Category: Print

Carmen N. Pedrosa

With President Rody Duterte at its helm, the Philippines is poised to restructure relations with other countries. He said it best in his own words.

“We will be friends with every country provided it is in the Philippine interest.”

His visit to China this week is a dramatic application of that policy. So far, the visit has been going well with Filipinos and the Chinese reviving an ancient friendship between their peoples.

This was not the case with the previous administration. It had a bias towards the United States.

With China and the US competing for first place as the world power the Philippines was caught in between. This has been difficult because the US asserted itself as its former colonizer. We did what we were asked to. For a long while it was futile to think that we could get over the colonial rot of being America’s patsy in the region. But things change.

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Andrew Moody

The leaders of the leading emerging nations need to demonstrate the BRICS organization still matters when it meets for its eight summit in Goa on Oct 15, experts say.

The two-day meeting takes place against the backdrop of uncertainty surrounding some of the economies within the bloc.

High on the agenda will be institutional reform so the organization’s members, consisting of Brazil, India, Russia and South Africa as well as China, can work more effectively together to deliver results.

The summit, which Chinese President Xi Jinping will attend, and which will have a lotus flower in the color of each of its members as its emblem, will have a five-pronged approach to build a more coherent organization, which will include integration, innovation and exploring synergies among existing mechanisms.

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Andrew Moody

Influential author believes neoliberalism is in ‘death throes’ as sluggish growth continues after financial crisis

Martin Jacques believes the G20 summit in Hangzhou is taking place at a crucial time for the global economy.

The British author and academic insists the Western neoliberal orthodoxy that has dominated global economic thinking since the late 1970s is now in its death throes.

This, he argues, is because of its failure to come up with solutions to sluggish global growth eight years after the global financial crisis.

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英国学者马丁·雅克(Martin Jacques)是为数不多的对中国有深刻了解的西方人之一。他的《当中国统治世界：中国的崛起和西方世界的衰落》一书，成为西方社会了解中国的典范读本。

在二十国集团(G20)杭州峰会前夕，《第一财经日报》记者在马丁·雅克位于伦敦的充满东方风韵的家中对他进行了专访。

马丁·雅克认为，在杭州举行的G20肯定会打上中国烙印，希望能够为全球经济开出良方。同时，他觉得要改变全球经济低迷的现状，上世纪70年代开始的所谓“新自由主义”经济已经走到了头，政治上的极端倾向越来越强大，是由贫富差异拉大造成的。

对于英国退欧后与中国的关系，马丁·雅克强调，与中国必须建立良好关系，这不是意愿，这是一个现实，相信建立不久的英国新政府会认清这个事实。

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Dr Sudhanshu Tripathi

China must be encouraged towards discussions by evolving a fresh global initiative so as to stall the imminent showdown in South China Sea.

With the US piling up its warships with fighter planes and stationed troops in South China Sea where China has hectically been active since long past, the likely scenario propels bad omen with all chances of a major regional war between the two which may include regional navies like Japan, Australia and South Korea. Indeed, the mounting tensions in South China Sea are due to China’s own creation which cropped up there few years back in 2011 because Beijing advanced its sovereign claim over entire South China Seaas its maritime territory citing some historical evidences. But that claim was rejected by a five member panel from the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands on July 12, 2016, while deciding on Philippines’ complaint lodged in 2013 for arbitration on grounds of alleged Chinese infringement into Manila’s Exclusive Economic Zone, under clauses of violation of the United Nations Treaty governing “Laws of the Sea” to which China is also a signatory. Unfortunately, this legal defeat has made Beijing more aggressive and irresponsible in its behaviour as it has resumed threatening all the littoral states of Asia-Pacific including India, thereby endangering the already tense scenario in this region.

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Andrew Moody

Historic G20 Summit in Hangzhou is seen as the diplomatic equivalent of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Shanghai Expo in 2010

World leaders who are set to descend on the Hangzhou International Exhibition Center will be taking part in what is being seen as a historic event for China.

The world’s second-largest economy is hosting the G20 Summit for the first time on Sept 4 and 5 and has the opportunity to shape the agenda in what is a difficult time for the global economy amid renewed fears about sluggish growth.

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Donald Winchester

At the turn of the millennium, many proclaimed that this would be the Chinese Century. Do current world events support that prediction? It’s a question that defies an easy answer.

Nineteen eighty-nine was, in Western eyes, a year of great hope. The Berlin Wall fell, the power of the Soviet Union was rapidly disintegrating, and free democratic elections were held in Brazil and Chile for the first time in years.

Amidst all this, the Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing—where thousands of young Chinese demonstrated against their communist government under the inanimate gaze of a hastily sculpted “Goddess of Democracy”—seemed to be part of the same movement. The protest was forcibly and brutally suppressed; but to many it seemed clear that this was the beginning of the spread of Western democratic values to China too.

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