Managing The Dragon

A lawyer friend of mine once told me about a particularly humorous negotiating session he had in Hong Kong in the 1990’s. At a critical point in the negotiations, it seems, the Chinese counterpart to his Western client kept repeating, in cryptic fashion, the question: “In or out? In or out?” Google now has to […]

In case you haven’t noticed, the deteriorating relationship between the United States and China is turning out to be the major story of 2010. Quite apart from tensions on trade and the currency, new issues are popping up every day, and old issues like Taiwan that have not been in the news for some time […]

When I sat down on January 12 and made the following two predictions for 2010, I believed that a trade war was looming and that the relationship between the United States and China would deteriorate as a result. Prediction #4: The relationship between China and the United States will deteriorate in 2010. Prediction #5: China […]

The global economy is much more stable today than it was at this time last year, but that doesn’t make 2010 any easier to predict. In January 2009, the debate was all about numbers. Would China’s economy grow by 8 percent as the government was predicting, 7.2 percent as the World Bank concluded, or considerably […]

It was supposed to be history in the making when representatives from 192 countries met in Copenhagen to formulate a global solution to what some believe is the biggest problem facing mankind. Instead, it degenerated into a sometimes tawdry display of finger-pointing and trading of barbs between representatives from the developed countries of the world […]

It’s only been six months, but it seems like ages since 2008 finally gave way to 2009. Though uncertainty will always be part and parcel of economics and finance, it’s hard to remember a time when there was less clarity in global economics. By January, trillions of dollars of wealth had been wiped out by […]

Is human rights truly off the table as an issue between the United States and China? Based on the recent visits by representatives of the Obama administration and Congress, one might think so. First, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a longtime critic of China’s human rights record, surprised Chinese officials when she steered clear of […]

When the economic history of China is written, it will show that, to date, there have been three major inflection points in the country’s economic development — events that have triggered major changes in the direction of the country. First, of course, was the opening of China to the outside world under Deng Xiaoping in […]

I’m often asked what the Chinese think of the election of Barack Obama. This is a question that has several answers. On one level, the election of an African-American as President of the United States has reinforced in the minds of the Chinese how unique and different the U.S. is as a country. On another, […]