Nile Bowie — Trump’s trade war pushes Singapore to China

Premier Lee Hsien Loong, a staunch American ally, sides with Beijing as US-led trade tensions threaten the city-state's fortunes

Asia Times
Trump’s trade war pushes Singapore to China

Nile Bowie

Pepe Escobar — China? Have Grandmaster, will travel

When I moved to live in Asia in 1994, out of Paris, my first port of call was Singapore. That was at the height of the Asian miracle. Full immersion meant learning everything that revolved around Lee [Kuan Yew] — and from Lee himself. Ideology, and political gaps aside — for instance, he was not exactly his usual razor-sharp about Iran or Russia or Latin America – Lee arguably knew more about China than any outside observer/analyst.

After all, it was Lee who dazzled the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping in person, in the late 1970s, prompting Deng to launch a modern China conceived as a sort of “a thousand Singapores”; sterling economic success under tight political control. President Xi Jinping, crucially, admires Lee as “our senior who has our respect.”

As Lee tells it, when he was asked by Chinese think tanks about “peaceful rise” as the new Chinese mantra, he responded with “peaceful renaissance, or evolution, or development. A recovery of ancient glory, an updating of a once great civilization.” Not accidentally, “peaceful development” was adopted by the previous Beijing leadership.

Now that the non-stop hysterical meme across the West is the “China threat,” or, extrapolating from the South China Sea disputes, “China aggression,” it’s quite enlightening to come back to the Grandmaster for some sobering China-related hard facts. Call it the Grandmaster’s concise China, and concise China-US, most of it compiled at Lee Kuan Yew (MIT Press, 2013). No meaningful analysis of China is possible without it.

Asia Times
China? Have Grandmaster, will travel
Pepe Escobar

Unlearning Economics — The Questionable Record of Neoliberalism

Now, I suppose, is as appropriate a time as any to discuss the policies generally known as neoliberalism/free market economics: tax and spending cuts, union busting, deregulation, privatisation and free trade, and how they have fared in practice. Unsurprisingly, those on the rightdefend neoliberalism’s record. However, successes have been over exaggerated, while in cases of clear success, a closer look reveals policies which are anything but ‘neoliberal’. I’ll take a brief look at some countries or sets of countries which are commonly purported to show the success of these policies: the US & UK, Chile, Hong Kong & Singapore, and Scandinavia.

Unlearning Economics
The Questionable Record of Neoliberalism