Beijing’s export drive is creating global imbalances it refuses to address. For decades, China’s economic rise has been both a source of global growth and a cause of mounting friction. Its transformation into the world’s factory has undeniably helped lower the cost of manufactured goods while integrating supply chains and lifting millions out of poverty. But the same model has produced increasingly large trade surpluses, industrial overcapacity and a dependence on exports tha

From Mao’s informants to Xi Jinping’s digital panopticon, China’s Communist Party has transformed surveillance into its most potent instrument of political survival. “We know how much the internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Think how much it will change China. There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet. Well, good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall.” So spoke President Bill Clinton back in 2

Xi Jinping’s invocation of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ revives the long shadow of the Peloponnesian War and asks whether America and China are repeating history’s oldest great-power mistakes. AI generated image During last week’s summit in Beijing with U.S. President Donald Trump, Xi Jinping once again summoned the ghosts of ancient Greece. The Chinese leader warned that Beijing and Washington must avoid falling into the ‘Thucydides Trap,’ the now-famous formulation popularised by

Trump’s Beijing summit revealed less a thaw in Sino-American rivalry than a quiet acknowledgement that the balance of power is shifting eastward. When Donald Trump recently left Beijing calling his summit with Xi Jinping “fantastic,” the pageantry suggested a diplomatic breakthrough. Yet, the summit produced few major agreements, while exposing how sharply the balance between the world’s two largest powers has changed. For decades America approached China as the stronger powe

China’s environmental awakening has brought cleaner skies and greener industries, but the costs of decades of ecological devastation remain immense. Mao Zedong was not a farmer. Though born into a peasant family, he had little farming experience. It was political struggle that interested him. This struggle would come to define his whole life; struggle against everything he thought was holding China back from becoming the Marxist utopia it was destined to be. In 1917, as a you