Last week, the United States and China announced a new trade deal on the eve of China launching a sweeping conference to promote its One Belt, One Road development and infrastructure investment initiative. How good are the terms of the Washington-Beijing agreement, and how do they relate to China’s push to become a bigger trading partner with many of its neighbors?
Charlene Barshefsky was a name you couldn’t avoid if you were in Beijing in the late 1990s. As the United States Trade Representative from 1997 to 2001, she led the American team that negotiated China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Jon Finer was Chief of Staff and Director of Policy Planning for former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry at the U.S. Department of State, where he previously served as Deputy Chief of Staff for policy. Prior to that, he worked for four years at the White House, including as Senior Advisor to Deputy National Security Advisor Antony Blinken, as Special Advisor for the Middle East and North Africa, and as the foreign policy speechwriter for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden. He joined the Obama Administration in 2009 as a White House Fellow, assigned to the Office of the White House Chief of Staff and the National Security Council staff.
Before entering government service, Finer was a foreign and national correspondent at the Washington Post, where he reported from more than 20 countries and spent 18 months covering the war in Iraq as an embedded journalist.
One hundred days into Donald Trump’s presidency, he has shocked the establishment and foreign governments with many foreign policy reversals, and also some surprising areas of consistency. In this podcast, Paul Haenle sat down with Jon Finer, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State John Kerry and Director of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State, to discuss the major takeaways from Trump’s first 100 days in office, and the future of U.S.-China engagement.
Brook Larmer is the author of Operation Yao Ming: The Chinese Sports Empire, American Big Business, and the Making of an NBA Superstar. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and The Economists’ 1843 Magazine. His New York Times Magazine feature on the Chinese tennis player Li Na was selected for the anthology, Best American Sports Writing 2014. Previously, Larmer served as Newsweek bureau chief in Buenos Aires, Miami, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. He lives in Bangkok with his wife and two sons.
Tens of thousands of Chinese companies and institutions—including several major firms in Hong Kong—have been crippled by a global cyberattack as people returned to work on Monday.
India’s main objection is the partnership China is developing with Pakistan. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a key component of One Belt, One Road -- passes through the disputed region of Kashmir, which both India and Pakistan claim in its entirety.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region’s most precious resources.
In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in the nineteenth century—pearlers had stripped riverbeds of mussels, mushroom pickers had uprooted the steppe, and fur-bearing animals had disappeared from the forest. In response, the court turned to “purification”; it registered and arrested poachers, reformed territorial rule, and redefined the boundary between the pristine and the corrupted. Schlesinger’s resulting analysis provides a framework for rethinking the global invention of nature. —Stanford University Press
Mike Ives, The New York Times (January 6, 2017)
“A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule,” Jonathan Schlesinger, chinadialogue (July 10, 2016)
Chinese President Xi Jinping and 29 other heads of state on Monday reaffirmed their commitment to build an open economy and ensure free and inclusive trade, under the ambitious Belt and Road initiative led by Beijing.
The Trump administration will eventually awaken to the fact that Beijing cannot, and has no desire to, deliver on North Korea.
