Moreover, GDP growth has almost certainly been overstated in the official data both in both 2022 and 2023. The costs of years of low-return investments now prevent Beijing from redirecting the financial system, making it difficult to unleash improvements in efficiency or “new quality productive forces.”
fredag 11. oktober 2024
China's Economy Has Peaked. Can Beijing Redefine its Goals?
Nothing in economic development is certain, but China’s economy has probably already peaked in size as a proportion of the global economy, reaching the peak in 2021. China now faces a structural economic slowdown as the financial system constrains economic growth rather than facilitating it. These economic pressures are directly linked to the end of an unprecedented credit and investment expansion during the previous decade. The resulting credit crunch has produced a collapse in property investment and slower local government infrastructure investment.
Mao Zedong's mass political campaigns still drive Chinese politics
Seventy-five years after Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China, his legacy is still being felt in the form of mass political campaigns and witch-hunts that keep the people divided while shoring up Communist Party rule, analysts and scholars said.
While Mao's announcement from the rostrum of Tiananmen Gate was intended to deliver the message that China was under new management following decades of colonial humiliation and war, it actually ushered in further political and social turmoil and set a pattern that is being repeated under party leader Xi Jinping today, experts told RFA Mandarin. The evaluation of China's recent past isn't just about history, they said. It is closely bound up with the current political line in Beijing -- to criticize Mao, albeit slightly, is to indicate a move away from his policies, while to echo him, as current leader Xi Jinping has done repeatedly in recent years, indicates a more left-leaning direction.
While Mao's announcement from the rostrum of Tiananmen Gate was intended to deliver the message that China was under new management following decades of colonial humiliation and war, it actually ushered in further political and social turmoil and set a pattern that is being repeated under party leader Xi Jinping today, experts told RFA Mandarin. The evaluation of China's recent past isn't just about history, they said. It is closely bound up with the current political line in Beijing -- to criticize Mao, albeit slightly, is to indicate a move away from his policies, while to echo him, as current leader Xi Jinping has done repeatedly in recent years, indicates a more left-leaning direction.
Taiwan ‘determined’ to protect its democratic way of life
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te on Thursday vowed to resist any attempt by China to annex his country and to defend its democratic and diverse way of life, as Beijing stepped up military exercises around the island. In an Oct. 10 National Day speech marking the 113th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China by the nationalist Kuomintang under Sun Yat-sen, Lai said his government, which fled to the island after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong’s communists on the Chinese mainland in 1949, would continue to defend the islands of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu.
“My mission is to ensure that our nation endures and progresses, and to unite the 23 million people of Taiwan,” Lai said. “I will also uphold the commitment to resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.”
“My mission is to ensure that our nation endures and progresses, and to unite the 23 million people of Taiwan,” Lai said. “I will also uphold the commitment to resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty.”
Six countries join naval drills amid tension with China
A six-nation naval exercise led by the United States and the Philippines has begun in the waters off northern Philippines, the second such drills in 10 days, amid rising tensions with China. Exercise Sama Sama, or Togetherness in the Tagalog language, kicked off on Monday, “marking the beginning of two weeks of maritime engagements designed to enhance interoperability and strengthen security ties among regional partners,” the U.S. Navy said in a statement.
The exercise, involving almost 1,000 naval personnel from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the U.S. and the Philippines, takes place in the northern Luzon area facing Taiwan. The United Kingdom has sent observers to the drills. Just days before, on Sept. 28, four of the partners – Australia, Japan, the Philippines and the U.S. – together with New Zealand, conducted a maritime exercise within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, or EEZ, in the South China Sea.
The exercise, involving almost 1,000 naval personnel from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, the U.S. and the Philippines, takes place in the northern Luzon area facing Taiwan. The United Kingdom has sent observers to the drills. Just days before, on Sept. 28, four of the partners – Australia, Japan, the Philippines and the U.S. – together with New Zealand, conducted a maritime exercise within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, or EEZ, in the South China Sea.
Blinken warns ASEAN on China’s ‘dangerous’ actions in sea disputes
The United States is concerned about China’s “increasingly dangerous and unlawful actions” in disputed regional waterways, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Southeast Asian leaders on Friday while reiterating U.S. support for freedom of navigation and flight.
Offshore territorial disputes between an increasingly assertive China and its neighbors have raised fears of an armed clash and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, has been trying to negotiate a “code of conduct” with China to prevent that. But progress on the code has been slow while confrontations in disputed waters have been increasing between Chinese maritime authorities and vessels from the Philippines and Vietnam, in particular.
“We remain concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful actions in the South and East China Seas, which have injured people and harmed vessels from ASEAN nations, and contradict commitments to peaceful resolution of disputes,” Blinken told the opening of an ASEAN-US summit in Laos.
Offshore territorial disputes between an increasingly assertive China and its neighbors have raised fears of an armed clash and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, has been trying to negotiate a “code of conduct” with China to prevent that. But progress on the code has been slow while confrontations in disputed waters have been increasing between Chinese maritime authorities and vessels from the Philippines and Vietnam, in particular.
“We remain concerned about China’s increasingly dangerous and unlawful actions in the South and East China Seas, which have injured people and harmed vessels from ASEAN nations, and contradict commitments to peaceful resolution of disputes,” Blinken told the opening of an ASEAN-US summit in Laos.
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