China

[Download the full paper here].

By Katie Stalter, Center for Social Development

This was originally posted on The Center for Social Development's site.

The greatest loss of human life and economic damage suffered by South Asia since 2001 has not been due to terrorism and its ensuing conflicts, but rather due to natural disasters ranging from the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the Indus floods of 2010 to seasonal water shortages and drought.  Although such calamities themselves might not be preventable, their human impact can certainly be mitigated. This report argues that such mitigation of environmental stresses is possible only through regional approaches to ecological cooperation.

The South China Sea has returned to the geopolitical spotlight, eclipsing the Taiwan Straits as the region's most volatile flashpoint.

But quite unlike the Taiwan or the associated Quemoy/Matsu dispute, the South China Sea's claimant nations are at least as interested in developing the region's economic potential as they are in asserting sovereignty and building military bases.

This opens a window to resolving the dispute in a way that looks beyond the traditional frame of sovereignty and towards a win-win economic benefit.

At some point in the next 200 million years, according to Yale University scientists, the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates will collide at the North Pole. When they are eventually joined by Africa, the singular super-continent will re-emerge, reminiscent of the Pangea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago.

Romesh Ratnesar considers the future of American strategy in the Middle East after regional protests and President Obama's remarks at the U.N. General Assembly. Emily Parker explains the global implications of recent uprisings in China. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

For years, global economists have forecast a slowdown in China’s breakneck growth. Now that the deceleration is actually here, rich-world investors, companies and government officials, reliant on the Chinese juggernaut for their financial well-being, seem impatient for the revelry to resume, and are hoping that the Chinese government will follow up its stimulus of package of 2008-2009 with another generous injection of capital. (On Sept.

It has been just over 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the last great additions to the world’s list of independent nations. As Russia’s satellite republics staggered onto the global stage, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was it: the end of history, the final major release of static energy in a system now moving very close to equilibrium. A few have joined the club since — Eritrea, East Timor, the former Yugoslavian states, among others — but by the beginning of the 21st century, the world map seemed pretty much complete.

Economic interdependence among nations, Americans have long believed, is the surest and safest path both to a wide prosperity and a perpetual peace. If all nations jointly depend together on one vast "global" factory for many basic goods, so our thinking holds, no one state will ever dare disrupt the functioning of this "communalized" system.

In 2011, China’s economy grew 9.2 percent, compared with 10.4 percent in 2010. In the second quarter of 2012 that growth rate had fallen further, to 7.6 percent. That’s set alarm bells ringing about the fate of the China miracle. Will the most successful and rapid decline in global poverty in the history of humanity shudder to a halt? Will the Asian Century be postponed, leaving the U.S., against the odds, as the undisputed top nation for the foreseeable future?