CHINA ~Now & Future

"In many ways, the current thaw serves Taipei's interests, but it also allows Beijing to assert increasing influence over Taiwan. As a consensus emerges in Taiwan on establishing closer relations with China, the thaw is calling into question the United States' deeply ambiguous policy, which is supposed to serve both Taiwan's interests (by allowing it to retain its autonomy) and the United States' own (by guarding against an expansionist China). Washington now faces a stark choice: continue pursuing a militarized realist approach -- using Taiwan to balance the power of a rising China -- or follow an alternative liberal logic that seeks to promote long-term peace through closer economic, social, and political ties between Taiwan and China."

Authors: JC de Swaan, Lecturer on Asian Capital Markets, Princeton UniversityRoya Wolverson, Staff Writer, CFR.org

"It's a very large positive in the sense that the next decade of global growth is probably going to be shaped by how well the China consumer develops or doesn't, and obviously this is a step to help that," said Mike O'Rourke, chief market strategist at BTIG LLC in New York.

"We are not limited to investments in China," Tung said

Governments around the world ran up record debts during the $5 trillion effort to pull the economy out of its deepest slump since the Great Depression and now face a tough balancing act: how to reduce debt without choking off growth.

"China wants to avoid a conflict on the Korean peninsula, and is concerned that taking South Korea's side may provoke North Korea into further escalations and even lead to war, said Shen Dingli, vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Shanghai's Fudan University. "North Korea is dying, and we can make things worse," Shen said. "We have assumed North Korea is not a rational actor." "

I think China is playing this brilliantly.

"Wang's CV echoes the development China's mainstream media: from life as a propagandist to a role as a watchdog - albeit one on a sturdy chain. He started his career as an official in western Gansu province in the mid-80s - "a very easy shortcut to wealth and status", he observed, in an interview conducted before the vaccines controversy."

"It will grow as trade relations deepen and Chinese technology and brand names have global impact. But this will be gradual. After a first flush of cash-driven enthusiasm, Chinese firms are proceeding with greater caution, less likely to throw money at countries and industries with which they have scant experience. They are also meeting increasing obstacles in some countries."

China's globalization will be gradual.

"The question of whether to "call out" China in the document was one of the most interesting and engaging of the entire process. Doing so would have been uncontroversial; after all, several senior OSD documents, including the last Quadrennial Defense Review, had done so, and there were many voices on Capitol Hill calling for the Navy in particular to be more mindful of the "Chinese threat." That said, the combined maritime leadership decided not to do so, largely on the basis of two ideas. The first was the centrality of the global system to the strategy and the critical cooperative relationships with like-minded nations in fostering and sustaining that system. Simply put, China has a huge stake in having the global system function smoothly. Crafting a strategy that invited them to maintain the system, rather than needlessly antagonizing them, seemed appropriate."

The Navy - and the Pentagon - are torn about whether they should name China as the most likely future adversary.

"The fact that a legally binding deal has not been achieved is a secondary issue -what matters is the settled conviction of the people that run the countries that count. (Don't forget that Kyoto was legally binding and yet many countries failed to meet their obligations.) Powerful national feeling in developing countries - especially China - seems to have been the main obstacle to a deal, but that is quite understandable; the west has to accept it and work with it."

Contrarian views from The Prospect on China and Copenhagen

The problem is that few of these companies - if any - know what to do to arrest the tattering of their image in their most promising markets.

Agricultural Bank's IPO could be the world's largest ever, exceeding Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd.'s $22 billion stock offering in 2006 or Visa Inc.'s $19.7 billion ...

For years companies and governments have been holding back regulations that could impede the free flow of information across the Internet. We are witnessing a key piece of this infrastructure changing, and it will be up to every CIO with an operation in China--or any other country that imposes hurdles--to figure out just how far those changes will go, how they will impact their corporate data and how great the risk will become to competitive intelligence, commerce and communication across a global enterprise.