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Showing posts with the label economy

'Do They Think This Is 1840?' Chinese Media Criticizes US For Demanding Trade Deficit Reduction

President Donald J. Trump and President Xi Jinping on July 8, 2017 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, via Wikimedia Commons) On May 4 the Trump administration demanded that the Chinese government implement measures to cut its $200 trade surplus with the United States, lower import tariffs and reduce advanced technology subsidies. A US delegation headed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin  arrived in Beijing on May 3 to hold  trade talks  with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He. Chinese media published a document allegedly submitted by the US delegation to the Chinese side during the negotiations. "At present, the United States-China trade relationship is significantly imbalanced," the paper states. "United States investment and the sale of services into China remain severely constrained. China's industrial policies now targeting U.S. technologies and intellectual property pose significant economic and security concerns to the United States. ...

Once Again, China Proves Neoliberals Wrong

A few days ago everyone talked about China 's stock market collapse. " Xi Jinping has run into the one thing in China he can't control ", wrote news website Quartz , implying that the all-powerful Communist Party finally had to acknowledge that it couldn't rein in the "free market". No sooner had the Chinese government stepped in to save the stock market than Western media dismissed Beijing's policies, predicting they would not work. " China markets plunge as government measures fail ", wrote Yahoo News . These are only two examples of what the South China Morning Post called "Western media's callous delight at China's stock market crash ". According to The Telegraph , China's stock market crash would cause a "more worrying financial crisis " than the one happening in Greece. But, as has often been the case over the past four decades, the West's neoliberal-minded analysts have failed to understand ...

Singapore and the Myth of Free Market Economics

Singapore skyline (by Merlion444 [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons ) Singapore is a success story. As founding father Lee Kuan Yew said in his  autobiography , Singapore moved from being a third world country in the 1960s, to being one of the richest countries on earth by the end of the 1990s. Singapore is a city-state which in the middle of the 1990s was half the size of Hong Kong, with a population of 3.04 million ( Kwong / Chau et al. 2001 , p. 1). A former British colony, Singapore's political situation after WWII was tumultuous. The city was granted independence from the British Empire in 1958. Singapore's leaders, however, did not want to found a separate state, but to become part of neighbouring Malaysia. In the 1959 elections, the People's Action Party (PAP), which still rules Singapore today, "promised clean, efficient politics and pledged to address issues in education, labor, housing, health, social security, economic growth through industrializati...