On the heels of the Feb. 4, 2023, shooting down of a Chinese balloon suspected of spying on the U.S., American fighter jets have shot down three additional objects in or near U.S. airspace.

When the media asked Glen VanHerck, the Air Force general responsible for overseeing North American airspace, about these events, he refused to rule out extraterrestrial forces at play. Other military officials later clarified that otherworldly origins aren’t a serious consideration, but the comment highlighted the U.S. government’s lack of knowledge about these objects.

As a space policy expert, I’m often confronted with questions about UFOs and little green people. However, as these recent episodes have shown, a UFO is far more likely to be human-made, rather than originating from some faraway place in the universe.

What does UFO mean?

Unidentified flying object, or UFO for short, is the term that has historically been used to describe aircraft that aren’t easily identified or explained. The modern UFO craze in the U.S. dates to the late 1940s and early 1950s, coinciding with the development of new technology like rockets and missiles.

Today, the U.S. government uses the phrase unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs. This change is partially to try to disassociate the term from science fiction aliens. The term also encourages greater scientific study and reflects the fact that many of these “objects” end up being strange atmospheric phenomenon or tricks of camera equipment.

Taking a serious look

There are thousands of unconfirmed UAP sightings by the public each year, but until recently there was no formal way for the U.S. to track these sightings. That lack of interest began to change in 2020 when the Pentagon officially released three videos taken from the cockpits of fighter jets showing unidentified objects moving in mysterious ways.

The following year, in 2021, Congress mandated the creation of an assessment on UAPs. As part of this report, the director of national intelligence identified 144 firsthand accounts of UAPs from military aviators and government sensors between 2004 and 2021.

The report identifies several potential explanations for UAPs, including clutter – an umbrella term that includes, for example, birds, balloons and drones. Other explanations include natural atmospheric phenomena such as ice crystals and thermal fluctuations, as well as secret technologies being developed by the U.S. or other nations.

It is this last category that has drawn attention, with the U.S. military shooting down a number of balloons and unidentified objects in the last week. Countries like China and Russia can gather a significant amount of intelligence using satellites, but balloons – and potentially other technologies as yet unknown by the American public – represent another way to collect sensitive data. If the U.S. military or government can’t identify a new technology, it is easy to classify an object as a UAP.

In 2022 alone, the Pentagon received 247 new UAP reports, about half of which were eventually attributed to balloons or “balloon-like entities.”

At the same time, it’s also easy to miss UAPs if people don’t know what to look for, as appears to be the case with previous spy balloons that China has sent around the world.

Whether future UAPs are balloons, secret technology or something else, there will continue to be a greater national focus on studying UAPs and an increasing ability to detect them. It is likely that reports will continue to pour in and U.S. aircraft will keep tracking them down.

Wendy Whitman Cobb, Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, Air University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

China is one of the few countries that is committed to expanding its dealings with the Taliban government in Afghanistan, where it hopes to expand its use of the vast natural resources while also improving its own geopolitical security.

In mid-2021 China welcomed a Taliban delegation, showing its willingness to recognise the Taliban government as the US signalled its planned withdrawal. In early January 2023, a Chinese firm agreed to sign a 25-year contract for oil extraction in Afghanistan. There is also the possibility that a Chinese state-owned company will be contracted to operate a copper mine in the country.

It is unsurprising that as western countries withdraw almost all their links with Afghanistan, China is willing to increase its commercial presence in the country. Although traditionally its Afghan policy has not been a diplomatic priority, it now sees opportunities.

Despite being one of Afghanistan’s largest foreign investors in the past and its strategic partner, China’s involvement in the country has previously been relatively limited when compared with others such as Russia and the US.

Arguably, its policy in regard to Afghanistan has been driven by domestic economic interests and security issues. However, in the last decade or so, China has adopted a more assertive foreign policy. At the same time, commercial interests have also led to increased Chinese involvement in Afghanistan.

Useful natural resources

Greater active engagement with Afghanistan will enable China to benefit in several ways. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most resource-rich countries, but its security conditions have constrained the development of the sector.

Some estimates set the value of Afghanistan’s untapped mineral deposits, such as copper, iron and lithium, at £811.5 billion. In terms of crude oil, it has 1.6 billion barrels. As for natural gas, Afghanistan possesses 16 trillion cubic feet, and has access to 500 million barrels of natural gas liquids.

However, in the past, Chinese activities in Afghanistan’s mineral sector have stalled. In the late 2010s, for example, security concerns hindered the activities of Chinese enterprises tapping into the country’s mineral resources. https://www.youtube.com/embed/9AAze0cPRsY?wmode=transparent&start=0 China is becoming an ally of the Taliban.

Useful Afghan resources

There is another related gain in working with the Afghan natural resources sector. China’s domestic energy supply is limited both by geology and energy density, and its dependence on other countries leads to “energy security anxieties”.

Access to Afghanistan’s natural resources, then, not only provides economic incentives for China to increase its commercial presence in the country. It also has the potential to help ease its growing demand for energy.

Increasing involvement in Afghanistan falls within China’s prioritisation of short-term energy security. But it can become a fundamental strategic element for its long-term energy requirements.

Afghanistan’s fragile internal security has affected China in two ways. First, it worried that years of instability in Afghanistan would spill over into China’s Xinjiang autonomous territory, where there is a long history of religious and ethnic tension with Beijing. This has included crackdowns by Beijing on the Muslim Uyghur people, and widespread accusations of extensive human rights abuses.

Second, the instability that stems from Afghanistan negatively affects the development of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is building trade routes with the rest of the world, because two of its fundamental corridors run adjacent to Afghanistan. As a global infrastructure and development investment plan encompassing over 60 countries (although there is no official count), including some from east Asia and Europe, the initiative is a vehicle to expand China’s global economic and political influence. Such an expansion is paramount for China’ superpower aspirations.

Trade frictions with the US and other countries have increased the pressure to open other markets for China’s goods. The BRI is an effective channel to develop new export markets which can alleviate trade pressures. And although the Afghan consumer market is small, it is an untapped market for Chinese goods – particularly those produced in China’s western regions.

Building superpower status

An additional gain is geopolitical. After decades of hegemonic presence “next door” but a degree of reluctance to get involved in Afghan affairs, China seems to be somewhat ready to fill the power vacuum created by the withdrawal of western countries.

Greater presence in Afghanistan provides China with an opportunity to strengthen its regional power and influence. In doing so, it can contribute to the stability of Afghanistan. In turn, such a role will improve China’s image as a responsible rising power.

So far, China has been reluctant to take on a security role in Afghanistan, because this could have led to friction with other countries and increased its exposure to threats by international terrorists networks. However, a change in strategy to increase the economic stability of Afghanistan can contribute to the reduction of China’s own security vulnerabilities

Jose Caballero, Senior Economist, IMD World Competitiveness Center, International Institute for Management Development (IMD)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For most people around the world, physical work takes up a great amount of time and energy every day. But what determines whether it is men or women who are working harder in households? In most hunter-gatherer societies, men are the hunters and women are the gatherers – with men seemingly walking the furthest. But what’s the labour breakdown in other societies?

We carried out a study of farming and herding groups in the Tibetan borderlands in rural China – an area with huge cultural diversity – to uncover which factors actually determine who works the hardest in a household, and why. Our results, published in Current Biology, shed light on the gender division of work across many different kinds of society.

The majority of adults across the world are married. Marriage is a contract, so one might expect roughly equal costs and benefits from the union for both parties. But unequal bargaining power in a household – such as one person threatening divorce – can lead to unequal contributions to the partnership.

Leaving home

We decided to test the hypothesis that leaving your natal area after heterosexual marriage to live with your spouse’s family may contribute to a higher level of workload. In such marriages, the new person typically isn’t related to, and doesn’t share a history with, anyone in their new household. Without blood relatives around them, they might therefore be at a disadvantage when it comes to bargaining power.

The most common form of marriage around the world is where women are the “dispersers”, leaving their native home, while men stay with their families in their natal area. This is known as patrilocality.

Neolocality – in which both sexes disperse at marriage, and the couple lives in a new place away from both their families – is another common practice in many parts of the world. Matrilocality – where women stay in the natal family and men move to live with the wife and her family – is quite rare. And duolocality – where neither sex leaves home and husband and wife live apart – is very rarely seen.

Luckily, in the diverse Tibetan borderlands, all four of these different dispersal patterns can be found across various different ethnic groups.

Our study focused on rural villages from six different ethnic cultures. With our collaborators from Lanzhou University in China, we interviewed more than 500 people about their dispersal status after marriage, and invited them to wear an activity tracker (like a fitbit) to assess their workloads.

Women work harder

Our first finding was that women worked much harder than men, and contributed most of the fruits of this labour to their families. This was evidenced both by their own reports of how much they worked and by their activity trackers.

Women walked on average just over 12,000 steps per day, while men walked just over 9,000 steps. So men also worked hard, but less so than women. They spent more time in leisure or social activities, or just hanging around and resting.

This may be partly because women are, on average, physically weaker than men, and may thus have reduced bargaining power. But we also found that individuals (be they male or female) who disperse at marriage to live away from their kin have higher workloads than those who stay with their natal families.

So if you are female and move away from home at marriage (as most women do throughout the world), you suffer not just in terms of missing your own family but also in terms of workload. When both sexes disperse and no one lives with their natal families, both sexes work hard (as there is little help from kin) – but the woman still works harder. According to our study, perfect sex equality in workload only occurs in instances where men disperse and women do not.

These results help us to understand why women globally disperse, but men generally do not. Dispersal is especially bad for men – adding about 2,000 more steps per day to their step count, but only adding about 1,000 steps per day for women.

Time and energy spent on farming, herding and housework competes with free time. So substantial labour contribution to households in these rural areas can result in less time spent on rest. From an evolutionary view, giving up rest isn’t favourable unless it contributes to higher fitness – such as enhancing offspring survival.

We don’t actually know whether it is favourable in this case, as it hasn’t been researched much. It may be true in poor and rural areas around the world, but less so in wealthier settings.

In most urban areas, for example, an inactive lifestyle is becoming more pervasive. And research has shown that sedentary lifestyles in such areas among white-collar workers are becoming a significant public health issue. They are linked to many chronic health conditions such as obesity, infertility, and several mental health disorders.

Sex inequality in workload persists both in the home and outside. Now our study has given an evolutionary perspective on why women are more likely than men to be bearing a heavy work burden.

But things are slowly changing. As women are increasingly starting families away from both their partner’s and their own family, their bargaining power is increasing. This is further boosted by their increasing levels of self-generated wealth, education and autonomy. Ultimately, these changes are leading men to take on an increasing workload in many urban, industrial or post-industrial societies.

Yuan Chen, PhD Candidate in Evolutionary Anthropology, UCL and Ruth Mace, Professor of Anthropology, UCL

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

At the end of November 2022, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak announced that the “golden era” between Great Britain and China was over. China may not have been too bothered by this news however, and has been busy making influential friends elsewhere.

In early December, Chinese president Xi Jinping met with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – a group made up of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – to discuss trade and investment. Also on the agenda were talks on forging closer political ties and a deeper security relationship.

This summit in Saudi Arabia was the latest step in what our research shows is an increasingly close relationship between China and the Gulf states. Economic ties have been growing consistently for several decades (largely at the expense of trade with the US and the EU) and are specifically suited to their respective needs.

Simply put, China needs oil, while the Gulf needs to import manufactured goods including household items, textiles, electrical products and cars.

China’s pronounced growth in recent decades has been especially significant for the oil rich Gulf state economies. Between 1980 and 2019, their exports to China grew at an annual rate of 17.1%. In 2021, 40% of China’s crude oil imports came from the Gulf – more than any other country or regional group, with 17% from Saudi Arabia alone.

And the oil will likely continue to flow in China’s direction. In 2009, it was predicted that China would require 14 million barrels of oil per day by 2025. In fact, China reached that figure in 2019 and is expected to need at least 17 million barrels per day by 2040. At the same time, the US became a net oil exporter in 2019 and thus achieved a longstanding foreign policy goal: to overcome its dependence on Middle Eastern fossil fuels.

China has benefited from increasing demand for its manufactured products, with exports to the Gulf growing at an annual rate of 11.7% over the last decade. It overtook the US in 2008 and then the EU in 2020 to become the Gulf’s most important source of imports.

These are good customers for China to have. The Gulf economies are expected to grow by around 5.9% in 2022 (compared with a lacklustre 2.5% predicted growth in the US and EU) and offer attractive opportunities for China’s export-orientated economy. It is likely that the fast-tracking of a free trade agreement was high on the summit’s agenda in early December.

Strong ties

The Gulf’s increased reliance on trade with China has been accompanied by a reduction in its appetite to follow the west’s political and cultural lead.

As a group, it was supportive of the west’s military action in Iraq for example, and the broader fight against Islamic State. But more recently, the Gulf notably refused to support the west in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It also threatened Netflix with legal action for “promoting homosexuality”, while Qatar has been actively banning rainbow flags supporting sexual diversity at the Fifa men’s World Cup.

So Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia was well timed to illustrate a strengthening of this important partnership. And to the extent that anything can be forecast, a deepening of the Gulf-China trade relationship seems likely. On the political front, however, developments are less easy to predict.

China is seeking to safeguard its interests in the Middle East in light of the Belt and Road initiative, its ambitious transcontinental infrastructure and investment project.

But how much further might the Gulf states be prepared to sacrifice their longstanding security pacts with western powers (forged in the aftermath of the second world war) in order to seek new ones with the likes of Beijing? Currently, America has military bases (or stations) in all six Gulf countries, but it is well documented that the GCC is seeking ways to diversify its self-perceived over-reliance on the US as its primary guarantor of security (a sentiment within the bloc that was pronounced while Obama was president, less so with Trump, but on the rise again with Biden).

In the coming period, the GCC will need to decide which socioeconomic path to pursue in the post-oil era where AI-augmented, knowledge-based economies will set the pace. In choosing strategic ties beyond trade alone, the Gulf states must ask whether the creativity and innovative potential of their populations will be best served by allegiances to governments which are authoritarian, or accountable.

Emilie Rutledge, Lecturer in Economics, The Open University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

And if it’s been a hard year for China, it’s been worse elsewhere, thanks to misguided economic policies and ill-advised geopolitics. The risk of recession casts a dark shadow over the US, which remains deeply polarized. The Eurozone is facing a deep recession, Japan’s economy is shrinking, and the United Kingdom is struggling with the worst fall in living standards since records began. 

In this dire international landscape, China’s recovery could alleviate global economic prospects.

From headwinds…

Until the fall, economic data has reflected challenges. Retail sales and domestic tourism have slumped, mainly because of recurrent lockdowns across first-tier megacities. That’s the net effect of mobility restrictions, which undermine effective demand. 

The reverse side of reduced consumption are rising household deposits and falling equity markets. When people feel uneasy about the future, they save rather than consume, while businesses defer investment decisions and investors flee to liquidity. 

Industrial production has moderated, due to supply-chain disruptions among the provinces. While automobile production and new electric vehicle production signals progress, the double-digit fall of the semiconductors is the direct result of US-led geopolitics. In turn, the slowing growth of exports reflects recessionary risks in the US and the European Union, two of China’s major trading partners. 

Following several years of adverse liquidity in the real estate sector, the new property market support measures, particularly the government’s 16-point recovery plan, will contribute to stabilization. While default risks remain elevated with weaker developers, larger quality developers will benefit from consolidation.

Through the year, investment, fueled mainly by the public sector, has offset effective demand, as evidenced by higher output in steel and new renewable projects. That will add to debt pressures, particularly at the local level. Meanwhile, the Fed’s aggressive tightening has complicated efforts at monetary easing at the People’s Bank of China. 

… to recovery

Yet, the real story of 2023 is likely to be the impending recovery of the Chinese economy. A central determinant in unleashing the Chinese consumption potential, private sector investment and investor confidence hinges on the fine-tuning of the dynamic clearing policy to Covid-19 cases and the consequent broad-based recovery.  

Though gradual, the implementations of new rules to better balance the pandemic fight and economic development could result in a surge of pent-up demand by the second quarter of 2023. Such progress would strengthen economic data. Retail sales would climb. Consumer confidence, even domestic tourism, would pick up with rising consumption, including (costlier) consumer durables, while household deposits would decrease accordingly.

Businesses would invest more, including foreign multinationals as their home markets in the West will stagnate. Property markets would gradually normalize and also benefit from pent-up demand. Chinese investors would return to equity markets, which would also be attractive to overseas investors seeking diversification. The MSCI China Index heralds the turnaround; it was 24% up in November, compared to only 2% for the S&P 500 Index.

Industrial production would pick up. Despite demand destruction in the West, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRIA) will promote steady progress on the back of recovery in Southeast Asia, which China is both driving and benefiting from. Less fixed asset investment by the public sector would reduce local governments’ debt pressures.

Downside risks, upside realities

In a downside scenario, domestic woes would prove more adverse because China would shun from reforms and opening-up policies. This nightmare scenario is aggressively propagated by neoconservatives in the West, although it has nothing to do with facts. 

In reality, both reforms and opening-up policies will continue in China. 

Certainly, domestic challenges will remain tough. The population is aging. The economy needs to move from investment toward consumption. Despite decelerating economic growth, per capita incomes must continue to rise. Worse, these challenges must be met amid the West’s purposeful efforts to undermine such efforts.

Yet, in each case, policymakers have shown willingness to rely on reforms to overcome challenges. The aging-related reduction of the labor force will be significantly smaller than expected, as the new UN projections attest. 

Furthermore, the share of investment to GDP likely peaked at 42 percent in the past half a decade, with a gradual decline set to ensue.

And thanks to continued reforms and “common prosperity” policies, Chinese catch-up in productivity and per capita incomes has climbed to more than a third of the US level, even as secular growth is decelerating to 4% in the late 2020s. 

A brighter 2023 outlook

In 2022, analysts and multilateral banks estimate China’s GDP growth at 3 to 3.3%. Then again, the growth rates of all major economies have been downgraded for 2022. 

The real story is that, thanks to the expected rebound, China’s growth could climb to 4.5 percent to 5.0 percent in 2023. The precondition is that prevention and control policies will continue to be refined to make them more agile and flexible and the global landscape remains manageable, as indicated by the easing of Sino-US tensions after the recent meeting between President Joe Biden and President Xi Jinping. 

With recovery in 2023, China’s long-term development goals – primary modernization by 2035 comprehensive modernization by 2050 – remain within schedule.

Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net

The original version was published by China Daily in the expert series on “China and the World Roundtable” on November 28, 2022

Views are personal

Public protests in China related to the government’s COVID-19 restrictions have hit the news worldwide over the weekend, following a fatal apartment fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang last week which killed ten people.

Many internet users claimed some residents could not escape because the apartment building was partially locked down, though authorities denied this.

There have been reports some demonstrators have called for President Xi Jinping, the newly re-elected General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, to stand down. Others have criticised the rule of the party itself.

China’s COVID measures are among the strictest in the world, as it continues to pursue lockdowns to suppress the virus – what it calls a “dynamic zero COVID” policy.

While these protests are certainly serious challenges to authority, they should be kept in perspective. In particular, there’s no real parallel to those in Tiananmen Square in 1989. These are street protests where the demonstrators disperse after marching and protesting, and the main focus of the protests are the COVID restrictions rather than wider political principles.

The main issue here is frustration not just with COVID restrictions, but the inconsistent ways these measures are being implemented.

At least in the short-term, the state’s reactions are likely to be muted. There’s undoubtedly pressure for change, though how this will be achieved is hard to predict.

A more national response

Protests in China have actually become quite common in the last couple of decades, though they almost always centre around a specific issue and are highly localised.

Workers in a factory may protest over lack of payment or deteriorating conditions. Villagers forced to resettle so that their land can be redeveloped attempt resistance, sometimes even to the extent of refusing to be moved away. Residents in new housing estates become mobilised to complain about the lack of promised roads, retail outlets and services.

These kinds of protest are usually resolved reasonably and quickly not least by state officials intervening to ensure solutions in the name of maintaining stability.

Less capable of such instant solution are protests about more general principles, such as freedom of expression, legal representation, or governmental responsibilities. In such cases, government responses have tended to suppress the concerns.

But such protests have almost always been localised and not led to any sense of a regional or national movement. This has even been true of industrial disputes where workers have protested in one or more factories under a single brand or owner.

There’s no evidence at this stage that this is an organised national movement. But it seems protesters in each city have been emboldened by the actions of demonstrators in others.

Reading China’s social media it’s clear, for example, that demonstrators in Beijing and Shanghai report on each others’ protests, as well as commenting on the initial protest causes in Urumqi.

To date, police reactions have varied between locations. Some police were said to have been allowing demonstrations to continue.

But in other places, minor scuffles have been reported, including some arrests.

Off the streets and away from the demonstrators, asymptomatic residents of apartment blocks in lockdown have occasionally continued to protest.

Student demands

Some 40 students at China’s leading Peking University issued a declaration on Sunday that criticised “the implementation of the dynamic zero policy”. They said the COVID-zero policies had an increasing number of problems and have led to “horrible tragedies”, though they also acknowledged the importance and effectiveness of the safety measures implemented earlier in the pandemic.

They also said “The most urgent task now is to find a temporary way of coexistence that minimises the danger of the epidemic while ensuring basic social order and basic economic and livelihood needs”.

To this end, they propose five key measures:

1. “To avoid the abuse of public power, all regional quarantine blockades should be stopped to ensure that all people in communities, villages, units and schools can enter and leave freely”
2. “Abolish technical means to monitor the whereabouts of citizens, such as pass codes and [health code] cell phone tracking app. Stop considering the spread of the epidemic as the responsibility of certain individuals or institutions. Devote resources to long-term work such as vaccine, drug development and hospital construction”
3. “Implement voluntary [PCR] testing and voluntary quarantine for undiagnosed and asymptomatic individuals”
4. “Liberalize restrictions on the expression of public opinion and allow suggestions and criticism of specific implementation problems in different regions”
5. “Make truthful disclosures of infection data, including the number of infected people, the death rate, long [COVID] rate, to eliminate epidemic panic during the transition”.

The key issues are how to move from the current “dynamic zero COVID” policy towards something else, and indeed what that should be, given the inadequate health coverage in much of the country.

David S G Goodman, Director, China Studies Centre, Professor of Chinese Politics, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One of the essential concepts you will find being made by people over the Internet is that the digital yuan is entirely identical to cryptocurrencies. To date, the digital yuan has been available within the borders of China. No one outside China knows how it is working and how it will be available to the people. You do not even understand what kind of authority you will be given with the help of digital yuan and how much of its authority you can use. Therefore, many things are being kept secret by the Chinese government the digital yuan; therefore, making a presentation about the nature of the digital yuan is not the right thing to do yet. Start your Digital Yuan journey with the Yuan Pay Group trading site. 

Growth prospects are going to be striking for digital yuan in the future. One of the primary reasons behind the same is that China is a very well-developed nation. Today, the government is testing the digital yuan within the borders of China so that it can make it successful at the global level. Suppose the digital yuan is going to become successful for China; going to be very well developed for the whole world. Moreover, everyone will be able to use the digital yuan within just a few steps. It is one of the most crucial strategic developments for the Chinese government because, with the help of this, it is also going to tackle the influence of digital dollars. You will find in the future that there will not be only one global digital currency, but there might be two of them. So, it is the right time to understand the digital yuan and its nature correctly so that you do not have any complications in your future understanding of it.

Differences

Before we move further towards making investments or understanding more about the digital yuan, it is crucial to know how it differs from cryptocurrencies. You might have seen that cryptocurrencies are globally available and act as digital currencies. Therefore, you might have a conception that both are identical. But the concept is genuinely connected, nature is not. Yes, both are digital, but they have completely different natures. Because of this, it is essential to understand how they both work. So, to provide complete information about how the digital yuan differs from cryptocurrencies, a few of the most critical points of differentiation are given below.

• Many people all over the world are nowadays making investments in cryptocurrencies. One of the primary reasons behind the same is that cryptocurrencies provide complete independence to the people. There is no dependency on third parties or government parties, so cryptocurrencies have become popular. However, when it comes to digital yuan, you will find out that independence is not provided to the people. The Digital yuan Is just a virtual version of the Fiat currency of the government, and therefore, the prices, as well as everything else, are controlled by the government itself. You are wrong if you think you will be capable of using the digital yuan by yourself all the time. You will always have the government’s hand on your head when you are using digital yuan.
• Moreover, we cannot just say that the prices keep moving, but they move more frequently and aggressively. You will see that cryptocurrency prices keep changing all the time, and they can also change within a couple of seconds. But, the digital yuan cannot be the same as cryptocurrencies because the prices are supposed to be very simple, sophisticated, and stable. Yes, the stability of the digital yuan prices is considered one of the primary reasons why it is wholly differentiated from cryptocurrencies. You will never be capable of seeing such a high degree of fluctuations in the digital yuan as much as you can see in crypto coins.
• Authority is an important reason why the digital yuan differs from crypto coins. You might have seen that many people worldwide are using cryptocurrencies nowadays, and it is all because they have a lot of authority. Yes, the complete authority of the cryptocurrencies is in the hands of the people who own them, but this cannot be said for the digital yuan. Yes, the authority of the digital yuan is in the hands of the government; therefore, you are not entirely free to use your digital tokens. Yes, if you have made a lot of investment in the digital yuan, you will find that the government will keep an eye on elections, and I can call you up for any prosecution whenever you have misused it.

Last words

Some of the most critical points of differences between the digital yuan and cryptocurrencies are explained in this post. By reading the details, it will be evident if you can keep digital tokens like bitcoins and digital yuan alongside or not.

It is a certainty that the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, will be confirmed in office at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, currently being held in Beijing. At 69, Xi is also tipped to become the CCP chairman.

In China there is a very close relationship between party and state – the two are often wrongly considered to be essentially the same. This sometimes leads to confusion in western commentary about the powers of different offices and the titles that leaders hold. The current Chinese president is also the general secretary of the Communist Party but, in the past, the head of state was not always the most powerful CCP leader. For example, during the leadership of Mao Zedong, a rival figure, Liu Shaoqi, was president between 1959 and 1966.

Western commentary often sees leadership tension as a starting point for political analysis. In studies of the USSR, “Kremlinology” became a refined art over many decades but it told us little about the fault-lines of Soviet society. What looked like a powerful regime, sending astronauts into space and exploding nuclear bombs, suffered a prolonged crisis of legitimacy in many parts of the society. Keeping the focus on leadership politics will not help explain China.

In contrast with the USSR, the CCP has been able to achieve many of the benefits of modernisation and economic growth without loss of popular legitimacy.

Term limits

The term limits for the Chinese presidency were withdrawn in 2018. It is possible that Xi will be the Chinese leader for many years to come. He is about ten years younger than the president of the USA, Joe Biden.

An article in the Financial Times in late August seems to have been the prompt for speculation about reviving the role of chairman. Mao adopted the title before 1949, when he was consolidating political power during the war against the Japanese occupation. Xi’s anti-corruption drive is seen by the FT as a confirmation of power. The argument is that Xi will become “Chairman Xi” to confirm his status.

There are no formal term limits for officeholders in the CCP, although it has been unusual for anybody approaching 70 to take on a larger role. We may now see a significant development but a change which would be mainly symbolic because Xi is already the most powerful man in China.

Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s modernisation and “opening up”, was the paramount leader without ever being president or chairman. Hua Guofeng succeeded Mao as CCP chairman, but it was Deng – appointed vice-chairman in 1977, who led China. The post of chairman was abolished in 1982 and most functions were transferred to the revived post of general secretary, which is currently held by Xi.

The most interesting question is not about titles but about policies. It would be a mistake to believe that a change of title will make Xi more like Mao Zedong. Mao repudiated many features of the Chinese past whilst Xi celebrates them. Xi Jinping, more than any other leader in China since 1949, consciously connects the past, present and future. He seeks legitimacy by celebrating the revolutionary role of the CCP in restoring China to the status of a world power and by modernisation of the economy and society.

Leadership styles

Xi and Mao also differ in their leadership styles. Xi Jinping has no inclination to use the mass mobilisation campaigns that Mao promoted. Not only did Mao cause chaos in the country with his “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” between 1966 and 1976, he also used the same approach in the previous decade when landlords’ estates were seized as part of the Land Reform programme and the 1958 rapid industrialisation programme, the Great Leap Forward.

Mao’s leadership, before and after 1949, was marked by the “Red versus Expert” tension between intellectuals and ideologues. Xi requires loyalty and expertise. Mao’s style was revolutionary, Deng brought prosperity, Xi stands for prosperity plus stability.

In Chinese official documents – and still more in informal discourse – Mao is seen to have made increasingly serious “errors”. His Cultural Revolution was directly criticised by the party in 2021 in its “Resolution of the Central Committee of CCP on the Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party over the Past Century”. This stated that the Cultural Revolution had been “catastrophic” and had resulted in “ten years of domestic turmoil which caused the Party, the country, and the people to suffer the most serious losses and setbacks since 1949”. It was, the resolution said: “an extremely bitter lesson”.

The worst excesses of Mao’s time came more than 50 years ago when China was still very poor by international comparison. Since then the overwhelming majority of Chinese people have become healthier, wealthier and much better educated. They see continuity of leadership, and strong connections to cultural traditions of unity, hierarchy, orthodoxy as a vital underpinning to “common prosperity”. China now presents 2035 as the date by which socialist modernisation will be “basically realised”.

If Xi can lead China towards the promised future, and the centenary of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in October 2049 will be the target date, he will continue to be in a strong position – whether he is chairman or not. Xi, and the party he leads, are focused on the future. He may even still be part of the leadership in 2035 and it is possible that he will be alive in the centenary year of the PRC.

David Law, Academic Director: Global Partnerships, Keele University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As economist Anne O. Krueger saw it, Trump’s trade war was “a failure that harmed both China and the US.” Consequently, many hoped that Biden’s victory would come with a bilateral reset. But the reverse happened. 

Building further on Trump’s flawed policies, the Biden White House began to weaponize those policies while diversifying risks to U.S. allies – from the EU and Japan to Ukraine and Taiwan.

This purposeful effort to force American primacy in the 21^st century, when it is no longer supported by fundamentals, has potential not only to push the world economy into a stagflationary recession, but into a severe global depression.

How China replaced US as global growth engine

Until the 1990s, poor economies had been dependent mainly on the West. After centuries of devastating colonialism, the divergence between the two had only deepened in the postwar era, due to the inherently unequal exchange.

By the early 2010s, China’s growth impact on the low- and middle-income countries had increased significantly, while the impact of the OECD economies had significantly decreased for low-income economies and stagnated for middle-income countries.

These trends intensified with the rise of Chinese investment abroad and the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, which has boosted modernization in many emerging and developing economies. 

Before the Trump trade wars, China replaced the US as the engine of the world economy. Between 2013 and 2018, it accounted for 28 percent of all growth worldwide on average. The IMF data suggested that China would account for a similar share of growth over the next 5 years.

Most importantly, China was also pulling along many of the world’s middle- and smaller-size economies in its train. Today, this great project is threatened. 

By turning its frictions with China into still another unwarranted Cold War, the Biden administration has taken the world economy at the edge of the abyss.

The $25 trillion global risk  

China’s rise as global growth engine is reflected by the expansion of its economy relative to other major global growth engines; i.e., the United States, the largest European economies (Germany, France, UK, and Italy), and Japan. There are two basic ways to assess that contribution. Market exchange rates are more realistic in international transactions. In this view, China passed Japan as a global growth engine around 2010, Europe-4 in the mid-2010s and is positioned to surpass the U.S. at the end of the 2020s. 

However, the purchasing power scenario is useful to illustrate secular trends. As the relative shares of the US, Europe-4 and Japan continue to decline in the world economy, that of China has potential to rise.

At the end of 2022, China is likely to account for $20 trillion or about a fifth of the estimated $104 trillion world economy. These trillions of dollars are not just China’s gain, or the advantage of rich economies that benefit from the mainland’s expansion. They offer critical support to middle- and low-income countries that the West’s colonialism derailed into longstanding dependency.

Thanks to these global inter-dependencies, any effort to destabilize China has potential to undermine living standards in the West for decades, while turning the most fragile economies into failed states. 

The $6.1 trillion risk to world trade

The role of global growth engines is reflected by trade and investment, and the countries these pillar economies partner with. Two-thirds of China’s exports goes to a handful of major economies in North America (US, Mexico), Western Europe (Germany, Netherlands, UK), East Asia (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan), Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand), Russia and Australia. 

The real impact of Chinese exports is far greater. Even if small- and medium-size economies import less in absolute terms, they often import significantly in relative terms, as evidenced by China’s 100 export partners. In 2021, the total value exported by China amounted to almost $3.4 trillion. Conversely, that year the total value imported by China soared to almost $2.7 trillion. 

For decades, Chinese imports and cheaper prices contributed to low costs and low inflation. In modern history, that’s an anomaly. Until the early 2000s, the high-income West dominated world trade. Their products and services were priced largely according to their purchasing power, which was significantly higher relative to those in middle- and low-income economies. 

Even worse, the Global South was exploited in imported proxy conflicts to keep Western growth undisrupted, very much like today. Emerging markets became more useful to the West only in the 1980s, when neoliberal policies permitted offshoring in the race to the bottom. 

Today any major threat to undermine Chinese trade poses a $6.1 trillion threat to China, the US, its allies and the Global South. 

The $311 billion risk to world investment    

Last year, global merger and acquisition activities soared to $5.9 trillion. China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), aligned with the with the post-pandemic upswing, displayed an uptick in growth, totaling $138 billion.

China’s inward FDI hit $173 billion, up 20.2 percent year on year. The robust double-digit growth is remarkable, due to the relatively high base in 2020. China registered positive growth of 5.7 percent, even as global FDI plunged 34.7 percent. In the process, Chinese engagement in the144 countries of the Belt and Road Initiative amounted to $59.5 billion.

When major economies in the West seek to destabilize or contain China’s economic rise for largely geopolitical reasons, they risk derailing over $311 billion in annual investment. Worse, that threatens the poorer economies’ historical opportunity – however slim and fleeting – to raise living standards after centuries of colonial plunder by the West.

From stagflationary debt crisis to global depression?

With the US/EU proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, it was early on clear that all key participants in this unwarranted war would face a recession in a matter of months.

Worse, the runaway inflation that the West is struggling with has potential to worsen into a stagflationary debt crisis. In the next recession, as Nouriel Roubini has suggested, “the crash in equity markets could be closer to 50%.” The assumption is the crisis will prove both stagflationary and be accompanied by a financial crisis.

In this dire landscape, a major destabilization of China could drastically accelerate secular stagnation, which continues to spread in the West, and to decimate opportunities for higher living standards in many emerging and developing economies.

Ironically, there is little or no reason for these unwarranted proxy conflicts and new Cold Wars, which, if given free reign, are paving the way to a global depression, induced by geopolitics. 

Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally recognized strategist of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (USA), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net 

The original version was published by China-US Focus on August 26, 2022

Views are personal

A woman in Suzhou, China, was reportedly detained recently for “provoking trouble”. Her alleged crime was being spotted outside wearing a kimono. The woman was dressed like a character from a manga (a Japanese comic). Arresting her might seem dramatic but there is more at play here than a simple fashion faux pas.

Clothing is a cultural identifier and, to many, a symbol of national identity and pride. When you think of the kimono you might think of Japan. However, the garment is rarely worn in Japan now, other than at traditional festivals or celebrations. As a result, the kimono industry, which experienced a boom in the 1980s, is currently experiencing a massive downturn.

The kimono worn today, however, is not an indigenous invention of the Japanese. It can be traced back to the 7th century when the Imperial Court began to wear garments adapted from Chinese styles.

Despite these Chinese origins, the kimono is a major cultural signifier of Japan globally. And, in many Asian countries, particularly those which were brutally colonised by Japan, the kimono remains a symbol of oppression.

From folk clothing to works of art

There is a long history of sartorial similarities between Japan and China.

Chinese explorers in southern parts of ancient Japan around the 3rd century BC observed people wearing simple tunics, poncho-type garments and a type of pleated trouser and top. These were similar to clothes worn in parts of China at that time. Images of priestess-queens and tribal chiefs in 4th century AD Japan also show figures wearing clothing like those worn by the Han dynasty China.

The first ancestor of the kimono appeared in Japan in the Heian period (794-1185). Still often worn with Chinese-style hakama (pleated trousers or long skirts), this garment was made from straight pieces of cloth fastened with a narrow sash at the hips. By the Edo period (1603-1868), everyone wore a unisex garment known as a kosode, made from straight pieces of fabric sewn together like today’s kimono.

In the early 1600s, Japan was unified by the Shogun Tokugawa into a feudal shogunate (a kind of military dictatorship) with Edo (now Tokyo) as the capital.

Japanese culture developed during this period with almost no outside influence, and the kosode, as a precursor to the kimono, came to represent what it meant to be Japanese.

Folk clothing and work clothes were also based on front wrapping (left over right), drop-sleeved tops and fastened with strings or cords following a basic kimono pattern. The role of kimono-making developed, and the value of some kimonos increased to the level of priceless works of art.

A symbol of Japanese culture

After previous eras of a “closed” Japan, the Meiji era (1868-1912) marked a period of rapid modernisation and foreign influence. The kimono, meaning “the thing to wear” had a proper name and officially came into being.

This was despite a new imperial edict that rejected old dress as “effeminate” and “un-Japanese”. As a result, men, government officials and military personnel were encouraged to wear western clothing, yōfuku, rather than traditional wafuku.

But as Japan was undergoing fundamental change on multiple levels, the sight of women wearing kimono was reassuring and a popular symbol of Japaneseness.

Women started wearing more western-style clothes, specifically underwear for women, after the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923. It was felt that a sense of shame in exposing themselves prevented many women from jumping or being rescued from the upper floors of buildings. The possibility that fewer women would have lost their lives in the disaster had they been wearing yōfuku or at least underwear beneath their kimonos was a catalyst for general westernisation.

Japan’s Showa era began in 1926 when Emperor Hirohito ascended to the throne. This period spanned two world wars and the rise of strident cultural ultranationalism and has been described as the most momentous, calamitous, successful and glamorous period in Japan’s recent history.

For those with a belief in the idea of Japanese uniqueness (Nihonjin-ron), which became especially popular after the second world war, the kimono (along with other aspects of Japanese culture) was considered superior to the western alternative. While the actual wearing of the garment decreased, the kimono’s symbolic status in Japan increased.

By the 1930s, Japan was a major colonial power, having transformed from a weak, feudal society into a modern, industrial, military power in the 1890s. As such, the nation had launched territorial conquests into neighbouring countries.

So, while people in Japan were “dressing the part” in a bold attempt to look powerful to the west, Japanese occupiers in Taiwan and Korea were actively encouraging local women to wear the kimono in order to display Japan’s superior role and “greater east Asian co-prosperity” in the region.

A study of how the kimono was perceived in Taiwan and Korea during the Japanese colonial period from 1895 to 1945 showed that the Japanese kimono is clearly linked to Japan’s colonial control and war responsibilities. The weaponisation of such a beautiful and elegant item of clothing has clearly left its mark.

As the woman who was arrested in China recently was reportedly warned:

If you would be wearing Hanfu (Chinese traditional clothing), I never would have said this, but you are wearing a kimono, as a Chinese. You are Chinese!

The kimono remains a symbol of Japanese tradition and a reminder of the dangers of nationalism for countries of wartime occupation and atrocities. But as Japan is preparing to double its defence budget, raising questions over its pacifist identity since the post-war period, and China is flexing its muscles in Hong Kong and Taiwan, there should be more for officials to worry about than a woman clad in a kimono.

Ella Tennant, Lecturer, Language and Culture, Keele University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.