Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Despite the growing global skepticism of Western-style democracy, citizens across Asia decisively reject authoritarian alternatives such as strong-man rule or military rule.
China’s just-announced nearly $600 billion stimulus package is almost certainly overkill for China’s needs—China’s domestic demand expansion this year is too strong to warrant this much money spent any time soon. But the stimulus announcement is just in time to give a needed lesson to the U.S. government about what an effective stimulus package might look like.
The incoming Obama administration faces a variety of challenges and opportunities in China and Asia more broadly. Many in Asia have assessed Barack Obama's presidential victory as a mandate for a more thoughtful, engaging American foreign policy.
Asia once was regarded as the vanguard of a global wave of democratization that, over the past three decades, has swept through southern Europe, Latin America, and Africa as well. In recent years, however, Asia has witnessed a democracy backlash.
This chapter examines how world public opinion influences the United States' ability to exercise influence abroad militarily, economically, and politically. It concludes by discussing the difference between opposition to American foreign policy, on the one hand, and anti-Americanism, on the other hand, and exploring that difference's policy implications.
The success of "state capitalism" – a capitalist economy run with a high degree of state control – has made it a model for states across the developing world. Western powers may now be wondering whether their brand of capitalism will triumph after all.
China's economy will remain strong despite the current global financial crisis, but its leaders should not assume that the crisis is a failure of capitalism, concluded Albert Keidel in a speech before the U.S.-China Business Council last week. Both the United States and China can learn from the crisis to improve their political and economic systems.
In this phase of the financial crisis, struggling countries are looking to rising powers for help, rather than turning to the conditional aid traditionally offered by the IMF. This trend highlights the shifting global financial order and indicates that emerging powers will undoubtedly play a larger role as the international community attempts to define a new global financial system.
In a Chinese healthcare system where the incomes of hospitals and doctors are often dependent on pharmaceutical sales, the access and affordability of medicine is problematic. Reform is needed, but the nature of that reform is intensely debated.
The United States is witnessing, at least temporarily, the collapse of effective liquidity for the complex financial instruments that have long been used to conduct transactions. But the real crisis is a Keynesian downward spiral, whereby declining consumption and declining investment reinforce each other.