Photo: EDGARD GARRIDO/REUTERS It’s only a few weeks into 2016, but Chinese president Xi Jinping must already feel nostalgia for the year gone by. Xi wasn't in town during my visit to frigid Beijing last week. He was abroad making his first tour of the Middle East, where he reaffirmed commitments to relations with Arab partners and inked a panoply of accords to deepen economic and security relations with Iran. But Xi’s Middle East tour offered him only a brief respite from the pressing set of issues accumulating in his inbox in Beijing. On the domestic front, the road to the ambitious economic restructuring he has pushed forward remains bumpy. Pursued alongside a muscular anti-corruption
This article was originally published in Project Syndicate on January 12, 2016. Read the original here. STANFORD – As 2016 begins, an historic contest is underway over competing development models – that is, strategies to promote economic growth – between China, on the one hand, and the US and other Western countries on the other. Although this contest has been largely hidden from public view, the outcome will determine the fate of much of Eurasia for decades to come. Most Westerners are aware that growth has slowed substantially in China, from over 10% per year in recent decades to below 7% today (and possibly lower). The country’s leaders have not been sitting still in response, seeking to
A Syrian refugee in Lesbos, Greece. CreditYannis Behrakis/Reuters This article was originally published on January 12, 2016 in the Opinion Pages of the New York Times. It can be found here. In the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., American support for accepting more Syrian refugees has withered. The Republican presidential hopeful Donald J. Trump has called for blocking all Muslims from entering the United States, saying we are at war with radical Islam. Other politicians, including some governors and members of Congress, now specifically label Syrian refugees a threat. The focus on whether or not to admit these desperate people to the United States obscures
More than at any time in the history of modern China, 2016 will be a pivotal year for the economy. Indeed, the odds are not small that the county’s economic troubles — which, remarkably, seemed like genuine news to much of the world in 2015 — will only get worse. Such a turn of events could well have a fundamental impact on the growth of the global economy, which is still inching forward in slow motion following the recent financial crisis. And for emerging markets in particular, a China in economic straits could slow down (or even potentially put on hold) the country’s newest initiatives — the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the ‘One Belt One Road’ (OBOR) investment and trad