Good evening. In just two decades, China has built a $2 trillion e-commerce market that accounts for nearly 50 percent of global online retail sales. Our cover story this week looks at some of the surprising reasons why e-commerce took off so successfully in China, including how digital platforms like Alibaba created trust and a sense of rule of law in Chinese commerce. Elsewhere we have a timeline of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, which received a harsh sentence earlier this week; an interview with the historian Odd Arne Westad about the decade that shaped China’s modern destiny; a reported piece on the robotic dog that was trained by American and Chinese researchers; and an op-ed about how Biden’s economic security blueprint could hand Trump a loaded gun. If you’re not already a paid subscriber to The Wire, please sign up here.
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Click, Trust, Prosper
How did China’s e-commerce industry boom so quickly and even leapfrog Western companies in the same space? In her new book, From Click to Boom, Lizhi Liu tells the story of eBay vs. Taobao in the early 2000s, and how the combination of the platform’s clever innovations with Beijing’s strategic non-action allowed China’s commerce to flow in ways it never had before.
The Big Picture: Hong Kong’s Democracy Movement Receives Its Sentence
The city’s largest ever national security trial has ended with years-long jail terms handed to dozens of activists. A Wire China timeline shows how Hong Kong reached this point. Eliot Chen and Rachel Cheung report.
A Q&A with Odd Arne Westad
Odd Arne Westad is a historian of modern international history who is currently the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University. His latest book, The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform, written with Chen Jian, recounts the dramatic political struggles that took place in China from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, the outcome of which — the book argues — fundamentally shaped the country’s development until the present day. In this interview with Andrew Peaple, he discusses the period that saw the death of Mao Zedong and the rise of Deng Xiaoping, and the decisions that set China’s economic and political path for years to come.
Odd Arne Westad
Illustration by Kate Copeland
The Robotics Risk Tightrope
The Biden administration has tried to prevent critical technologies from reaching China. But, as Noah Berman reports, researchers at American universities still often collaborate with Chinese peers in those same areas.
Biden’s Economic Security Blueprint Hands Trump a Loaded Gun
Having failed to outline an economic security strategy with clear boundaries, the Biden administration is handing Trump an open-ended framework that is primed for further, unrestrained expansion, argue Viking Bohman and Matt Ferchen in this week’s op-ed.
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