China

Today’s news on the Chinese economy – that growth has slowed for the sixth quarter running – is no big surprise: the question for months now has been whether China’s landing will be hard or soft, not whether there will be a landing. Indeed, some analysts feel that the numbers suggest a recovery in the second half, and both Asian and European markets are buoyed by apparent relief the data isn’t worse.  Official Chinese statistics have to be taken with a large pinch of salt, obviously. Looking at the headline GDP numbers isn’t enough, as we pointed out recently – electricity consumption is probably a better gauge. But wait –

It’s immensely difficult to manage such a huge and complex country as China, we are constantly told by its mandarins. Indeed it is. Tens of thousands of Hong Kongers took to the streets over the weekend to protest their new leader, the Chinese Communist Party-friendly Leung Chun-ying. There have been demonstrations annually on 1 July to mark the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Britain, but Sunday’s was the biggest in years. The numbers of protestors range from 65,000 to 400,000 depending on whether you ask the police or the demo organisers. They’re unhappy about everything from corruption to pollution to the widening income gap to a construction scandal surrounding

China’s rumour mill, hyperactive even in the calmest of times, has been in overdrive in the past two days. Monday evening and early Tuesday in Beijing, the country’s Twitter-like microblogs were abuzz with speculation there could have been a military coup, possibly linked with the recent demotion of Communist official Bo Xilai. There hasn’t been a coup, nor is there likely to be. Crazy rumours swirl in China every day (though not always of this level of seriousness). It’s said that authorities are now banning the word ‘coup’ on microblogs.   The bigger issue for China is that its policy of controlling information, while trying to catapult itself into the

Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Russia marked the beginning of the end of the Putin era. It won’t feel like it for another few years, as the Russian strongman ascends to the nation’s Presidency again and bestrides the international stage. But when future historians come to examine post-Putin Russia, the end of 2011 will be seen as the point at which the transition began. Exit polls showed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with less than 50 per cent of the vote. United Russia held a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma. The significant drop in support for United Russia — despite electoral fraud and with only tame parties

In this week’s Spectator we have a piece from one of our former editors, Nigel Lawson, where he confronts this idea that the West’s woes can be blamed on a new bogeyman called ‘global imbalances’. This is fast becoming the received wisdom, something that even the bankers can point to and blame. It gets everyone off the hook, and takes attention away from the basic failure to regulate the supply of money and quality of investments. CoffeeHousers may be familiar with the argument by now. Time and time again, we hear central bankers shrug their shoulders and say something like: ‘Don’t blame us central bankers and financial policymakers for the

Tenzin Wangmo, a 20-year-old Tibetan nun, woke up to clear skies on October 17th. At around noon, she gathered the things she needed and walked down the valley to the bridge below her nunnery. Once there, she found a suitable spot, perhaps thumbed the prayer beads strung around her neck one final time, and began to shout. “Let His Holiness the Dalai Lama return to Tibet!”, she cried. “We want religious freedom!” Then she set herself on fire. She walked up and down for about eight minutes, a witness says, before collapsing. Ten days before, two teenage former monks set themselves alight in the same region, Aba county in ethnically

The punchline to yesterday’s eurosummit comes in the very first paragraph of the official statement, released in the darkness of morning: “The euro continues to rest on solid fundamentals.” Now that you’ve brushed away the tears from that one, what was it that was actually agreed upon in the end? The main measure is effectively a fiscal target for Greece: its national debt, expected to peak at around 180 per cent of GDP in 2013, will come down to 120 per cent by 2020. And this will be achieved by cutting the value of bonds held by private investors in half, alongside further waves of privitisation and Greek frugality. Brussels