JOHN GIBSON—In all urban areas apart from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, nominal values for incomes or for gross domestic product need to be multiplied by at least 40% to put them on a comparable basis to Beijing. The reason is that the cost-of-living in Beijing is so much higher, and it is notable that this comparison only accounts for differences in housing prices. These price differences are primarily due to urban land prices and are not due to housing quality differences across China’s cities.
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China: A New Philosophy of Economics
PETER KOENIG—The west consistently seeks to undermine the interests of their partners, be it for trade or political agreements; be it partners from the west, their smaller and weaker brothers; or from the east; or from the south – there is always an element of exploitation, of “one-upmanship”, of outdoing a partner, of domination. Equality and fairness are unknown by the west.
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China-Africa, A New Accord
LEO ZHAO—For 500 years, without exception, foreign agency in the land of Africa has been exclusively self serving and brutally exploitative. Thus it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine the possibility of any other kind of relationship between outsiders and Africans. But today, at such a crucial time of global transformation, for many reasons including the future for entire populations and the world, it is vitally important to not only imagine, but to observe and support, based on concrete facts, the building of exactly a different kind of relationship.
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WORLD AFFAIRS: AS THE WEST STUMBLES, CHINA AND EURASIA LEAD—A REPLY
THOMAS HON WING POLIN—The power and influence of the West’s long-dominant Empire is visibly waning, along with its predatory neoliberal global order. What has risen to challenge it on its home ground is not socialism or its humane impulses to care for the 99%, and not the 1%. The heyday of that effort has come and gone.
The new, emerging challenger to the status quo is a right-wing “nationalism” that’s crude, ugly, vindictive. Anti-foreigner, anti-women, anti-everything-that’s-not-us, it is fueled by the frustrated aspirations of have-nots – the angry losers under the neoliberal order. They are the karmic payback for the depredations of the Empire’s elites.”
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