Identifying the Linkages Between Major Mining Commodity Prices and China’s Economic Growth—Implications for Latin America

By Yongzhen Yu on April 28, 2011

Major mining commodity prices are inherently volatile and cyclical. High levels of investment in China have been a key driver in the strong world demand for minerals and metals over the past decade. The urbanization and industrialization of China has been an important factor behind the increase in domestic demand and high investment growth, while its export sector is also an important source of growth and plays a critical role as a catalyst. Activity in infrastructure, construction, real estate, and automobile manufacturing all contribute to the strong demand for minerals. Over the next five years, the Chinese demand is expected to remain strong, supported by investment and gradually rising consumption rates. However, in the second part of this decade economic growth in China could slow down. For Latin American countries, export receipts should remain strong over the next five years and beyond, given the continued strong demand from China.

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Topics: 
Economy
Keywords: 
Economic Growth
Latin America
Mining
Organization: 
International Monetary Fund (IMF)

Recharging Chinese Art

By Jonathan D. Spence on April 27, 2011

Retirement was not usually a concept of pressing concern to Chinese emperors. Succession and survival were normally quite enough to keep them occupied, and death—when it came—was often unexpected and frequently brutal. But Emperor Qianlong, who reigned from 1736 to 1795 CE, was unusual in his willingness to plan for his own future on a more than basic scale. The factors affecting his thinking about retirement seem to have been fourfold.

China’s Green Revolution

Energy, Environment and the 12th Five-Year Plan

By Isabel Hilton, Olivia Boyd, Tan Copsey, Hu Angang, Liang Jiaochen, Liu Jianqiang, Shin Wei Ng, Linden Ellis, Thomas Ho, Sam Geall on April 27, 2011

In March, China officially adopted its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, a blueprint for the country’s development from 2011 to 2015. Its green targets will shape China’s action on the environment over the next five years. To mark the occasion, chinadialogue has put together a collection of articles and exclusive comment for English language readers.

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Topics: 
Economy
Environment
Keywords: 
Sustainability
Clean Energy
Renewable Energy
Environmental Policy
Organization: 
chinadialogue

China Misunderstood: Did We Contribute to Ai Weiwei’s Arrest?

By Ian Johnson on April 22, 2011

Like many artists, Ai Weiwei enjoys provoking. It isn’t just his finger-to-the-Chinese-government images that he has become known for but also how he does it: his obsessive-compulsive documentation of himself in photos, blogs, tweets, and rants into a digital recorder. In a country obsessed with walls, he is a living challenge to the political system.

China’s Second Internet Bubble?

By Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more on April 22, 2011

Interest in Chinese Internet companies has reached a fever pitch. Fueled by the fact that roughly fifty percent of the companies that went public on NASDAQ last year were Chinese in origin, at least seventeen more high-profile companies are planning foreign IPOs this year. Yet given the fact these businesses still face massive market and political risk, their planned valuations are unsettling many investors and rekindling memories of the late 1990s boom.

Chinese Farmers’ Land Rights at the Crossroads—Findings from 2010 Nationwide Survey

By Zhu Keliang and Jeffrey Riedinger on April 18, 2011

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He Jianan
Topics: 
Law
Rural Life
Keywords: 
Land Rights
Surveys
Farming
Organization: 
Landesa

The First American Official to Visit China since 1949

By Winston Lord on April 16, 2011

Certainly, the single most dramatic event that I've been involved in had to do with the opening to China in the early 1970s. In my entire career the question of relations with China has been the most important, including not only the work I did in the 1970s but also as Ambassador to China and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs. So China has been the single most important aspect of my career as it has evolved.

Tide Players

By Jianying Zha on April 15, 2011

In Tide Players, acclaimed New Yorker contributor and author Jianying Zha depicts a new generation of movers and shakers who are transforming modern China. Through half a dozen sharply etched and nuanced profiles, Tide Players captures both the concrete detail and the epic dimension of life in the world’s fastest growing economy. Zha’s vivid cast of characters includes an unlikely couple who teamed up to become the country’s leading real-estate moguls; a gifted chameleon who transformed himself from Mao’s favorite “barefoot doctor” during the Cultural Revolution to a publishing maverick; and a tycoon of home-electronic chain stores who insisted on avenging his mother, who had been executed as “a counter-revolutionary criminal.” Alongside these entrepreneurs, Zha also brings us the intellectuals: a cantankerous professor at China’s top university; a former cultural minister turned prolific writer; and Zha’s own brother, a dissident who served a nine-year prison term for helping to found the China Democracy Party. Deeply engaging, lucid, and poignant, Zha’s insightful “insider-outsider” portraits offer a picture of a China that few Western readers have seen before. —The New Press

Book Review: 

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Time Magazine (May 23, 2011)
David Pilling, Financial Times (June 10, 2011)
Jonathan Mirsky, The New York Review of Books (October 27, 2011)

On the Sacred Mountain

By Pico Iyer on April 7, 2011

A powerful, unexpected scene suddenly surfaces near the beginning of Colin Thubron’s characteristically beautiful, though uncharacteristically haunted, new book of travel. As he walks through the mountains of Nepal, toward the holy peak of Mount Kailas in Tibet, he abruptly realizes that he’s only 140 miles from Naini Tal, the Indian hill station whose name rang across his home as a boy, in his father’s reminiscences.

The China New Energy Vehicles Program: Challenges and Opportunities

on April 1, 2011

In June 2010, the World Bank organized a team of international experts in urban transport, electric vehicle technologies, and policy and environment to carry out a survey study of China’s New Energy Vehicle (NEV) Program. The preliminary findings of the study indicate that the scale of China’s program leaves the country well poised to benefit from vehicle electrification. Vehicle electrification is expected to be strategically important to China’s future in the following four areas: global climate change; energy security; urban air quality; and China’s auto industry growth.

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Topics: 
Energy
Environment
Keywords: 
Electric Vehicles
Environmental Protection
Organization: 
World Bank