She was a gifted agricultural scientist educated at prestigious universities in Shanghai and Tokyo. She said she wanted to help farmers in poor areas, like her hometown in Xinjiang, in western China. But because of her uncle’s activism for China’s oppressed Muslim Uyghurs, her family and friends said, the Chinese state made her a security target.

At first they took away her father. Then they pressed her to return home from Japan. Last year, at age 30, Mihriay Erkin, the scientist, died in Xinjiang, under mysterious circumstances.

The government confirmed Ms. Erkin’s death but attributed it to an illness. Her uncle, Abduweli Ayup, the activist, believes she died in state custody.

Mr. Ayup says his niece was only the latest in his family to come under pressure from the authorities. His two siblings had already been detained and imprisoned. All three were targeted in retaliation for his efforts to expose the plight of the Uyghurs, he said.

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Uyghur activists overseas who denounce China’s repression have found that their relatives back home have been imprisoned, or worse. https://t.co/rR5HcUJ8Za

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 28, 2021

Joseph Cheng, 71, used to be one of Hong Kong’s busiest activists: a familiar presence in the media and a leading figure in several pro-democracy organizations. After retiring in 2015, the former political-science professor planned to live out his remaining days in the city. But Mr. Cheng’s life—a microcosm of Hong Kong’s recent history—has been turned upside down.

Last year’s so-called national-security law reclassified much ordinary activism as a criminal offense. On April 10, two days after I spoke to Mr. Cheng, authorities handed down sentences for campaigners including the media tycoon Jimmy Lai (14 months in prison) and the “father of Hong Kong democracy,” Martin Lee (a suspended sentence). Since then, the arrests have continued and Mr. Lai’s newspaper Apple Daily has been shut down.

Fearing prosecution, Mr. Cheng and his wife moved to Canberra, Australia, in July 2020. “It’s a quiet life,” he tells me. “Sometimes it’s a little bit lonely.” Because of Covid, his family members in Hong Kong can’t visit. “You feel bad to see friends arrested, prosecuted, sentenced to prison. But I understand that there is very little I can do.”

Mr. Cheng was born in 1949 to Chinese parents who had fled the civil war. He has, in turn, held the British colonial government to account as a leading member of the pressure group Hong Kong Observers; campaigned for political reform under Chinese rule; and now finds himself in de facto exile. He is also a practicing Catholic, and his career is a reminder of the remarkably strong Christian influence on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.

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Christians are only 12% of the population, but their values incline them toward sacrifice, writes Dan Hitchens https://t.co/nfKqyBBrSF

— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) July 10, 2021

Recently, the owner of a small store in western China came across some remarks by Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of state. What he heard made him angry.

A worker in a textile company had the same reaction. So did a retiree in her 80s. And a taxi driver.

Pompeo had routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, and these four people made videos to express their outrage. But they did so in oddly similar ways.

“Pompeo said that we Uyghurs are locked up and have no freedom,” the store owner said in his video. “We are very free now….”

Read it all (note please that the above is the title on the print edition).

Exclusive: The videos are meant to look like everyday life.

But our investigation found that they're part of an elaborate effort by China to shape world opinion about Xinjiang, where Uyghurs are living under repressive government policies. https://t.co/GFVANy76hg

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 23, 2021

A new artificial intelligence model developed by Chinese researchers is performing untold feats with image creation and natural language processing — making rivals in Europe and the U.S. nervous about falling behind.

The model, dubbed Wu Dao 2.0, is able to understand everything people say — the grammar too — but can also recognize images and generate realistic pictures based on descriptions. It can also write essays and poems in traditional Chinese, as well as predict the 3D structures of proteins, POLITICO’S AI: Decoded reported.

Developed by the government-funded Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and unveiled last week, Wu Dao 2.0 appears to be among the world’s most sophisticated AI language models.

Wu Dao 2.0’s creators say it’s 10 times more powerful than its closest rival GPT-3, developed by the U.S. firm OpenAI.

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Developed by the government-funded Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and unveiled last week, Wu Dao 2.0 appears to be among the world's most sophisticated AI language models: allegedly x10 more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-3. https://t.co/yULPbLV5X8

— Séb Krier (@sebkrier) June 10, 2021

For the first time ever, the number of professionals registered with the century-old Communist Party of China has exceeded the number of factory and farm laborers in its ranks, showing the changing nature of the self-described vanguard of the working class.

The Communist Party had nearly 32.19 million members who can be classified as white-collar workers at the end of 2019, according to data from its organization department, topping the 32.01 million registered industrial and service workers.

The Communist Party, which on July 1 will mark the 100th anniversary of its founding, states in its constitution that it “is the vanguard of the Chinese working class.” Article 1 of the national constitution says the “People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.”

But Takashi Suzuki, associate professor of Chinese politics at Aichi Prefectural University in Japan, said that “with laborers and farmers no longer in the mainstream, the Communist Party is losing its identity as a political organization.”

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CHINA'S COMMUNIST PARTY | CHANGING OF THE GUARD?

For the first time ever, the number of professionals registered with the century-old Communist Party of China has exceeded the number of factory and farm laborers in its ranks.https://t.co/X4I8MNW2dU #CPC #XiJinping

— Nikkei Asia (@NikkeiAsia) June 7, 2021

When China’s government ordered women in her mostly Muslim community in the region of Xinjiang to be fitted with contraceptive devices, Qelbinur Sedik pleaded for an exemption. She was nearly 50 years old, she told officials. She had obeyed the government’s birth limits and had only one child.

It was no use. The workers threatened to take her to the police if she continued resisting, she said. She gave in and went to a government clinic where a doctor, using metal forceps, inserted an intrauterine device to prevent pregnancy. She wept through the procedure.

“I felt like I was no longer a normal woman,” Ms. Sedik said, choking up as she described the 2017 ordeal. “Like I was missing something.”

Across much of China, the authorities are encouraging women to have more children, as they try to stave off a demographic crisis from a declining birthrate. But in the Xinjiang region, China is forcing them to have fewer, tightening its grip on Muslim ethnic minorities and trying to orchestrate a demographic shift that will diminish their population growth.

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1. NEW: In China, the govt is trying to assert control over every aspect of life for Muslim women in Xinjiang. Their minds. Their homes. Even their wombs.

“The women of Xinjiang are in danger,” one woman said. “The government wants to replace our people." https://t.co/bVk1xQYhJW

— Amy Qin 秦颖 (@amyyqin) May 10, 2021

China’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 exceeded those of the U.S. and the developed world combined, according to a report published Thursday by research and consulting firm Rhodium Group.

The country’s emissions more than tripled during the past three decades, the report added.

China is now responsible for more than 27% of total global emissions. The U.S., which is the world’s second-highest emitter, accounts for 11% of the global total. India is responsible for 6.6% of global emissions, edging out the 27 nations in the EU, which account for 6.4%, the report said.

The findings come after a climate summit President Joe Biden hosted last month, during which Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his pledge to make sure the nation’s emissions peak by 2030. He also repeated China’s commitment to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury and urged countries to work together to combat the climate crisis.

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"China’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 exceeded those of the U.S. and the developed world combined," reports @CNBC.https://t.co/LOSBzkYBoz

— China US Focus (@ChinaUSFocus) May 6, 2021

China is set to report its first population decline since the famine that accompanied the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic policy in the late 1950s that caused the deaths of tens of millions of people.

The current fall in population comes despite the relaxation of strict family planning policies, which was meant to reverse the falling birth rate of the world’s most populous country.

The latest Chinese census, which was completed in December but has yet to be made public, is expected to report the total population of the country at less than 1.4bn, according to people familiar with the research. In 2019, China’s population was reported to have exceeded the 1.4bn mark.

The people cautioned, however, that the figure was considered very sensitive and would not be released until multiple government departments had reached a consensus on the data and its implications.

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Falling population is a real challenge for #China. Growth becomes harder to sustain, and it also forces the mix of growth towards materials, clashing with China's #climate commitments. China…first population decline in 5 decades https://t.co/WT88eyqXQe via @financialtimes

— Richard Yetsenga 叶森 (@ricyet) April 27, 2021

President Xi has presided over a rare public display of China’s growing naval strength by unveiling three new warships — one an amphibious helicopter carrier, hailed as the most advanced vessel in the nation’s fleet — amid growing concern that he is building a force capable of retaking Taiwan.

The carrier, named Hainan, is designed as an offensive platform from which to launch an amphibious or airborne assault and can transport up to 1,200 troops as well as dozens of helicopters and jump jets. The second vessel, the Dalian, is a guided-missile cruiser with stealth technology; the third is an upgraded Type 094A nuclear-powered submarine, the Changzheng-18, believed to be capable of carrying 12 JL-2 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The ceremony, in a military port in the southern city of Sanya, coincided with a warning from Wang Yi, the foreign minister, that the US would have to accept China’s rise if it wanted to co-exist peacefully. “Democracy is not Coca-Cola, with the US producing the syrup and the whole world has one single taste,” he said.

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President Xi has presided over a rare public display of China’s growing naval strength by unveiling three new warships amid growing concern that he is building a force capable of retaking Taiwan https://t.co/NLv1MgMmX8

— The Times (@thetimes) April 26, 2021

The mighty US dollar continues to reign supreme in global markets. But the greenback’s dominance may well be more fragile than it appears, because expected future changes in China’s exchange-rate regime are likely to trigger a significant shift in the international monetary order.

For many reasons, the Chinese authorities will probably someday stop pegging the renminbi to a basket of currencies, and shift to a modern inflation-targeting regime under which they allow the exchange rate to fluctuate much more freely, especially against the dollar. When that happens, expect most of Asia to follow China. In due time, the dollar, currently the anchor currency for roughly two-thirds of world GDP, could lose nearly half its weight.

Considering how much the United States relies on the dollar’s special status – or what then-French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously called America’s “exorbitant privilege” – to fund massive public and private borrowing, the impact of such a shift could be significant. Given that the US has been aggressively using deficit financing to combat the economic ravages of COVID-19, the sustainability of its debt might be called into question.

The long-standing argument for a more flexible Chinese currency is that China is simply too big to let its economy dance to the US Federal Reserve’s tune, even if Chinese capital controls provide some measure of insulation. China’s GDP (measured at international prices) surpassed that of the US back in 2014 and is still growing far faster than the US and Europe, making the case for greater exchange-rate flexibility increasingly compelling.

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Expected future changes in #China’s exchange-rate regime are likely to trigger a significant shift in the international monetary order, says @Harvard's @krogoff. So, the dollar’s global dominance may well be more fragile than it appears. https://t.co/2FvLlLbZDk

— Project Syndicate (@ProSyn) March 30, 2021

The state department report included new details about China’s use of forced labour in Xinjiang, the source of a growing trade dispute with the West over the past year. The report noted Xinjiang government documents had revealed a large-scale government plan, known as the “mutual pairing assistance” programme, where 19 cities and provinces, mostly in eastern China, have established factories in Xinjiang and were using forced labour.

It said the labour was provided by detainees in the internment camps who were subjected to forced labour in the factories “producing garments, hair accessories, and electronics and in agricultural production, notably picking and processing cotton and tomatoes”.

The report said there was credible evidence of the forced transfer of Uighur detainees to work in technology, clothing, and automotive factories and in the production of personal protective equipment. It noted reports that transfer schemes led to forced labour of nearly half a million people in the Xinjiang cotton harvest.

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China is guilty of genocide, says US report https://t.co/YjdOZsPItl

— Pamela Almaz (@palmaz2112) March 31, 2021

If China’s window of advantage does shrink over time as the defense of Taiwan improves, what, then, is the right U.S. strategy in the meantime? If time is on the eventual side of those defending peace and freedom, our strategy is designed to buy more of it.

This option that we recommend supports the planning that we describe in the second approach, the status quo, in which the United States has contingency plans to share in the direct defense of Taiwan but will not commit in advance to do so. But in our view, that is not an adequate U.S. strategy to deter war. We believe the United States should, in addition, rehearse — at least with Japan and Taiwan — a parallel plan to challenge any Chinese denial of international access to Taiwan and prepare, including with pre-positioned U.S. supplies, including war reserve stocks, shipments of vitally needed supplies to help Taiwan defend itself.

The United States and its allies, like Japan, should plan to challenge a Chinese quarantine or siege of Taiwan enough to place the burden on China to decide whether to widen the conflict by attacking U.S. or allied forces that were endeavoring to deliver such supplies. If such plans exist now, they are not evident, either in exercises choreographed with allies, in pre-positioned supplies, or in the shipping capacity to carry them out. These plans would probably require significant changes in the character and deployment of U.S. and other allied forces. But these changes, oriented more to helping Taiwan defend itself and less reliant on a rapid build-up of U.S. striking power inside the first island chain, would not menace the People’s Republic of China as much as the strategy envisioned in the third approach.

In this fourth approach, if China did choose to widen the war, the United States and its allies would plan to defend themselves and continue to do what was possible to help Taiwan defend itself. But the United States would not assume that such a war needs to extend to the Chinese, Japanese, or American homelands.

Instead, in another revision to the second approach, the United States and its allies would credibly and visibly plan to react to the attack on their forces by breaking all financial relations with China, freezing or seizing Chinese assets, leading to a severe rupture of the world economy and a likely global financial crisis. Also, the United States and Japan would prepare, visibly and in advance, the massive remilitarization and mobilization measures that they, and perhaps others, would take as the logical consequence of the increased danger of general war. Some critics assert this already is U.S. strategy, but we have seen no such allied economic, political, and military plans on this scale, that would strengthen deterrence.

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Can the United States Prevent a War over Taiwan? – War on the Rocks. (An excellent analysis of US options to deter or respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Growing danger of direct Chinese military action.) https://t.co/RGqQ5OTfXs

— Barry R McCaffrey (@mccaffreyr3) March 8, 2021

This progress in facial recognition and big data is all part of the other development in the Chinese digital world, the social credit system. This is a credit score analogous to those which are run in the West by credit reference agencies such as Experian and Equifax. The complete view of our lives and finances owned by these firms seems largely to escape attention in the West, but it hasn’t escaped the attention of the CCP, which has multiple trials running of social credit systems that build on and expand the existing Western model. The Chinese pilots look not at consumer creditworthiness but at social behaviour, with the criteria for desirable behaviour defined by the party. Strittmatter cites a pilot in Rongcheng, where citizens get points – not a metaphor, they actually are awarded points – for helping aged neighbours move house, giving calligraphy lessons and offering use of their basement for a CCP singalong. Conversely they lose points for pouring water outside their house so it turns into ice, letting their dogs shit on the pavement, driving through red lights and so on. In some versions of these schemes, your social credit is affected by the social credit of the people you hang out with; a bad reputation is contagious.

At the moment, the main impacts of people’s social credit are on activities such as travel: people with bad social credit can’t fly, can’t book high-speed train tickets or sleeper berths; they have slower internet access and can’t book fancy hotels or restaurants. It isn’t difficult to project a future in which these sanctions spread to every area of life. The China-wide version of social credit is scheduled to go live in 2020. The ultimate goal is to make people internalise their sense of the state: to make people self-censor, self-monitor, self-supervise. Strittmatter quotes Discipline and Punish: ‘He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.’ The Chinese version of social credit is the closest thing we’ve ever seen to Foucault’s system in action at a national level.

Put all this together. Imagine a place in which there’s a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to ‘damaging information’; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA. Strittmatter points out that you don’t need to imagine this place, because it exists: that’s life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs. Increasingly, policing in Xinjiang has an algorithmic basis. A superb piece of reporting by Christian Shepherd in the Financial Times recently told the story of Yalqun Rozi, who has ended up in a re-education camp for publishing Uighur textbooks in an attempt to preserve the language. One of his crimes was using too high a percentage of Uighur words. The system allows a maximum of 30 per cent from minority language sources; Rozi had used 60 per cent Uighur, and ‘China’ had appeared only four times in 200,000 words. Uighurs get into trouble for attending mosque too often or too fervently, or for naming their children Mohammed, or for fasting during Ramadan. There are about 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang: 1.5 million of them have either spent time in a re-education camp or are in one right now.

China has​ been a dictatorship for seventy years. The idea that prosperity and the internet would in themselves make the country turn towards democracy has been proved wrong. Instead, China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state. The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalised the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalisation is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behaviour, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.

Read it all (my epmhasis).

'The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalised the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control' https://t.co/KLfbexQ0eQ #china #books #21stc

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) March 15, 2021

China’s campaign of persecution against its Uighur ethnic minority has violated every article in the UN genocide convention, a landmark independent review has found.

The report by more than 50 international law experts, which runs to 25,000 pages, is the first legal non-governmental examination of a swelling body of evidence over Beijing’s treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. It adds that the government under President Xi bears responsibility for an “ongoing genocide”.

Under the UN Genocide Convention, a party can be found to commit genocide if they carry out any of five acts, including murder, displacement and birth suppression, with “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.

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China’s campaign of persecution against its Uighur ethnic minority violates every article in the UN genocide convention, a landmark review led by more than 50 international law experts has found. https://t.co/C4lhe7L1D0

— The Times (@thetimes) March 9, 2021

China upped the stakes in its tech race with the U.S. as leaders laid out plans to speed up development of advanced technologies from chips to artificial intelligence and quantum computing over five years.

In a draft economic blueprint unveiled at the country’s annual legislative gathering, officials said they would boost research and development spending by more than 7% annually over the five years to the end of 2025. That will account for a higher percentage of gross domestic product than in the previous five-year period.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said in a speech Friday that China will revise regulation and policies to support the flow of venture capital into startups, free up bank lending and extend tax incentives to encourage research and development.

Economists and industry analysts say China’s 14th five-year plan stands out for its emphasis on advanced technologies and innovation. It also included China’s vision for 2035, when the country expects to have “significant breakthroughs on core technologies and seeks to be among the most innovative nations globally.”

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China upped the stakes in its tech race with the U.S. as leaders laid out plans to speed up development of technologies such as chips, artificial intelligence and quantum computing over five years. https://t.co/vdTvYYC0kS

— WSJ China Real Time (@ChinaRealTime) March 8, 2021

While Americans rightly exult in the achievements of U.S. medalists, “Chariots of Fire” also serves as a reminder that athletics and even patriotism only mean so much. When Liddell is informed that a qualifying heat takes place on Sunday, his Sabbath, he chooses not to compete in that race. The camera cuts from athletes at the Olympics to Liddell reading a passage in Isaiah: “Behold the nations are as a drop in the bucket . . . but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings, as eagles. They shall run, and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint.” David Puttnam, a “Chariots of Fire” producer, wrote me that the verses were “specifically selected by the actor, the late Ian Charleson, who gave himself the task of reading the entire Bible whilst preparing for the film.”

The Isaiah passage is liturgically important for Jews: Parts of it are declaimed in synagogue on the Sabbath when we read God’s command to Abraham to leave the center of civilization and found a family, and a faith, in a new land. Isaiah reminds Jews that Abraham’s children have encountered much worse than what Harold Abrahams experienced. While most nations now rest on the ash heap of history, the biblical Abraham’s odyssey continues. The countries competing in today’s Olympics come and go, while those who “wait upon the Lord” endure.

“Chariots of Fire” also offers a message for people of faith who have grown troubled by the secularization of society and the realization that they are often scorned by elites. Like Liddell, we may be forced to choose religious principle over social success. Hopefully, however, we will be able to use our gifts to sanctify this world. As Liddell’s father told his son in the film: “Run in God’s name, and let the world stand back in wonder.”

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‘The Flying Scotsman’ Eric Liddell won gold in the men’s 400m at the Paris Olympics in 1924 🏅
The film #ChariotsofFire tells the story of his athletic career.
See Eileen Soper’s portrait of Liddell -who died #otd in 1945- at #ScotPortrait in Edinburgh: https://t.co/IW0xyUOtYa pic.twitter.com/Sr2hpbnh2C

— National Galleries (@NatGalleriesSco) February 21, 2019

God whose strength bears us up as on mighty wings: We rejoice in remembering thy athlete and missionary, Eric Liddell, to whom thou didst bestow courage and resolution in contest and in captivity; and we pray that we also may run with endurance the race that is set before us and persevere in patient witness, until we wear that crown of victory won for us by Jesus our Savior; who with thee and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

On this day, Feb. 21, 1945, Eric Liddell died at the age of 43. A Scottish Olympic champion runner before becoming a missionary to China, Liddell was captured by the Japanese during WWII and died while imprisoned. His life as a runner was portrayed in the film "Chariots of Fire." pic.twitter.com/rq9jHxdN5i

— Barry McCarty (@barrymccarty) February 21, 2021

Nearly every product in American homes, from lightbulbs to couches, windows and Wi-Fi routers, conforms to standards and measurements of a global system established to ensure quality and seamless operation.

Industrial standards, created by the U.S. and its allies over decades, form an invisible matrix of rules that underpin the global marketplace. Mundane though it may sound, this uniformity is critical to international trade in how it guarantees that bolts, USB plugs and shipping containers can all be used interchangeably world-wide. The standards reflect the consensus of international panels long dominated by Western technical experts.

China now wants to take the lead in fields of the future. To the consternation of many Western countries, Beijing is employing state funding and political influence to try to define the norms for all manner of cutting-edge technologies that span telecommunications, electricity transmission and artificial intelligence.

“Dominance of technical standards underpinning information and communications technologies and other emerging fields is integral to Beijing’s ambitions,” said Congress’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission in its annual report in December.

China’s efforts are driven by the desire to outdo the West, as well as amass profits.

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Western nations have long steered the global standards for nearly every modern product. China now wants to grab the wheel. https://t.co/WaFFU21z6h

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) February 7, 2021

The United States is “deeply disturbed” by reports of systematic rape and sexual abuse against women in internment camps for ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region and there must be serious consequences for atrocities committed there, the U.S. State Department said on Wednesday.

A BBC report earlier on Wednesday said women in the camps were subject to rape, sexual abuse and torture. The British broadcaster said “several former detainees and a guard have told the BBC they experienced or saw evidence of an organized system of mass rape, sexual abuse and torture.”

Asked to comment, a State Department spokeswoman said: “We are deeply disturbed by reports, including first-hand testimony, of systematic rape and sexual abuse against women in internment camps for ethnic Uighurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang.”

The spokeswoman reiterated U.S. charges that China has committed “crimes against humanity and genocide” in Xinjiang and added: “These atrocities shock the conscience and must be met with serious consequences.”

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U.S. 'deeply disturbed' by reports of systematic rape of Muslims in China camps https://t.co/mt5fGjzgWB pic.twitter.com/HczEtNw2XL

— Reuters (@Reuters) February 4, 2021

Read it all.

This is evil, and worse than anyone thought. At one- million-plus Uighurs and others unjustly interned, the world can’t continue its silence. https://t.co/UQ1nz0FS9E

— K.A. Ellis 🌍 (@K_A_Ellis) February 3, 2021

Article content may not be suitable for some blog readers–KSH.

Who really won the Cold War? Maybe China.

In 1972, Cold War logic pushed President Richard Nixon into an unlikely alliance with Mao Zedong—bringing China back into the mainstream of the world economy. In 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union encouraged “end of history” hubris that blinded the West to the consequences of China’s rise.

Fast forward to 2020 and China has emerged as a major global power, its single-party rule and state-dominated economy the cause of alarm in foreign capitals—and pride in Beijing. By 2035, Bloomberg Economics forecasts, China will have overtaken the U.S. to become the world’s biggest economy and perhaps also its most powerful political actor.

China’s rise is just one part of a larger shift that’s already under way and looks set to accelerate in the decades ahead.

Bloomberg Economics has used a growth accounting framework—adding up the contributions of labor, capital and productivity—to forecast potential GDP through 2050 for 39 countries, from the U.S. to Ghana. We’ve used that data to map some of the key geographic and political shifts in store for the world economy.

The results suggest that a remarkable period of stability, stretching from the end of World War II through to the early 21st century, is coming to an end. The center of economic gravity is shifting from West to East, from advanced economies to emerging markets, from free markets to state controls and from established democracies to authoritarian and populist rulers. The transition is already upending global politics, economics and markets. This is just the beginning.

Much could happen to throw our projections off track. The Covid crisis is demonstrating how pandemics can reconfigure the global economic map. Wars, natural disasters and financial meltdowns can do the same. So could policy choices on globalization and climate change. Still, absent a crystal ball, forecasts of potential growth provide the most reliable basis for thinking about the long term.

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An absolutely fascinating read – An Economist’s Guide to the World in 2050 https://t.co/1RUswpBD8I #economics #business #politics #law #society #developmenteconomics #sustainability #globalisation #internationaltrade #protectionism #internationalrelations

— The Mr Moosajee (@BusEconYMO_HGS) November 12, 2020