Chinese Premier Li Qiang delivers a speech during the opening plenary session of the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference on March 30, 2023, held in Boao, Hainan. Credit: Kyodo via AP Images
Back on the ground in China after zero-Covid, foreign business leaders face a challenge in their China strategy: Figuring out how much things have really changed — and what China’s leaders really want.
Chinese leaders have been clear in their words. In December Xi Jinping spoke of "the need to make sure that the first-rate foreign investment already in the country stays in the country, as well as to attract more high-quality foreign investment." At Davos in January, Liu He reiterated "foreign investments are welcome in China, and the door to China will only open up further." At the Boao Forum in March, new premier Li Qiang promised that “no matter how the international situation changes, China will unswervingly keep expanding our opening up”.
But the leadership’s actions threaten to speak louder than these words. Recent moves, all focused on professed Chinese security concerns rather than economic opportunity, send at best mixed messages. At worst they presage a much ha
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On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
