Sunday, 31. December 2006, 02:21:50
China-US Relation, ABSURDIST
By Sheila Melvin
The Wilson Center
2006-8-9As Pearl Buck neared her 80th birthday, she became obsessed by the idea of returning to China. It was the early 1970s, and Buck, the American author who had won the Nobel Prize for her books set in China, had not set foot there herself in nearly four decades, as the country was transformed by the Japanese invasion, civil war, and the triumph of communism.
Although she had been born in West Virginia in 1892 while her missionary parents were home on leave, China was the country where she had grown up, first married, and written her most famous novel, The Good Earth (1931). Chinese was her first language, the one in which she mentally composed sentences before putting them to paper in English. China had provided much of the material for many of her 70-odd books, mostly novels but also plays, short fiction, children’s stories, biographies of her parents, essays, and poetry. China had inspired her humanitarian work. And it was in China that her adored mother, her father, two brothers, and two sisters lay buried.
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Wednesday, 27. December 2006, 01:05:55
Latin America, Political Economy, China-US Relation
By Dennis Morrison
Jamaica Observer
December 24, 2006Earlier this month, a high-level delegation from the executive branch of the US government that included seven members of president Bush's Cabinet and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, visited China for talks on economic matters.While the team was there, economic data released by the US Commerce Department showed that America's trade deficit had soared to record levels for the first nine months of the year. The news also broke that China is on course to surpass Mexico this year as the USA's second biggest trading partner behind Canada.
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Tuesday, 26. December 2006, 01:06:06
China-US Relation, National Security
Summary prepared by Tamer Nagy Mahmoud, Junior Fellow, China Program, Carnegie Endowment
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
April, 11, 2003Many observers believe the current relationship between Washington and Beijing is the best it has been in over a decade. The strong rhetoric and tense encounters of the first year of President George W. Bush's administration have given way to growing signs of bilateral cooperation in several areas. What explains the current turnaround? Is a more cooperative Chinese foreign policy of a tactical or strategic nature? What actions or events could bolster, or disrupt, the current relationship? In particular, how might the war in Iraq and the North Korea crisis affect it?
To examine these and other related questions, the Carnegie Endowment's China Program has invited former U.S. Ambassadors Chas W. Freeman and J. Stapleton Roy to present their views at a special lunch forum, Explaining the Turnaround in the U.S.-China Relationship.
Ambassadors Freeman and Roy are both retired career Foreign Service officers with extensive, in-depth experience in China and Asia. For further information, please see attached biographies.
Michael D. Swaine, Co-Director of the Carnegie China Program, will serve as the moderator for this event--the first in a yearlong series of seminars and discussions examining the durability of the current Sino-U.S. rapprochement.
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Saturday, 23. December 2006, 10:51:43
Political Economy, China-US Relation, National Security
A Partnership of Paranoia
Is economic reform of the Communist system in China enough?
By Annie Hsiao
UCLA International Institute
11/30/2005With the emergence of Deng Xiao Ping into the forefront of the Chinese Communist Party, the regime has incrementally loosened its authoritarian and centralized control of the economy. Propelled by DXP’s economic ideology of “it doesn’t matter what color the cat is, as long as the cat catches the mouse,” the communist regime set up Special Economic Zones, opening up to Western countries to come and invest capital in local factories. Since the 1960s, the Chinese state’s economic liberalization and openness to the West has ushered in much socio-economic and political progress. Economic reform has influenced political conformity to international standards of cooperation. But economic reform is still just what it is, economic. And although it may influence other domestic and international stratums of culture, politics, and class, it is not the determinative factor that defines the Chinese Communist state.
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Thursday, 7. December 2006, 19:09:14
Ideology, Politics, China-US Relation
By Ben Calmes
Sinomania!
Autumn 1998There was a time, before the dawn of the 20th Century, when Europeans and Americans (in particular) admired and respected China.
For over a thousand years
the Chinese diffused their remarkable technological innovations in agriculture (the plow), information (printing), finance (paper money), warfare (gunpowder) –without restrictions– throughout the world.
Chinese philosophy, art, and culture were revered and widely imitated.
The economy of China was huge and its exports were the most sought after products on the planet. Columbus and Magellan made their famous "discoveries" in order to capture this great trade.Read more...
Wednesday, 6. December 2006, 12:15:31
China Watch, National Security, China-US Relation, Nationalism
By GEOFFREY YORK
The Globe and Mail
Dec 5, 2006BEIJING -- For years, China's Communist rulers have coyly insisted that China is merely a developing country. Now a growing number of Chinese scholars and commentators are discarding the old bashfulness and beginning to talk openly of China's rising power.
Their bold predictions of Chinese ascendance are a reflection of the surging sense of self-confidence here. There is a growing belief that China will soon be challenging the United States for leadership in the global arena.
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Wednesday, 29. November 2006, 21:04:23
National Security, China-US Relation
By Ronald L. Tammen and Jacek Kugler
Chinese Journal of International Politics
Volume 1, Number 1, 2006The United States places at risk its opportunity to remain the world's pre-eminent nation by focusing all of its energy, time and capabilities on the war against terrorism and on its ancillary action in Iraq, despite compelling reasons otherwise. This myopia, conditioned by unambiguous security threats and the emotion of the moment, is abetted by a stubborn resistance to the maintenance of a long-term focus in foreign policy. Thus a combination of forces, imposed internally and externally, handicap American leadership and threaten the United States’ strategic interests.
The attacks of 9/11 and subsequent events in the Middle East have created a condition of immediacy in US foreign policy. The crisis de jure atmosphere dominates our attention and concentrates our intellectual resources. Short-term benefits do exist; for example, as a nation, America has been resilient in its response to the terrorist threat. However, the other pre-occupation, the debate over Iraq, has been notably near-term in its content. The strategic consequences of this action are being understood only now.1
Behind the façade of these all-consuming national priorities, American strategic thinking has grown stale. This is partly the result of the Cold War generation of policy makers failing to anticipate the new world, and finding their core concepts to be useless both in the war on terrorism and in the broader effort to maintain US leadership. It is also the fault of the supporting strategy-making community and its failure to provide fresh insight, continuity and focus.
The potential consequences of this lapse in attention and intellectual insight could not be more severe. A great challenge for the United States and the world lies not in terrorism or even in regional conflict. Instead, it lies in the longer-term collision of interests between the US and an emerging, powerful China. Appreciation of that fact should force policy makers to recalculate and reanalyse current crises from a strategic perspective. Events in the Middle East, South Asia and East Asia are important not for what they are but for what they will demonstrate about American leadership in the ultimate contest to come, as Asia becomes the focal point of world politics.2
Content:
1.Theoretical Framework through a Policy Lens
2.Policy Implications
3.Probability of Conflict at the Global Level
4.Empirical Implications: The Asian Challenge
5.The Rise of China
Download Article (PDF, 318k)
Friday, 24. November 2006, 20:54:38
National Security, China-US Relation
Council on Foreign Relations - The U.S.-China Relationship: Policy Goals
By Esther Pan
International Institute for Strategic Studies
Nov 11, 2005The Pentagon's annual report to Congress on the strength of the Chinese military estimated that China currently spends some $60 to $90 billion on defense, two or three times its officially published estimate. The nation has a standing army of 2.3 million, and is in the middle of a strategic and well-funded military modernization plan. China's army could soon legitimately challenge that of the United States, experts say, which has attracted attention and raised concerns worldwide. In a June speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld questioned China's military buildup. He asked why China is increasing its arms purchases, investment, and deployments when it has no clear enemies and criticized the fact what while China's economic growth has fed its military spending, a growth in political freedom has not followed. "With a system that encouraged enterprise and free expression, China would appear more a welcome partner and provide even greater economic opportunities for the Chinese people," Rumsfeld said. [
CFR]
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Thursday, 23. November 2006, 16:26:13
Politics, Globalization, China-US Relation
By Scott Marshall
CPUSA Vice Chair and Chair, CPUSA Labor Commission
Communist Party, USA
10/04/2006This discussion document is the product of a four day “Think Tank” organized by the Economics and Labor Commissions of the Communist Party USA, in Chicago, in early February 2006. Several papers were presented and debated each day on a range of issues connected with capitalist globalization and the response of the working class and organized labor. There is no way that a single pamphlet could completely summarize those four days of intense discussion. But we hope that this document will provoke discussion and debates on what we think are some of the most burning challenges of our times for labor and for the working class.A qualitatively new form of transnational capital has clearly emerged. Its features include enormous new concentrations of finance capital, new forms of transnational monopoly, huge changes in the technology of mass production and manufacturing, a new global division of labor, and increasing poverty and decline for workers of the world in a global race to the bottom. Some individuals now own wealth greater than that of smaller countries.
World capitalism continues to develop, reaching new levels of concentration and more advanced forms of global economic integration. Some see it as a new phase of what Lenin described as “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” Others think of it as an even more qualitative change and see it as a whole new stage of monopoly capitalism. Regardless of your view, it is clear that capitalism has not reached its final stage and stopped developing.
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Thursday, 23. November 2006, 16:03:59
China-US Relation
By Janice Fioravante
Asia Times
Nov 11, 2006NEW YORK - Like the title of the Elvis Presley movie Kissing Cousins, China and New York are in the serious courting stage.
New York will play host to a prime showcase of Chinese merchandise when construction starts this month on a new complex. The Grandland Expo Center will be based in a 120,000-square-foot (11,150-square-meter) building in East Elmhurst in Queens, the most multicultural borough of New York City. The Fujian-based firm, Grandland, purchased the building as part of a US$46 million investment.
Yuet-fung Ho, vice president of the international business development (Asia) group for the New York City Economic Development Corp (NYCEDC), is given much of the credit for her involvement, skills, language and perseverance for the "win" of this export and import distribution project.
It is just one endpoint to the hours and hours of work on the part of NYCEDC and others, including state Governor George Pataki and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, all having traveled to China many times over the past three years to meet face to face with key representatives there.
In fact, Ho, who grew up in Hong Kong and previously opened the CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System) Broadcast International office there, sees the increased travel to China, "coupled with the rising talent level from China over the past five to 10 years", as having "set up an environment for soaring interest in business exchange between New York, and the United States generally, and China".
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