Chinese Vice Premier and top economic advisor to President Xi Jinping, Liu He, at the World Economic Forum in 2018. Credit: Ciaran McCrickard/World Economic Forum via Flickr
In the month since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Beijing’s foreign policy messages have been highly conflicted, as it attempts to maintain high-level support for Moscow while distancing China from the humanitarian costs and economic collateral damage of the conflict. Those mixed messages reflect not only the difficulty of reacting to Russian military setbacks on the ground, but a real split within China’s governing system: namely, between Political China and Technocratic China.
Political China is primarily concerned with how China can use its relationship with Russia to advance its interests in a longer-term competition with the United States and U.S.-led alliances. Political China also emphasizes the importance of moving toward a multipolar world order and resists engagement with Western institutions. In this view, self-sufficiency is more important than economic and political engagement, while interdependence is defined as making the rest of the world more dependent upon Chi
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When China announced it was ending quarantine requirements for incoming travelers, Chinese people collectively picked up their phones to search popular travel apps like Ctrip and Qunar. Owned by travel giant Trip.com, these apps helped Chinese travelers explore the world pre-pandemic and facilitated the human-to-human interactions that drove China's rise. But many of today's travelers seem to be sticking closer to home, and their hesitation to get back to the jetsetting habits of the past 20 years has far-reaching implications — especially for Trip.com.
The professor talks about China's real estate bubble; if China can develop a modern financial system without rule of law; and why it's not China that is reshaping the global order, but the world's response...