order has sparked one of the most contested debates in international affairs. For some, it evokes their worst fears over a rising revisionist power; for others it creates inflated expectations over what the Chinese leadership is willing to commit to within the global arena.

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  • China should adopt new urbanization patterns to kickstart growth.

    30 August 2016

    Old Urbanization Patterns Won't Help a New China

    China’s unprecedented growth since reforms began in the late 1970s has been accompanied by an equally transformative process of urbanisation. China’s urbanisation rate increased from 17.9 to 54.8 percent between 1978 and 2014, which represents the largest peacetime population movement in human history. The transfer of labour from the agricultural sector and rural areas to non-agricultural sectors and urban areas in China underwrote the world’s fastest sustained period of economic growth in the past three decades.

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  • Analysis of China's water and energy use yields surprising results.

    24 August 2016

    There is Something in the Water in China

    Water and energy are indispensable inputs to modern economies. However, in China these are both under threat. China’s per capita quantity of fresh water is only one-quarter of the global average and its sparse water resources are unevenly distributed across the country.

    At the same time, China faces serious energy pressures due to the dominance of coal in energy consumption, causing severe environmental crises and its high external energy dependence in general.

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  • A structural flaw created Chinese zombie firms that won't go away.

    22 August 2016

    How China's Soft Budget Constraint Created Zombie Firms

    This year began with international media attention drawn to the weakness of China’s economy. This prediction was validated on 9 May 2016 when the People’s Daily ran on its front page an article written by President Xi Jinping that expounded on the need for ‘supply-side structural reform’.

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  • Are Chinese officials really relaxing financial controls?

    17 August 2016

    Relaxing Financial Controls the Chinese Way

    It is as if Hamlet, the confused prince of Denmark, has taken up residence in Beijing.  The famed-prince wrestled with "seeming" and "being".  So are Chinese officials.  They seem to be relaxing their control financial markets, but are they really?  Are they tolerating market forces because they approve what they are doing, such as driving interest rates down or weakening the yuan?  If so what happens when the markets do something for which they don’t approve?

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