The Trump administration is so alarmed that Chinese investors may try to purchase Westinghouse Electric Co.’s nuclear business that U.S. officials are trying to find an American or allied buyer for the company instead, two people familiar with the matter said.
The White House is talking in more urgent terms about North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, as President Donald Trump’s talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping approach.
Trade will be one of two key issues on the agenda, along with North Korea. But what’s the problem—and what can Trump do about it?
When President Trump meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week, he will remind his guest that China runs the largest trade surplus with the United States.
China was the top foreign buyer of U.S. crude in February, according to data that show the growing interdependence of the world’s big energy-consuming nations at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions.
Beef may be on the table when the U.S. president and Chinese leader Xi Jinping discuss trade during this week’s summit at Trump’s Florida resort.
Who will be the winner of the upcoming Trump-Xi summit? My answer: That’s a dangerous—and wrongheaded—question to focus on. Yes, we want the U.S. to win, but the U.S.-China relationship must be played and judged as a long game.
Donald Trump has struggled with his position on China. President Xi Jinping has several reasons for confidence when he arrives at Mar-a-Lago for negotiations.
When Deng Xiaoping launched China on the path to economic reform in the late 1970s, he vowed to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” More than three decades later, China’s efforts to modernize have yielded something very different from the working people’s paradise Deng envisioned: an incipient kleptocracy, characterized by endemic corruption, soaring income inequality, and growing social tensions. China’s Crony Capitalism traces the origins of China’s present-day troubles to the series of incomplete reforms from the post-Tiananmen era that decentralized the control of public property without clarifying its ownership.
Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the control and ownership rights of state-owned assets allowed well-connected government officials and businessmen to amass huge fortunes through the systematic looting of state-owned property—in particular land, natural resources, and assets in state-run enterprises. Mustering compelling evidence from over two hundred corruption cases involving government and law enforcement officials, private businessmen, and organized crime members, Minxin Pei shows how collusion among elites has spawned an illicit market for power inside the party-state, in which bribes and official appointments are surreptitiously but routinely traded. This system of crony capitalism has created a legacy of criminality and entrenched privilege that will make any movement toward democracy difficult and disorderly.
Rejecting conventional platitudes about the resilience of Chinese Communist Party rule, Pei gathers unambiguous evidence that beneath China’s facade of ever-expanding prosperity and power lies a Leninist state in an advanced stage of decay. —Harvard University Press
Tom Mitchell, Financial Times (November 18, 2016)
The Economist (October 15, 2016)
“Is the Chinese Government in Late-Stage Regime Decay? A Conversation with Minxin Pei,” Library of Law and Liberty, October 18, 2016
“Minxin Pei: Political Jockeying Hinders Real Economic Reform in China,” by Minxin Pei, Nikkei Asian Review, July 14, 2016
“Q. and A.: Minxin Pei on the Future of Communist Rule in China,” by Michael Forsythe, The New York Times, February 29, 2016
This week, Matthew Pottinger will be on hand for President Trump’s meeting with President Xi Jinping of China, as the top Asia policy maker in an administration desperately short of his kind of on-the-ground experience.
