20190712_DaliYang_v2.mp3

You won't want to miss Prof. Yang's expert analysis of the US-China relationship, and what the future might hold for both sides of this persistent conflict.

There are two reports I always look forward to reading each June: the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, and analyst Mary Meeker’s annual report on Internet trends. For those interested in the art of investment prognostication, a stroll through the archives of Meeker’s reports since 1996 is fascinating. They chart the growth of the Internet and the disruption of global communications that have impacted nearly everything.

As some of my more patient friends know, I have been toiling away at a book on Chinese monetary history during the Interwar period off and on for some years.  Immersing myself in the public and private words of the historic figures of the 1930’s has perhaps sensitized me to the propensity of even well-intentioned leaders to glide into chaos.  That which is unthinkable inexorably becomes inevitable.
 

Today, five days after he tweeted this deadline and nine months since he first declared the intention to do so, President Trump raised the tariff on $200B of imports from China from the +10% first applied in March 2018 to +25%. The action follows China’s message to U.S. negotiators backtracking on a number of earlier promises to increase intellectual property protections.
 

By SUN Xi and Herta Monica Montesino Cucos

“The China-US relationship can never be too good or too bad” or so believed Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of modern China. Today, however, there are new views according to which the China-US relationship will never return to how it was in the past, and that it cannot avoid the “Thucydides trap.” It is arguable whether China and the United States have started a “new Cold War,” but the trade and technology war is clearly already going on.

“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth— persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”   John F. Kennedy, Yale University Commencement Address June 11, 1962