Category: China

Creative destruction, or destructive creations? Part 2, in with the new?

18 June, 2009 (17:03) | China, Cities, Slums, Theory, Uighurs, Urban Renewal | 3 comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

In yesterday post, using as our text a New York Times article on the proposed comprehensive slum redevelopment of Kashgar, Xinjiang:

Kashgar, though, is not a typical Chinese city. Chinese security officials consider it a breeding ground for a small but resilient movement of Uighur [...]

Creative destruction, or destructive creations? Part 1, out with the old?

17 June, 2009 (09:35) | China, Cities, Slums, Theory, Uighurs, Urban Renewal | 2 comments

When you demolish an urbanized informal or ancient settlement, are your motives pure or impure?
 

Guilty or innocent?
 
If you are Robert Mugabe, the answer is clear: it’s slow genocide by bulldozer. 
 
If you’re the City of Boston in the 1950’s, the answer is likewise clear: your motives were good even if your outcomes were bad.
 
If [...]

Yin and Yank?

1 April, 2009 (10:45) | Capital markets, China, Global markets, Securitization, US News | 1 comment

In the weeks and months to come, you will hear much wailing about Chinese policy this and Chinese economic pressure that – and there’s no doubt that China’s economic policy now has a powerful effect on America’s – but let that not blind you to the curious (and potentially hopeful?) interdependency that appears now to [...]

As the china breaks

27 January, 2009 (10:36) | Capital markets, China, Global news | No comments

As risk re-pricing is now sweeping the globe, it will touch every moneyed nation, whether it be debtor (the US) or creditor (China).  Even as the US economy undergoes its multi-stage recapitalization – first HERA, then TARP, now the Obama-nibus Stimulus Bill – we will get a first-hand experiment in how different financial ecosystems respond [...]

The clatter of breaking China?

28 November, 2008 (10:57) | Capital markets, China, Global news, Subprime | No comments

You can’t boom an economy without breaking vases?
 
If capital is global – and it is – then, in the words of a Miami Vice villain, “When we sneeze?  Everybody — catches cold,” and no other nation has more invested, financially and otherwise, in the US economy’s health, than China.  And, if Forbes [September] is to [...]