China's Evergrande Crisis

 

CNN's recent article on Evergrande has me thinking out loud about the problem of ghost cities in China and the prospects for a downturn in the country.

Biden's comments and US Policy on Taiwan

At a town hall meeting last night, President Biden twice said the US was committed to defend Taiwan if China attacked it. White House aides immediately walked the comments back, saying that the US remains committed to the provisions of the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, and by implication to the policy of strategic ambiguity. In todays TOL podcast below, I talk about Biden's comments and Us policy towards Taiwan.

Comments on the News: China and Taiwan

 Tensions between China and Taiwan have been in the news recently as China has sent warplanes into Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone. I talk about this in my TOL Podcast (below) and have provided links to relevant articles below the podcast

Links to relevant Articles:

China isn't about to invade Taiwan. But the two sides are on a dangerous path by Ben Westcott and Eric Cheung, CNN

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a bloody, logistical nightmare by Ben Westcott

What Is the U.S. “One China” Policy, and Why Does it Matter? by Michael Green, CSIS

NTD Talking Points interview: Ian Easton: An Invasion of Taiwan Would Be Nothing Like We’ve Seen in Modern Warfare

Does China Manipulate its Currency?

 The short answer is : Not anymore.

I have addressed this question on this blog twice before (in April 2016 and February 2014 ) and though I was done with it but it seems to keep re-emerging.

So today I am devoting a podcast episode to the topic. Also there are some graphs below the podcast link that depict important data related to the topic.

Graph 1: Exchange Rate- Yuan to the Dollar

Graph 2: China's Foreign Reserves (excluding gold)

Graph 3: Savings Rates

Source: Manning and Napier, Five Things to Know about US-China Trade

One more thing...

For a discussion of whether China was manipulating its currency in August 2019 when the Trump adminsitrations declared it a manipukatoir, see Brad Setser's Council on Foreign Relations brief

Comments on the News - Ojomo and Horn's take on Aid in Afghanistan

 In an attempt to reinvigorate this blog, I am launching a podcast counterpart. In this episode, I comment on the NBC News article "20 years after the Afghanistan invasion, a lesson in how not to spend development aid" by Efosa Ojomo and Michael B. Horn 

China's crack down on Cheng Wei

 CNN Business has an article about China's crack down on Cheng Wei's ride-hailing app. 

This seems to me to be an example of what Acemoglu and Robinson predicted about China's future in their book Why Nations Fail. That is to say that the authoritarian regime in China would not be able to sustain growth based on innovation due to its lack of control over such growth.

This is reminiscent of Chain crackdown on Jack Ma which was covered recently in a WSJ article entitled "Jack Ma’s Costliest Business Lesson: China Has Only One Leader."