Working successfully with Chinese businesses will require changes that start in our schools, says visiting China specialist Dr Martin Jacques.
He is in New Zealand to deliver the keynote address at the new New Zealand Forum on October 16, presented by Massey University and Westpac.
“If you think China is going to be your major trading partner, you will need to have a good number of New Zealanders who can speak Mandarin,” Dr Jacques says.“It’s really important. While there are lots of educated young Chinese who can speak English in major cities, being able to speak a Chinese dialect is a sign of respect, and can give you valuable intel on what’s going on.”
Fonterra’s recent botulism scare in China brought home just how important our second-largest trade partner is to the New Zealand economy – and its increasing influence on the global economy.
Read more >
The Fonterra botulism scare will become a small blemish on New Zealand’s future relationship with China, according to the British author of a bestseller on the eastern superpower.
New Zealand will continue to be significant beneficiary of China’s growth said Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World.
“By a stroke of great geographical fortune [New Zealand] is in a position to develop a strong economic relationship with the Asian mainland. The effect of it will be economic, but in the long run will be intellectual, cultural, in some ways political,” said Jacques, who is the keynote speaker at a Massey University forum on New Zealand’s place in China’s historic growth.
The botulism scare has made a significant dent in New Zealand’s exports to China, but the damage will be short term and should not be overestimated, Jacques said.
Read more >
Air-Sea Battle and the pivot seem an overreaction to China’s rise, given the number of challenges Beijing already faces.
Westerners are nothing if not breathless about China. Books describing its rise often have titles like When China Rules the World, Contest for Supremacy, Eclipse(of the U.S. by China), and so on. China is such a preoccupation that the U.S. has now “pivoted” to Asia. And the U.S. Department of Defense, eager to cash-in on the China hype in an era of sequestration and domestic exhaustion with the “Global War on Terror,” tells us now that the U.S. must shift to anAir-Sea Battle concept (ASB).
In a not-so-amazing coincidence, ASB is chock of full of the sorts of costly, high-profile, air and maritime mega-platforms the military-industrial complex adores. China’s single, barely functional aircraft carrier—the second one is not due for awhile—is a god-send to hawks and neo-cons everywhere. Even as the U.S. scales back in the Middle East, defense can seemingly never be cut. Indeed, the terrible irony of the pivot to Asia from the Middle East is that ASB platforms like satellites, drones, up-armored aircraft carriers, stealth jets and littoral ships will cost so much that staying focused on the Middle East may well be less expensive. (For a running debate on ASB, start here.)
Read more >
In his well-known book, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, Martin Jacques claims China’s impact on the world will be profound and, in the long term, China will seek “to transform that system while at the same time, in effect, sponsoring a new China-centric international system which will exist alongside the present system and probably slowly begin to usurp it”.
Jacques’ bullish statement raises the expectation that China may come to dominate the world in the not-too-distant future. However, David Shambaugh, a leading expert in the field of contemporary China studies in the United States, pours cold water on such an upbeat sentiment.
In his newly released book, China Goes Global: the Partial Power, Shambaugh systematically examines China’s global impact in economic, political, military and cultural fields.
Read more >
Sinologist’s views unleash debate about the country’s place in the world and how far it will finally advance
Is China emerging as a potential global superpower or just a partial one? The leading American Sinologist David Shambaugh makes the case in his new book, China Goes Global: The Partial Power, that despite being the world’s second-largest economy, the country has along way to go before it begins to shape the world in its own image.
Even in the economic sphere, where China arguably had its most significant influence —accounting for 40 percent of global growth over the past two decades as well as being the largest exporter and holder of foreign exchange reserves — its global reach is overstated, according to Shambaugh.
The American academic argues that while the image is of Chinese companies taking over businesses throughout Europe and the United States, China has only the fifth largest overseas direct investment in the world, behind even the Netherlands and a fifth of the size of that of the United States.
Read more >
Leading Sinologist argues that China is only a partial superpower but many acknowledge that it has had the greatest impact on the continent
China has perhaps had more impact on Africa in the past decade than any other region in the world.
Trade alone has risen from $18.54 billion in 2003 to more than $200 billion today alongside the stock of overseas direct investment increasing eightfold from just $1.6 billion in 2005 to $13.04 billion at the end of 2010, according to the China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
But does this major economic interaction in Africa or elsewhere give China real influence and also make it a global role model?
Read more >
China may have the planet’s second largest economy. But the Chinese are not going to rule the world
There is a lot of money to be made writing books warning that we are all about to succumb to China’s thrall. The best seller in this genre is Martin Jacques’ “When China Rules the World.”
But China is nowhere near to ruling the world, has shown no signs of wanting to rule the world, and would not know what to do with the world if it did rule it (which it never will.) It is a shame that for pointing this out in his new book China Goes Global, David Shambaugh will likely earn only a fraction of Jacques’ royalties.
Read more >
No schedule was set for territorial dispute talks between Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said it was unclear when such a widely anticipated meeting would take place. Last week tension ran high as China entered the airspace and naval zone of disputed islands. The Voice of Russia asked to comment this dispute to Martin Jaques, author of the best-seller “When China Rules the World” and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The Senkaku Islands have been controlled by Japan since 1895, aside from a 1945 to 1972 period of administration by the United States. The People’s Republic of China and Taiwan disputed the US handover of authority back to Japan in 1971. And both countries have defended its claims to the territory since then.
Japan argues that it found the Islands to be the land belonging to no one back in 19th century.
Read more >
LONDON — I like being in this city because I am able to read articles with different points of view on an issue that matters: China as a rising power in Asia.
China experts who have written books recently are David Shambaugh, “China Goes Global: the Partial Power,” Edward N. Luttwak, The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, and Timothy Beardson’sStumbling Giant: the Threats to China’s Future.
These books can be said to be a reaction to Martin Jacques, the author of the international bestseller, “When China Rules the World.” Since I am in London, I asked Martin Jacques what he thought of the article that reviewed the three books in Prospect Magazine. I ask him to comment specifically on a question posed by the author, Jonathan Mirsky.
“What should we do about a regime that prides itself on a mythical past on the continuing assumption that all other countries are its cultural inferiors?”
Read more >
It’s the second day of the annual US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington. The meetings are high-level: Secretaries of State and Treasury on the U.S. side, State Councilor and Vice Premier for the Chinese. Economic issues — from trade barriers and investment opportunities, to alleged currency manipulation and cyber-espionage — are on the agenda between the two economic superpowers.
Vice President Joe Biden had this to say at the opening of the talks on Wednesday:
“One of the most important things that we need to continue to establish and deepen between our peoples and between our governments is trust. We don’t have to agree on everything, but we have to trust.”
Read more >
