Talk for the SKOLKOVO Business School

11.45am – 1.30pm

Private event

Shanghai

Lecture: ‘Where Will China Be In 2030?’

10am

China Institute, University of Malaya

Kuala Lumpur

‘China and the world in the 21st century’, hosted by JUST and the Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations (IDFR)

10am

Public lecture

The Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations (IDFR) auditorium, Kuala Lumpur

Lecture: ‘China’s Rise and its Global Implications’

Fudan University

Shanghai

Talk at The Symposium on China Studies 2016, hosted by Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Theme: One Belt, One Road

Beijing

The Party and the World Dialogue: ‘Global Economic Governance and Innovation’, hosted by the International Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Chongqing

Following its publication in The Observer, this article has stimulated a great deal of interest and debate in the UK and the US. It received almost 500,000 unique visitor views and trended on Twitter. 

In the late 1970s Martin Jacques was one of the first to herald the emerging dominance of neoliberalism in the west. Here he argues that this doctrine is now faltering. But what happens next?

The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade, with no end in sight.

After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic. But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.

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Kerry Brown and Rebecca Hope

The London-based Telegraph newspaper carried a story in June 2016 by a British student in Africa, who painted her life there as one of trauma and insecurity. Initially capturing the attention of readers, it was soon withdrawn due to an alarming realisation: it turned out to be a grossly inaccurate misrepresentation of present-day Zambia. Even had there been any degree of truth to this account, the fundamental problems with presentation and underlying value statements rendered the story little more than an embellished fable. It was, put simply, deeply patronising, treating Africa like some backdrop in a concocted drama to satisfy a visiting fantasist.

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