According to RIA Novosti, Russia-China trade rose 44 percent year on year, to $48 billion last year. Not surprisingly, 90 percent of Russian exports to China consisted of energy products and raw materials, while 40 percent of Chinese exports to Russia were engineering or electronic products. Again, in some ways this kind of reinforcement of bilateral ties among strategic rivals represents a threat to America’s interests. But in other, broader ways, it lessens the potential for a conflict between them that could threaten the stability of the global order. With regard to the more specific question of how China’s growing [...]
The alarmist scenarios about China’s rise would worry me a lot more if the Chinese were hellbent on using globalization to slowly insinuate traditional Chinese culture on an unsuspecting world. Outside of tofu and soy sauce, though, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, the Chinese elites seem much more interested in drinking French wine and buying contemporary art (albeit primarily Chinese contemporary art for the time being). To me, the tensions that continued globalization will inevitably raise between China (the government) and China (the people) seem by far more potentially alarming than those it will raise between China [...]
A few years ago, Hampton’s post about democracy promotion and terrorism probably ran the risk of being twisted by unscrupulous critics into an apology for the terrorists. That got me thinking about the logical inconsistency employed by those who argued for democracy promotion, while denying that any real political grievances feed violent Islamic extremism. Fortunately, those days are over, and we can now discuss things as they exist in the real world. Hampton already mentioned all the caveats necessary when considering democracy promotion. To which Dan Drezner will apparently be adding one more in Congressional testimony tomorrow: sovereign wealth funds. [...]
