| | | | What Tiananmen Teaches Us About China and Autocracy | | As today marks the 30th anniversary of China's crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, many writers have opined on what China lost on that day—Minxin Pei, for instance, recalls the movement toward intellectual openness that never returned—but worth equal examination is how China has managed to suppress its country's collective memory of the event.
That's the subject of a new book, The Last Secret, which has made its way to publication in Hong Kong, Ian Johnson writes in The New York Review of Books. The book contains newly surfaced documents from a post-crackdown meeting convened by then-Chinese-leader Deng Xiaoping, in which prominent officials were made to accept that firing on demonstrators had been the right move. It's a lesson in how autocrats intimidate and control both debate and history.
That this record has only surfaced now is a testament to China's ability to suppress history, about which The New Yorker's Jiayang Fan spoke on this week's GPS; the result, as described by Fan on GPS and by Eric Fish in a Time essay, is a younger Chinese generation with a fragmented view of Tiananmen Square, one that defies summary as facts filter to them in indirect ways. | | How a War with Iran Would Go | | | Writing in Foreign Affairs, Ilan Goldenberg offers some healthy blow-by-blow speculation as to how a war between the US and Iran might proceed. Things would likely start with a "small, deniable attack" on a "US-related target" by Iranian proxies, Goldenberg suggests, and things would escalate from there. Limited US missile strikes, as America conducted against Syria, might find more eager retaliation from Iran. As attacks escalate, the US could be drawn into an all-out war against a country with a population three times larger than Iraq's at the start of the Iraq War. Israel could be pulled in, and massive refugee flows and regional chaos would ensue; it's not only a warning but the reason, Goldenberg asserts, that no one (save John Bolton, he writes) seems to want war. | | Will Europe's Greening Be Russia's Gain? | | | After Europe's Green parties surged in last week's elections, Jakub Grygiel posits in an American Interest essay that Russia, ultimately, will benefit. As Europe seeks to reduce carbon emissions by weaning itself off coal, the continent will inevitably turn toward cleaner natural gas from Russia, Grygiel predicts. Russia is, by far, Europe's largest gas supplier (accounting for 40.2% of EU gas imports in 2016, while Norway supplied the next most at 24.9%), and Grygiel supposes that climate action will split the continent politically, as a Europe-wide mandate to replace coal won't sit well with Eastern and Central European countries wary of Russian dominance and dependence on imported energy. | | America's Chinese Approach to Middle East Peace | | The US hasn't yet released its Jared-Kushner-led peace plan for Israelis and Palestinians, but Kori Schake of the International Institute for Strategic Studies writes in The Atlantic that the administration's approach "sounds more like Chinese foreign policy than it does American foreign policy." America will lead a conference in Bahrain that aims to bring Arab investment to Palestinians, and Schake observes that, in a way, the approach mirrors China's typical emphasis of economics over political rights in its foreign dealings.
"By focusing on economics," Khaled Elgindy adds in Foreign Policy, "the US administration has fundamentally misdiagnosed the problem." The main obstacle to Palestinian prosperity is Israeli policy, he writes, surmising the US has its approach backward. | | Has the World Outgrown Globalization? | | That's what McKinsey partner Susan Lund suggests in the latest episode of the McKinsey Podcast. Global trade has recovered since the financial crisis but has not resumed its pre-crash rates of increase, and Lund observes that while "a lot of us thought, well, when the recovery gets going in the US and Europe, then trade will 'go back to normal.' Now we're 10 years out from that point, and we can look back and see, in fact, we're in a very different chapter of globalization."
It's partly a story of economic growth: Goods produced in places like China are now being consumed there, as the developing world gains a larger consumer class. The world is moving from a model of globalization to regionalization, Lund says, with lots of trade between neighboring countries in Europe and Asia. As automation gains traction, the trend away from globalization may hasten, Lund says, as things like 3-D printing and AI will favor local production. | | | | | | |
