The Riddle of Backshoring

Everyone is preoccupied with terrorism at the moment, but this was a very important story in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. It seems that if we want American companies to bring home their manufacturing from China, we have to pay attention to the entire supply chain that they need to make their products on U.S. […]…

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East Asia Watch: The Ideological Winds of China

Something is happening in China that I haven’t seen since I first started covering it in 1979, some 35 years ago. President Xi Jinping is either starting or encouraging the start of a Maoist-style ideological campaign against Western-inspired professors, journalists, intellectuals and others who advocate human rights or political pluralism. This is exactly what Mao […]…

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What’s Truly Important about Chinese Economic Ambitions

I’m reading a lot of blather these days about how fast the Chinese economy is growing, and can continue to grow, and about how soon its total size will surpass that of the United States. These are the wrong questions to be asking. The Chinese, with four times as many people as the United States, […]…

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Anxiety Rising Over Relations Between Japan and China

I’d like to congratulate Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times for breaking this story only 24 hours after I did. Unfortunately, he had to travel to Davos to figure it out, but I was able to do it from the comfort of my North American regional headquarters: January 27, 2014 Anxiety Rising Over […]…

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Earth to Apple: You Have a Problem in China

For several decades now, Apple and many other major manufacturers have assumed that a basic model of manufacturing in China would endure forever: the Chinese would allow virtually unlimited import of Japanese parts for assembly into products destined for both the Chinese market and the world. The Apple iPhone, according to one study, consists of […]…

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