Taking its cue from Nancy Pelosi’s early August visit to Taiwan, the US Congress continues to lead America’s squeeze play on China. At the same time, the Biden Administration is not too far behind in continuing to pressure China. The combination of these two...
With the Chinese renminbi (RMB) approaching the seemingly key threshold of “7” relative to the US dollar, rumor-driven foreign exchange markets are on edge. Those fears are overblown for three key reasons: First, RMB management is the least of China’s current...
The August 26 preliminary agreement between China’s CSRC (China Securities Regulatory Commission) and America’s PCAOB (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) on cross-border audit inspections is welcome and encouraging news. The well-telegraphed agreement was...
It turns out that Speaker Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in early August was the tip of a much larger iceberg. Not only was it immediately followed by a bipartisan congressional delegation led by US Senator Ed Markey (a Democrat) and then a subsequent visit by Indiana...
Kurt Campbell, National Security Council Indo-Pacific Coordinator (aka Biden’s “Asia man”) has an important cameo role in Accidental Conflict. As I note in the book, “In an earlier incarnation at the State Department, Campbell played a key tole in developing one of...
The predictable blowback on my latest FT opinion piece fixated on misdirected efforts to provide justification for Nancy Pelosi’s pro-independence stance on Taiwan. I cited the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué as providing the bedrock foundation for US acceptance of the “One...
Predictably, the Chinese have responded with a vengeance to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2-3 chest-thumping visit to Taiwan. The Speaker’s remarks, which unexpectedly found me offering live color commentary at the time on CNBC Asia, played well in domestic...
Henry Kissinger recently remarked in a fascinating interview that the United States has an unfortunate penchant for seeking “endless confrontations” with China. This resonates with a key theme of Accidental Conflict, which stresses the blame game as an inherent...
China has been the greatest beneficiary of the current wave of globalization. In the decade prior to China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization, Chinese exports averaged just 2% of total world exports. By 2021, that share had risen to 12.7%. China is...
Largely in response to China’s so-called “dynamic zero-Covid” policy, official government statistics just revealed that the Chinese economy slowed to a virtual standstill in the second quarter of this year. The increase of +0.4 % in real GDP is reported on a...