China Research

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited China only recently without sending kind diplomatic signals to China’s political leadership. Rather the opposite – by mentioning a number of critical points that really are sensitive to Chinese top politicians, such as human rights and the complicated relations to Taiwan. Scarcely surprising, Foreign Minister Wang Yi answered very clearly that China does need any instructions from the West.

This kind of Chinese reaction on foreign critical comments or “recommendations” certainly cannot be regarded as something new. I remember very well how irritated the Chinese reacted 15-20 years ago when American presidential administrations regularly exhorted Chinese political decision-makers to finish their unfair exchange rate policy and to, consequently, finally strengthen the renminbi.

However, China never listened to these direct American attempts to influence domestic policy decisions. They will not either in the foreseeable future.

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This time, I also want to recommend two articles with interesting views on international developments.

First, I find the paper of Pinepoli Goldberg(Yale University) and Tristan Reed (The World Bank) about the possibility of deglobalization very interesting. They see a slowdown of globalization but – contrary to other economists – no a reversal (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4413852&dgcid=ejournal_htmlemail_nber%3Aworking%3Apaper%3Aseries_abstractlink and NBER Working Paper No. w31115.

Second, I would like to focus on the illuminating article by Rolf Langhammer (Kiel Institue for the World Economy) on the increasing cross-border service trading and the difficulties in factfinding, mainly demonstrated by the German example (https://www.ifw-kiel.de/fileadmin/Dateiverwaltung/IfW-Publications/-ifw/Kiel_Policy_Brief/2023/KPB_166.pdf)

Hubert Fromlet
Affiliate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University
Editorial board

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