Decoupling — Editor’s note for Friday, August 19, 2022
A note for Weekly newsletter readers from Jeremy Goldkorn.
Nostalgia for the go-go years of the 1990s and 2000s filled me today as we published a new piece titled “Giant Chinese companies delisting from U.S. exchanges signals the end of an era,” by Dexter Tiff Roberts.
Roberts spent the same two decades in China that I did: mid-1990s to the mid-2010s. He was China bureau chief for Bloomberg Businessweek, and reported from all of China’s 30-some provinces and regions while he lived in Beijing.
But as he points out, the era in China that we were a part of is over.
Roberts is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Asia Security Initiative, and he teaches political science at the University of Montana. He is the author of The Myth of Chinese Capitalism: The Worker, the Factory and the Future of the World and publishes a weekly newsletter on China called Trade War. I am delighted that he will now also be writing a weekly column for us on business and the Chinese economy.
Returning to the news of the hour: Xiāo Jiànhuá 肖建华, a Chinese billionaire with Canadian citizenship who was abducted from his luxury apartment in Hong Kong in 2017, has been sentenced to 13 years in prison by a Shanghai court on graft charges.
Our phrase of the week is: What rock did you crawl out from under? (哪个石头缝里蹦出来的 nǎge shítou fèng lǐ bèng chūlái de), a term recently used on the Chinese internet in a duel of nationalist pundits.
