US president-elect Donald Trump has not moderated his anti-trade tone since winning the election. Instead, he has upped the ante and fired a series of early warning shots in what could turn into a full-blown global trade war, with disastrous consequences for the United States and the rest of the world.
On New Year's Eve, one of my best friends sent me an emotional text message saying she was lucky to have taken off from Brussels International Airport in the early hours of March 22, just a few hours before the terrorist attacks at the airport and Maalbeek metro station in central Brussels. She wished us all the best for the New Year.
As we usher in 2017, there seems to be no alternative to uncertainty as a broadly, if not universally, applicable catchall to events whose full ramifications are yet to be seen. It applies fittingly to so many countries, so many people, in so many ways.
Many corrupt officials have confessed that it is the lack of effective supervision that made them fearless in their pursuit of illegal gains. A new reform aims to create a supervisory environment that means civil servants no longer have the space to develop such audacity.
THE STATE COUNCIL, China's Cabinet, has issued a guiding document calling for strict records of the creditworthiness of government officials and local government departments. Southern Metropolis Daily comments:
ZHAO CHUNHUA, a woman in North China's Tianjin municipality, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison by the local people's court because she ran a stall where people could pay to shoot balloons with toy guns. In another case, Wang Lijun, a farmer from the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, was found guilty of illegal trading, because he purchased corn from local farmers and resold them to companies. Beijing News comments:
ZHAOPIN, a leading job platform in China, has released the results of its survey of white collar workers, which found over 40 percent of those surveyed did not take their annual paid leave. Southern Metropolis Daily commented on Monday:
The Central Economic Work Conference, held in Beijing in mid-December, set the tone for economic development in 2017. This is the first time the conference upgraded "seeking progress while maintaining stability" to an unprecedentedly high level - from a methodology for economic work to an important principle for governance.
The year 2016 will be remembered for many things, not least of which is how the old world order got tossed out and a new world order got established. It will be remembered for Syria constantly hogging the headlines for bombardments, destruction and the death of thousands of civilians, while the world continued to go about its business as usual.
Ever since Donald Trump won the United States' presidential election, analysts across the world have written tons of articles with some expressing "cautious optimism" and others "guarded pessimism". And given the appearance of another "black swan" - the election of Rodrigo Duterte as the Philippines' president, I can guess where the international situation and the United States' foreign policy are headed toward.
A group of European Union parliamentarians have added their voices to calls from climate action groups and much of Europe's solar industry for an end to punitive tariffs on Chinese solar power equipment.
Since President Xi Jinping proposed the Belt and Road Initiative, which includes the Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road, in 2013, more than 60 countries along the ancient trade routes have echoed the initiative and worked out their own strategies to push forward its implementation.
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Raymond Zhou
Op Rana
Berlin Fang
Zhu Yuan
Huang Xiangyang
Chen Weihua
