PETALING JAYA: China continues to grab world headlines and dominate international news for many reasons. The world’s second largest economy is now expected to be the biggest in only a few years, with many far-reaching implications to follow.
World-renowned author and academic Dr Martin Jacques will be presenting a fresh look at the new China in a talk at Menara Star in Petaling Jaya at 2pm on Thursday.
PETALING JAYA: China continues to grab world headlines and dominate international news for many reasons.
The world’s second-largest economy is now expected to be the biggest in only a few years, with many far-reaching implications to follow.
World-renowned author and academic Dr Martin Jacques will be presenting a fresh look at the new China in a public talk at Menara Star in Petaling Jaya on Thursday, Sept 27 at 2pm.
Global business leaders are voicing increasing concern over heightened political tensions between China and Japan, sparked by a maritime dispute in the East China Sea. They fear an escalation may have a spill-over effect on their regional operations and damage trade ties between the world’s second and third-largest economies.
Company executives, diplomats and analysts told CNBC that supply chains across China and Japan and regional trade flows are at risk if the territorial dispute between the north Asian neighbors – believed to be the worst in decades – deepens.
“This could really be something that causes a huge economic dislocation,” Mike Splinter, chief executive officer at Applied Materials told CNBC. “If import barriers go up, it could affect our business.”
On 18th September 2012, Martin Jacques gave a talk at the University of Melbourne as part of a public lecture series organised by Asialink, questioning ‘Australia’s Role in the World’. This highly popular YouTube video of his lecture has over 200,000 views.
Australia is leading the West into a new era of Chinese ascendancy, according to author and China-expert Martin Jacques.
‘You are incredibly privileged because you are the pioneer Western country as we move into a completely new historical era in which China is dominant,’ he said.
As part of his only public appearance in Melbourne, Jacques introduced an audience of over 300 to the updated version of his best-selling book ‘When China Rules the World’ and acknowledged Australia’s place on the ‘cutting edge’ of relations with China.
He also warned that it is ‘no longer a Western economy’.
Driving from the airport into the Dongcheng district of central Beijing last Saturday, I noticed the signs and signifiers of China’s economic heft were all present and accounted for—the glass and concrete towers of the financial institutions that act as the world’s bankers, the logos of the mining conglomerates that bring in the resources to fire the country’s (still) prodigious growth, the porticos of the luxury hotels where some of the planet’s biggest deals are negotiated and sealed. There were also, of course, the brutalist facades of the Chinese parastatals, which, like the ubiquitous black Audis of the party apparatchiks, signified that you were no longer in Kansas, Dorothy.
In 1991, Chinese Premier Li Peng, who was on a visit to India, handed over Rs 500 to an Intelligence Bureau official who had been assigned as the liaison officer with the Chinese delegation. Although it is customary for visiting delegations to give gifts of mementos, the cash ‘gift’ was considered a breach of protocol, and according to media accounts, was promptly returned to the Chinese embassy.
It appears that Chinese visitors have, at the very least, been sensitised to the impact of inflation in India in recent years. For yesterday, visiting Chinese Defence Minister Liang Guanglie committed another such breach of protocol, when he handed over a cash ‘gift’ to two IAF officers – but this time the ‘gift’ was for a total of Rs 1 lakh.