CHINA US Focus - Perspectives shaping the world's most important bilateral relationship

The debate is over. After six years of weighing the options, China is now firmly committed to implementing a new growth strategy. At least, that’s the verdict I gleaned from the just-completed annual China Development Forum, long China’s most important dialogue with the outside world.

Former Secretary of the US Treasury Department, Henry M. Paulson Jr., examines how better urban policies can assist China’s ailing economy, even as investment and exports continue to decline.

Last year, for the first time in Chinese history more people lived in cities and towns than in the countryside. Some 690 million urban dwellers now account for 51.3 per cent of China’s total population.   Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz has said this urban transition will be one of the two main forces [...]

Depending on how you count the numbers, there are some 200-250 million farm households in China representing a population of some 700-800 million persons. When you think about the vastness of this human resource the reality is that nearly 1 in 10 persons on this planet is a Chinese farmer, and from within China’s burgeoning [...]

The Chinese economy continues to be a hot topic in international media forums as its export growth rate starts to decline due to the dark economic clouds hanging over developed countries, particularly in the EU. When Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced a lower growth target of 7.5% for 2012 during the recent National People’s Congress, [...]

With the U.S. economy in the doldrums and Europe's ongoing debt crisis continuing its downward spiral, analysts are left to wonder if China might be the savior of the global economy or, rather, whether the country is simply a multitrillion bubble about to burst. China's great leap forward in public infrastructure and urban construction had, [...]