The following interview with the Global Times took place on 15 0ctober, bit was not published: 1. Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo this year. What’s your comment on the decision of Nobel committee? Can the award be interpreted as the pressure of the Western countries on China to accelerate its [...]

Academic papers and books on democracy continue to proliferate.  Mainstream western opinion supports views such as: • Rapid economic development quickens democratisation. • The liberal democratic path is the only sustainable route to modernity. • Non-democratic regimes are necessarily ridden with corruption and cronyism. Two questions which require far more attention than they receive are: • What is meant [...]

The seventh session of the Informal European Parliament Dialogue on China took place at the European Parliament on 13c April and was organised by the Brussels Institute of China Contemporary Studies (BICCS).  The Dialogue was attended by some 60 MEPs, European and Chinese diplomats, think tank analysts, academics and others.  Elmar Brok MEP and Reinhard [...]

Feng Zhongping*, a politically influential scholar, gave an interesting perspective on the EU-China relationship.  He insisted that Europe was important to China.   However, it came third behind the US, and the neighbourhood countries of Russia and Japan.  The EU is China’s number 1 trade partner and a valuable supplier of technology.  But the EU’s political [...]

A lecture by Professor Li Jinshan of Zhejiang University on 27 April surprised the BICCS (Brussels Institute for Contemporary China Studies) with the complexity of the Chinese governing structure.  This illustrates why the enforcement of laws passed by the Central Government is not easy, as foreign companies have found to their disadvantage.  China has five [...]

Ian Bremmer’s article in the March 2010 issue of Prospect is well worth reading.  The world’s two great powers are growing dangerously hostile to one another. Could this be worse than the cold war? Previous posts have raised the increasing conflict between China and the US.  President Hu Jintao’s attendance at the nuclear disarmament conference [...]

The US Treasury is expected to issue its semi-annual report on 15 April.  Will it declare China a “currency manipulator”?  This would be “for purposes of preventing effective balance of payments adjustments or gaining unfair competitive advantage in international trade.”  This could lead to the imposition of countervailing duties on Chinese imports.  The possibility of [...]

The World Commerce Review of March 2010 contained the following article: China’s Future Role on the World Stage Stanley Crossick The world stage is changing fast and China is changing fast. In order to examine China’s future role on the world stage, we must first address the ways the world and China are changing. It [...]

The following article appeared in the World Commercial Review of December 2009 Trading With China: Win-Win Or Zero Sum Game? Stanley Crossick A casual reader of the European and American media might be forgiven for thinking that many people see the West losing out to China over trade. It is understandable that many, including of [...]

The following article was published in the Global Times on 18 March 2010 By Stanley Crossick By now, China’s economic success over the last 30 years is an accepted fact and does not need the citing of statistics. But what are the main characteristics of the Chinese development model, and is it sustainable? It is not [...]