Jeff South

on March 21, 2014

Jeff South is a Fulbright scholar teaching journalism at Northeast Normal University in Changchun. His courses focus on data journalism, data visualization, and social and mobile media. South is on leave from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he is an Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Robertson School of Media and Culture. Before joining the VCU faculty in 1997, South worked for about twenty years as a reporter and editor on newspapers in Dallas and Austin, Texas; Phoenix, Arizona; and Norfolk, Virginia. He also served two years with the U.S. Peace Corps as a teacher in Morocco and spent 2007 as a Knight International Journalism Fellow in Ukraine. South writes for such publications as Global Voices Online and Quill, the magazine of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Isaac Stone Fish

on March 20, 2014

Isaac Stone Fish is the founder and CEO of Strategy Risks. Founded in 2021, Strategy Risks helps clients manage geopolitical risks, with a focus on China. Stone Fish is the author of America Second: How America’s Elites are Making China Stronger (Knopf), a book about American political and business leadership’s deep ties to China, and how this impacts the United States.

Stone Fish also serves as a contributor to CBSN, an adjunct at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs, a Visiting Fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a columnist on China risk at Barron’s. He is a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Truman National Security Project Fellow, and a Senior Advisor to the Korea Society. He previously served as a Senior Fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on United States-China Relations, and the German Marshall Fund, and as the Asia Editor at Foreign Policy Magazine.

A fluent Mandarin speaker and formerly a Beijing correspondent for Newsweek, Stone Fish spent seven years living in China, and has visited every province, municipality, and special administrative region. He is an experienced speaker on United States-China business, economics, and politics, and his views on international affairs are widely quoted on CBS, CNN, NPR, Bloomberg, The Guardian, The New York Times, and other major news media. He lives in New York City.

Paddling to Peking

By Roderick MacFarquhar on March 20, 2014

For Richard Nixon’s foreign policy, 1971 was the best of years and the worst of years. He revealed his opening to China, but he connived at genocide in East Pakistan. Fortunately for him, the world marveled at the one, but was largely ignorant of the other.

Unbalanced

By Stephen Roach on March 19, 2014

The Chinese and U.S. economies have been locked in an uncomfortable embrace since the late 1970s. Although the relationship initially arose out of mutual benefits, in recent years it has taken on the trappings of an unstable codependence, with the two largest economies in the world losing their sense of self, increasing the risk of their turning on one another in a destructive fashion.

In Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China Stephen Roach lays bare the pitfalls of the current China-U.S. economic relationship. He highlights the conflicts at the center of current tensions, including disputes over trade policies and intellectual property rights, sharp contrasts in leadership styles, the role of the Internet, the recent dispute over cyberhacking, and more.

A firsthand witness to the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Roach likely knows more about the U.S.-China economic relationship than any other Westerner. Here he discusses:

  • Why America saving too little and China saving too much creates mounting problems for both
  • How China is planning to re-boot its economic growth model by moving from an external export-led model to one of internal consumerism with a new focus on service industries
  • How America shows a disturbing lack of strategy, preferring a short-term reactive approach over a more coherent Chinese-style planning framework
  • The way out: what America could do to turn its own economic fate around and position itself for a healthy economic and political relationship with China

In the wake of the 2008 crisis, both unbalanced economies face urgent and mutually beneficial rebalancings. Unbalanced concludes with a recipe for resolving the escalating tensions of codependence. Roach argues that the Next China offers much for the Next America—and vice versa.—Yale University Press

Book Review: 

Fred Andrews, The New York Times (February 15, 2014)
Glenn C. Altshuler, Huffington Post (January 21, 2014)

What Should Michelle Obama Accomplish on Her Trip to China?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Orville Schell, Vincent Ni & more on March 19, 2014

Orville Schell:  Looking at the challenges of rectifying U.S.-China relations and building some semblance of the "new kind of a big power relationship" alluded to by presidents Obama and Xi at Sunnylands last year, will most certainly require a multi-stage ongoing effort. Michelle Obama's trip to China with her mother and her two daughters this week could prove to be a very constructive next step.