Megatrend: Deteriorating global environment
Economic and geopolitical trends are both cycling downward, Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer and Chairman Cliff Kupchan write in their “Top Risks 2020” report, out today:
The global economy, after emerging from the great recession of 2008 with the longest expansion of the post-war period, is now softening. …
And the world is now entering a deepening geopolitical recession, with a lack of global leadership as a result of American unilateralism, an erosion of U.S.-led alliances, a Russia in decline that wants to undermine the stability and cohesion of both the U.S. and its allies, and an increasingly empowered China under consolidated leadership that’s building a competitive alternative on the global stage.
Why it matters: “This deteriorating environment is much more likely to produce a global crisis.”
Article of the day: “The relationship is in free fall”
The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, who lived in Beijing for eight years and in Washington for the past six, unleashes his shuttle reporting from the two capitals as they wrestle “to determine who will dominate the twenty-first century”:
Judd Apatow, the filmmaker and comedian, told me that Americans intended to introduce freedom to China, but instead traded it for Chinese money. “I think it happened very slowly and insidiously,” he said. “You would not see a major film company or studio make a movie that has story lines which are critical of countries with major markets or investors. … The result is, there are a million or more Muslims in re-education camps in China, and you don’t really hear much about it.”
My favorite passage:
When I started studying Mandarin, twenty-five years ago, China’s economy was smaller than Italy’s. It is now twenty-four times the size it was then, ranking second only to America’s, and the share of Chinese people in extreme poverty has shrunk to less than one per cent. Growth has slowed sharply, but the country still has legions of citizens vying to enter the middle class. It is estimated that a billion Chinese people have yet to board an airplane.
Πηγή: axios.com
