Gordon G. Chang

"Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage." C.S. Lewis

Another Wei Lingling piece of stupidity. The Summit is postponed because Trump has gotten in over his head in Iran and doesn't know what to do China is seen by the rest of the world (except Israel) as the stable, responsible superpower I'm embarrassed for WSJ that they have Lingling write this stuff

One of the most atrocious international crimes being committed right now is the US blockade on Cuba. The US government is doing everything it can to strangle Cuba’s economy, especially by ramping up the oil blockade. No electricity, no oil, no fuel. Barely any food. A severe health crisis has erupted. Why is the US doing this? For no reason other than its dislike of the Cuban regime. Cuba poses no threat to the US. There is overwhelming global opposition to the US blockade. UN human rights experts have condemned it as a serious violation of international law. Now, Trump wants to take over Cuba, saying: “I can do anything I want with it.” This is one of the most grotesque crimes of our time.

Good piece (and thread) by Lizzi Lee. She notes that "In fact Xi Jinping has long been frustrated with his bureaucrats. He complained about officials who “rack up a mountain of debt, pat their butts, and walk away,” chasing short-term growth at long-term cost." The irony, of course, is that wasted investment, rising debt, and a short-term orientation might not be caused by misaligned incentives or bureaucratic incompetence so much as by Beijing's growth model itself. The problem, in other words, is structural – because China cannot get consumption growth to outpace GDP growth, it cannot change bureaucratic behavior as long as it continues to set high GDP growth target. Getting consumption growth to outpace GDP growth in a meaningful way would require either -- a productivity miracle of historic proportions, one in which higher productivity shows up almost wholly as higher household income rather than as higher business profits or government revenue, -- a substantial (and possibly disruptive) redistribution of total income (GDP) from government, businesses and the rich to ordinary households, or -- much slower GDP growth. The first outcome would obviously be the preferred one, but it may depend too much on wishful thinking, especially as productivity growth has actually been declining for years. The second outcome would require major (and possibly disruptive) structural reforms that so far Beijing has been unwilling to consider, probably because these would anyway lead to the third outcome, which Beijing is so far unwilling to accept. This means that the only way local governments can meet Beijing's GDP growth target is by directing large amounts of cheap credit into rising property, infrastructure and manufacturing investment, whether or not these investments are economically justified. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is effectively what those much-criticized officials have done. Their behavior has responded more or less correctly to their incentives, which in turn were not the result of absent-mindedness but rather of the country's economic growth model. The fault, in other words, may lie not in the inefficient implementation of economic policies so much as in the policies themselves.