Gideon Rachman and FT correspondents in Moscow, Washington, Beijing, and Brussels discuss how Vladimir Putin will react to Russia’s growing protest movement, Xi Jingping’s visit to Washington and tensions ahead of the EU-China summit over the emissions trading scheme.
“Outside” being the WTO, in this case.
Dave Camp and Max Baucus, Congress’s two top dogs on trade, want the administration to try to make currency misalignment a WTO matter (originally Brazil’s idea). Good luck with that one. Since the WTO works by consensus, China can block this issue on its own. Regarding the renminbi, the consultancy fees for working out just how undervalued is undervalued would put international economists’ kids through college for decades to come.
So what’s going on here? Possibly the creation of a distraction in an attempt to forestall currency legislation on the Hill. Camp doesn’t like it, and although Baucus voted for it last year, he would probably be secretly happy to see it stalled indefinitely, not being a confrontationist firebrand. If Congress decides to pass a bill to fix this awkward example of judicial meddling in the near future, it could provide a vehicle on which China-bashers can attach some more radical legislation.
The conventional wisdom is that when the economy picks up and unemployment comes down, trade and currency disputes generally abate. On the other hand, there is an election coming up, and POTUS gave a pretty clear indication in the State of the Union that he thinks that warming up the old protectionist rhetoric from four years ago might play well in the Midwestern swing states. Don’t hold your breath for a currency deal coming out of Geneva – Capitol Hill is the real battleground for this one.
It might have gone largely unnoticed. But there was a sting in the opening remarks made by Jia Qinglin to African heads of state at their annual summit.
The sting was aimed in Europe’s direction. Mr Jia, the fourth-ranking member of China’s ruling communist party, made much of Africa’s rich history and culture and of China’s long and brotherly relationship with the continent in his speech at the brand new $200m-headquarters Beijing had gifted to the African Union. Africa was the cradle of mankind, he reminded the audience.
By Gideon Rachman
The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.” That statement from the Prison Notebooks of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci was a favourite of student Marxists when I was at university in the 1980s. Back then it struck me as portentous nonsense. But Gramsci’s observation does resonate now – in an age of ideological confusion.
One of the nice things about the Financial Times is that you have really interesting conversations in the corridors. Yesterday I got chatting to James Kynge, our former Beijing bureau chief, who now edits the newsletter, “China Confidential“. James said that he thinks that political atmosphere inside China feels more unstable than for many years. He cited many little pieces of evidence. But the one the appealed to me most was the story of the “Happy Girls” talent show.
At least one newspaper in China has finally come out in strong support of pro-democracy demonstrations and mass sit-ins. An opinion piece in the official China Daily objected to what it called a “blackout imposed by major news media” of the growing protest movement.
The country being so criticised is not, of course, China.
Rather, it is the US, the latest leg of the global revolution, where news of the Occupy Wall Street movement has allegedly been suppressed.
By Gideon Rachman
The defining geopolitical drama of the next century will be the battle for power and influence between China and America. That emerging struggle is already posing awkward choices for Asian countries, caught between the two global giants.
It is often interesting to return a country you once knew well. In the mid 1990s I used to visit Singapore regularly as The Economist‘s correspondent for South-East Asia. I even managed inadvertently to provoke a row between the magazine and the city state that led to The Economist briefly having its circulation restricted.
More than fifteen years later, a lot hasn’t changed in Singapore. The People’s Action Party are still in power, as they have been since independence. Eating and shopping are still the country’s most popular pastimes. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father is still alive, and still dispensing pearls of wisdom that are quoted reverentially in the Straits Times. The place is still spotless and prosperous. The big regional story is still the rise of China.
I thought that spending a week in Singapore might provide some respite from the euro-crisis which, as Paul Krugman wrote the other day, is now simultaneously boring and terrifying. But there is no getting away from it. Even the staid Straits Times, the local paper here, led on the euro yesterday. And at a dinner I went to last night – mixing Asians and Europeans, financiers and policymakers – the talk was mainly of Greece, Germany and the single currency.
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