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Larry Summers
April 5, 2015
（个人网站专栏）
Time US leadership woke up to new economic era

This past month may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system. True, there have been any number of periods of frustration for the US before, and times when American behaviour was hardly multilateralist, such as the 1971 Nixon shock, ending the convertibility of the dollar into gold. But I can think of no event since Bretton Woods comparable to the combination of China’s effort to establish a major new institution and the failure of the US to persuade dozens of its traditional allies, starting with Britain, to stay out of it.

This failure of strategy and tactics was a long time coming, and it should lead to a comprehensive review of the US approach to global economics. With China’s economic size rivalling America’s and emerging markets accounting for at least half of world output, the global economic architecture needs substantial adjustment. Political pressures from all sides in the US have rendered it increasingly dysfunctional.

Largely because of resistance from the right, the US stands alone in the world in failing to approve the International Monetary Fund governance reforms that Washington itself pushed for in 2009. By supplementing IMF resources, this change would have bolstered confidence in the global economy. More important, it would come closer to giving countries such as China and India a share of IMF votes commensurate with their new economic heft.

Meanwhile, pressures from the left have led to pervasive restrictions on infrastructure projects financed through existing development banks, which consequently have receded as funders, even as many developing countries now see infrastructure finance as their principle external funding need.

With US commitments unhonoured and US-backed policies blocking the kinds of finance other countries want to provide or receive through the existing institutions, the way was clear for China to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. There is room for argument about the tactical approach that should have been taken once the initiative was put forward. But the larger question now is one of strategy. Here are three precepts that US leaders should keep in mind.

First, American leadership must have a bipartisan foundation at home, be free from gross hypocrisy and be restrained in the pursuit of self-interest. As long as one of our major parties is opposed to essentially all trade agreements, and the other is resistant to funding international organisations, the US will not be in a position to shape the global economic system.

Other countries are legitimately frustrated when US officials ask them to adjust their policies — then insist that American state regulators, independent agencies and far-reaching judicial actions are beyond their control. This is especially true when many foreign businesses assert that US actions raise real rule of law problems.

The legitimacy of US leadership depends on our resisting the temptation to abuse it in pursuit of parochial interest, even when that interest appears compelling. We cannot expect to maintain the dollar’s primary role in the international system if we are too aggressive about limiting its use in pursuit of particular security objectives.

Second, in global as well as domestic politics, the middle class counts the most. It sometimes seems that the prevailing global agenda combines elite concerns about matters such as intellectual property, investment protection and regulatory harmonisation with moral concerns about global poverty and posterity, while offering little to those in the middle. Approaches that do not serve the working class in industrial countries (and rising urban populations in developing ones) are unlikely to work out well in the long run.

Third, we may be headed into a world where capital is abundant and deflationary pressures are substantial. Demand could be in short supply for some time. In no big industrialised country do markets expect real interest rates to be much above zero in 2020 or inflation targets to be achieved. In the future, the priority must be promoting investment, not imposing austerity. The present system places the onus of adjustment on “borrowing” countries. The world now requires a symmetric system, with pressure also placed on “surplus” countries.

These precepts are just a beginning, and many questions remain. There are questions about global public goods, about acting with the speed and clarity that the current era requires, about co-operation between governmental and non-governmental actors, and much more. What is crucial is that the events of the past month will be seen by future historians not as the end of an era, but as a salutary wake up call.

（此文刊登在华邮专栏）

彭博对此文的点读：
Larry Summers: The Past Month May Go Down as a Turning Point for U.S. Economic Power
Brutal

In a new column, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers delivers a scathing message (emphasis ours):

"This past month may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system. True, there have been any number of periods of frustration for the US before, and times when American behaviour was hardly multilateralist, such as the 1971 Nixon shock, ending the convertibility of the dollar into gold. But I can think of no event since Bretton Woods comparable to the combination of China’s effort to establish a major new institution and the failure of the US to persuade dozens of its traditional allies, starting with Britain, to stay out of it."

Summers is referencing the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China’s 18-month-old plan to start the first new multilateral development lender in decades. More than 40 countries applied to be founding members including China, Australia, Egypt, Ukraine, the U.K., France, Switzerland, India, and South Korea.

Mohamed El-Erian voiced similar concerns in a Bloomberg View column late last month.

Through the combination of the proposed AIIB, a new development bank and mushrooming bilateral arrangements, China is slowly building small pathways to bypassing the longstanding institutional arrangement. No wonder the U.S. is again worried about the erosion of the existing Western-dominated multilateral system (in this particular case, the World Bank) where its influence is still considerable, if not determinant.

There are still some unknowns in how the bank will operate, but we should learn more when after the final round of talks among founding members, which is scheduled for May. The AIIB is expected to be fully established by the end of the year.

Summers puts much of the blame on the current U.S. political environment:

This failure of strategy and tactics was a long time coming, and it should lead to a comprehensive review of the US approach to global economics...Political pressures from all sides in the US have rendered it increasingly dysfunctional. Largely because of resistance from the right, the US stands alone in the world in failing to approve the International Monetary Fund governance reforms that Washington itself pushed for in 2009...Meanwhile, pressures from the left have led to pervasive restrictions on infrastructure projects financed through existing development banks, which consequently have receded as funders, even as many developing countries now see infrastructure finance as their principle external funding need.

【纽约客】
April 6, 2015 Issue
Born Red
How Xi Jinping, an unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao
Evan Osnos

In anticipation of New Year’s Eve, 2014, Xi Jinping, the President of China and the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, permitted a camera crew to come into his office and record a message to the people. As a teen-ager, Xi had been sent to work on a farm; he was so delicate that other laborers rated him a six on a ten-point scale, “not even as high as the women,” he said later, with some embarrassment. Now, at sixty-one, Xi was five feet eleven, taller than any Chinese leader in nearly four decades, with a rich baritone and a confident heft. When he received a guest, he stood still, long arms slack, hair pomaded, a portrait of take-it-or-leave-it composure that induced his visitor to cross the room in pursuit of a handshake.

Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, read his annual New Year’s greeting from a lectern in an antiseptic reception hall. Xi, who took office in November, 2012, has associated himself with an earthier generation of Communists, a military caste that emphasized “hard work and plain living.” He delivered his New Year’s message at his desk. Behind him, bookshelves held photographs that depicted him as Commander-in-Chief and family man. In one picture, he was wearing Army fatigues and a fur hat, visiting soldiers in a snowfield; in another, he was strolling with his wife and daughter, and escorting his father, Xi Zhongxun, a hallowed revolutionary, in a wheelchair. The shelves also held matching sets of books. Xi’s classroom education was interrupted for nearly a decade by the Cultural Revolution, and he has the autodidact’s habit of announcing his literary credentials. He often quotes from Chinese classics, and in an interview with the Russian press last year he volunteered that he had read Krylov, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Nekrasov, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Sholokhov. When he visited France, he mentioned that he had read Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Sartre, and twelve others. In his New Year’s remarks, Xi oscillated between socialist slogans (“Wave high the sword against corruption”) and catchphrases from Chinese social media (“I would like to click the thumbs-up button for our great people”). He vowed to fight poverty, improve the rule of law, and hold fast to history. When he listed the achievements of the past year, he praised the creation of a holiday dedicated to the Second World War: “Victory Day of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.”


When Xi was fourteen, Red Guards warned, “We can execute you a hundred times.” He joined the Communist Party at twenty.

Xi is the sixth man to rule the People’s Republic of China, and the first who was born after the revolution, in 1949. He sits atop a pyramid of eighty-seven million members of the Communist Party, an organization larger than the population of Germany. The Party no longer reaches into every corner of Chinese life, as it did in the nineteen-seventies, but Xi nevertheless presides over an economy that, by one measure, recently surpassed the American economy in size; he holds ultimate authority over every general, judge, editor, and state-company C.E.O. As Lenin ordained, in 1902, “For the center . . . to actually direct the orchestra, it needs to know who plays violin and where, who plays a false note and why.”

Xi’s New Year’s message was broadcast on state television and radio channels at 6:30 p.m., just before the evening news. A few hours later, the news veered sharply out of his control. In Shanghai, a large holiday crowd had gathered to celebrate on the Bund, the promenade beside the Huangpu River, with splendid views of the skyline. The crowd was growing faster than the space could handle. Around 11:30 p.m., the police sent hundreds of extra officers to keep order, but it was too late; a stairway was jammed, and people shouted and pushed. A stampede ensued. In all, thirty-six people suffocated or were trampled to death.

The disaster occurred in one of China’s most modern and prosperous places, and the public was appalled. In the days that followed, the Shanghai government held a memorial for the victims, and encouraged people to move on; Internet censors struck down discussion of who was responsible; police interrogated Web users who posted criticisms of the state. When relatives of the victims visited the site of the stampede, police watched them closely, and then erected metal barriers to render it unreachable. Caixin, an investigative media organization, revealed that, during the stampede, local officials in charge of the neighborhood were enjoying a banquet of sushi and sake, at the government’s expense, in a private room at the Empty Cicada, a luxury restaurant nearby. This was awkward news, because one of the President’s first diktats had been “Eight Rules” for public servants, to eliminate extravagance and corruption. Among other things, the campaign called on officials to confine themselves to “four dishes and one soup.” (Eventually, eleven officials were punished for misusing funds and for failing to prevent a risk to the public.)

A few weeks after the incident in Shanghai, I paid a call on a longtime editor in Beijing, whose job gives him a view into the workings of the Party. When I arrived at his apartment, his kids were in raucous control of the living room, so we retreated to his bedroom to talk. When I asked him how President Xi was doing, he mentioned the banquet at the Empty Cicada. He thought it pointed to a problem that is much deeper than a few high-living bureaucrats. “The central government issued an order absolutely forbidding them to dine out on public funds. And they did it anyway!” he said. “What this tells you is that local officials are finding their ways of responding to change. There is a saying: ‘When a rule is imposed up high, there is a way to get around it below.’ ” The struggle between an emperor and his bureaucracy follows a classic pattern in Chinese politics, and it rarely ends well for the emperor. But the editor was betting on Xi. “He’s not afraid of Heaven or Earth. And he is, as we say, round on the outside and square on the inside; he looks flexible, but inside he is very hard.”

Before Xi took power, he was described, in China and abroad, as an unremarkable provincial administrator, a fan of American pop culture (“The Godfather,” “Saving Private Ryan”) who cared more about business than about politics, and was selected mainly because he had alienated fewer peers than his competitors. It was an incomplete portrait. He had spent more than three decades in public life, but Chinese politics had exposed him to limited scrutiny. At a press conference, a local reporter once asked Xi to rate his performance: “Would you give yourself a score of a hundred—or a score of ninety?” (Neither, Xi said; a high number would look “boastful,” and a low number would reflect “low self-esteem.”)

But, a quarter of the way through his ten-year term, he has emerged as the most authoritarian leader since Chairman Mao. In the name of protection and purity, he has investigated tens of thousands of his countrymen, on charges ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets and inciting the overthrow of the state. He has acquired or created ten titles for himself, including not only head of state and head of the military but also leader of the Party’s most powerful committees—on foreign policy, Taiwan, and the economy. He has installed himself as the head of new bodies overseeing the Internet, government restructuring, national security, and military reform, and he has effectively taken over the courts, the police, and the secret police. “He’s at the center of everything,” Gary Locke, the former American Ambassador to Beijing, told me.

In the Chinese Communist Party, you campaign after you get the job, not before, and in building public support and honing a message Xi has revealed a powerful desire for transformation. He calls on China to pursue the Chinese Dream: the “great rejuvenation of the nation,” a mixture of prosperity, unity, and strength. He has proposed at least sixty social and economic changes, ranging from relaxing the one-child policy to eliminating camps for “reëducation through labor” and curtailing state monopolies. He has sought prestige abroad; on his first foreign trip (to Moscow), he was accompanied by his wife, a celebrity soprano named Peng Liyuan, who inspired lavish coverage of China’s first modern Presidential couple. Peng soon appeared on Vanity Fair’s Best-Dressed List.

After Mao, China encouraged the image of a “collective Presidency” over the importance of individual leaders. Xi has revised that approach, and his government, using old and new tools, has enlarged his image. In the spirit of Mao’s Little Red Book, publishers have produced eight volumes of Xi’s speeches and writings; the most recent, titled “The Remarks of Xi Jinping,” dissects his utterances, ranks his favorite phrases, and explains his cultural references. A study of the People’s Daily found that, by his second anniversary in office, Xi was appearing in the paper more than twice as often as his predecessor at the same point. He stars in a series of cartoons aimed at young people, beginning with “How to Make a Leader,” which describes him, despite his family pedigree, as a symbol of meritocracy—“one of the secrets of the China miracle.” The state news agency has taken the unprecedented step of adopting a nickname for the General Secretary: Xi Dada—roughly, Big Uncle Xi. In January, the Ministry of Defense released oil paintings depicting him in heroic poses; thousands of art students applying to the Beijing University of Technology had been judged on their ability to sketch his likeness. The Beijing Evening News reported that one applicant admired the President so much that “she had to work hard to stop her hands from trembling.”

To outsiders, Xi has been a fitful subject. Bookstores in Hong Kong, which are insulated from mainland control, offer portraits of varying quality—the most reliable include “The New Biography of Xi Jinping,” by Liang Jian, and “China’s Future,” by Wu Ming—but most are written at a remove, under pseudonyms. The clearest account of Xi’s life and influences comes from his own words and decisions, scattered throughout a long climb to power.

Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Minister of Australia, a Mandarin speaker who has talked with Xi at length over the years, told me, “What he says is what he thinks. My experience of him is that there’s not a lot of artifice.”

In a leadership known for grooming colorless apparatchiks, Xi projects an image of manly vigor. He mocks “eggheads” and praises the “team spirit of a group of dogs eating a lion.” In a meeting in March, 2013, he told the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, “We are similar in character,” though Xi is less inclined toward bare-chested machismo. Xi admires Song Jiang, a fictional outlaw from “Water Margin,” a fourteenth-century Chinese classic, for his ability to “unite capable people.” Neither brilliant nor handsome, Song Jiang led a band of heroic rebels. In a famous passage, he speaks of the Xunyang River: “I shall have my revenge some day / And dye red with blood the Xunyang’s flow.”

Xi describes his essential project as a rescue: he must save the People’s Republic and the Communist Party before they are swamped by corruption; environmental pollution; unrest in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and other regions; and the pressures imposed by an economy that is growing more slowly than at any time since 1990 (though still at about seven per cent, the fastest pace of any major country). “The tasks our Party faces in reform, development, and stability are more onerous than ever, and the conflicts, dangers, and challenges are more numerous than ever,” Xi told the Politburo, in October. In 2014, the government arrested nearly a thousand members of civil society, more than in any year since the mid-nineteen-nineties, following the Tiananmen Square massacre, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a Hong Kong-based advocacy group.

Xi unambiguously opposes American democratic notions. In 2011 and 2012, he spent several days with Vice-President Joe Biden, his official counterpart at the time, in China and the United States. Biden told me that Xi asked him why the U.S. put “so much emphasis on human rights.” Biden replied to Xi, “No President of the United States could represent the United States were he not committed to human rights,” and went on, “If you don’t understand this, you can’t deal with us. President Barack Obama would not be able to stay in power if he did not speak of it. So look at it as a political imperative. It doesn’t make us better or worse. It’s who we are. You make your decisions. We’ll make ours.”

In Xi’s early months, supporters in the West speculated that he wanted to silence hard-line critics, and would open up later, perhaps in his second term, which begins in 2017. That view has largely disappeared. Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, whose upcoming book, “Dealing with China,” describes a decade of contact with Xi, told me, “He has been very forthright and candid—privately and publicly—about the fact that the Chinese are rejecting Western values and multiparty democracy.” He added, “To Westerners, it seems very incongruous to be, on the one hand, so committed to fostering more competition and market-driven flexibility in the economy and, on the other hand, to be seeking more control in the political sphere, the media, and the Internet. But that’s the key: he sees a strong Party as essential to stability, and the only institution that’s strong enough to help him accomplish his other goals.”

In his determination to gain control and protect the Party, Xi may have generated a different kind of threat: he has pried apart internal fault lines and shaken the equilibrium that for a generation marked the nation’s rise. Before Xi took power, top officials presumed that they were protected. Yu Hua, the novelist, told me, “As China grew, what really came to matter were the ‘unwritten rules.’ When the real rules weren’t specific enough or clear enough, when policies and laws lagged behind reality, you always relied on the unwritten rules.” They dictated everything from how much to tip a surgeon to how far an N.G.O. could go before it was suppressed. “The unwritten rules have been broken,” Yu said. “This is how it should be, of course, but laws haven’t arrived yet.”

The Communist Party dedicated itself to a classless society but organized itself in a rigid hierarchy, and Xi started life near the top. He was born in Beijing in 1953, the third of four children. His father, Xi Zhongxun, China’s propaganda minister at the time, had been fomenting revolution since the age of fourteen, when he and his classmates tried to poison a teacher whom they considered a counterrevolutionary. He was sent to jail, where he joined the Communist Party, and eventually he became a high-ranking commander, which plunged him into the Party’s internal feuds. In 1935, a rival faction accused Xi of disloyalty and ordered him to be buried alive, but Mao defused the crisis. At a Party meeting in February, 1952, Mao stated that the “suppression of counterrevolutionaries” required, on average, the execution of one person for every one thousand to two thousand citizens. Xi Zhongxun endorsed “severe suppression and punishment,” but in his area “killing was relatively lower,” according to his official biography.

Xi Jinping grew up with his father’s stories. “He talked about how he joined the revolution, and he’d say, ‘You will certainly make revolution in the future,’ ” Xi recalled in a 2004 interview with the Xi’an Evening News, a state-run paper. “He’d explain what revolution is. We heard so much of this that our ears got calluses.” In six decades of politics, his father had seen or deployed every tactic. At dinner with the elder Xi in 1980, David Lampton, a China specialist at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, marvelled that he could toast dozens of guests, over glasses of Maotai, with no visible effects. “It became apparent that he was drinking water,” Lampton said.

When Xi Jinping was five, his father was promoted to Vice-Premier, and the son often visited him at Zhongnanhai, the secluded compound for top leaders. Xi was admitted to the exclusive August 1st School, named for the date of a famous Communist victory. The school, which occupied the former palace of a Qing Dynasty prince, was nicknamed the lingxiu yaolan—the “cradle of leaders.” The students formed a small, close-knit élite; they lived in the same compounds, summered at the same retreats, and shared a sense of noblesse oblige. For centuries before the People’s Republic, an evolving list of élite clans combined wealth and politics. Some sons handled business; others pursued high office. Winners changed over time, and, when Communist leaders prevailed, in 1949, they acquired the mantle. “The common language used to describe this was that they had ‘won over tianxia’—‘all under Heaven,’ ” Yang Guobin, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “They believed they had a natural claim to leadership. They owned it. And their children thought, naturally, they themselves would be, and should be, the future owners.” As the historian Mi Hedu observes in his 1993 book, “The Red Guard Generation,” students at the August 1st School “compared one another on the basis of whose father had a higher rank, whose father rode in a better car. Some would say, ‘Obey whoever’s father has the highest position.’ ” When the Cultural Revolution began, in 1966, Beijing students who were zilaihong (“born red”) promoted a slogan: “If the father is a hero, the son is also a hero; if the father is a reactionary, the son is a bastard.” Red Guards sought to cleanse the capital of opposition, to make it “as pure and clean as crystal,” they said. From late August to late September, 1966, nearly two thousand people were killed in Beijing, and at least forty-nine hundred historical sites were damaged or destroyed, according to Yiching Wu, the author of “The Cultural Revolution at the Margins.”

But Xi Jinping did not fit cleanly into the role of either aggressor or victim. In 1962, his father was accused of supporting a novel that Mao opposed, and was sent to work in a factory; his mother, Qi Xin, was assigned to hard labor on a farm. In January, 1967, after Mao encouraged students to target “class enemies,” a group of young people dragged Xi Zhongxun before a crowd. Among other charges, he was accused of having gazed at West Berlin through binoculars during a visit to East Germany years earlier. He was detained in a military garrison, where he passed the years by walking in circles, he said later—ten thousand laps, and then ten thousand walking backward. The son was too young to be an official Red Guard, and his father’s status made him undesirable. Moreover, being born red was becoming a liability. Élite academies were accused of being xiao baota—“little treasure pagodas”—and shut down. Xi and the sons of other targeted officials stayed together, getting into street fights and swiping books from shuttered libraries. Later, Xi described that period as a dystopian collapse of control. He was detained “three or four times” by groups of Red Guards, and forced to denounce his father. In 2000, he told the journalist Yang Xiaohuai about being captured by a group loyal to the wife of the head of China’s secret police:

    I was only fourteen. The Red Guards asked, “How serious do you yourself think your crimes are?”

    “You can estimate it yourselves. Is it enough to execute me?”

    “We can execute you a hundred times.”

    To my mind there was no difference between being executed a hundred times or once, so why be afraid of a hundred times? The Red Guards wanted to scare me, saying that now I was to feel the democratic dictatorship of the people, and that I only had five minutes left. But in the end, they told me, instead, to read quotations from Chairman Mao every day until late at night.

In December, 1968, in a bid to regain control, Mao ordered the Red Guards and other students to the countryside, to be “reëducated by the poor and lower-middle-class peasants.” Élite families sent their children to regions that had allies or family, and Xi went to his father’s old stronghold in Shaanxi. He was assigned to Liangjiahe, a village flanked by yellow cliffs. “The intensity of the labor shocked me,” Xi recalled in a 2004 television interview. To avoid work, he took up smoking—nobody bothered a man smoking—and lingered in the bathroom. After three months, he fled to Beijing, but he was arrested and returned to the village. In what later became the centerpiece of his official narrative, Xi was reborn. A recent state-news-service article offers the mythology: “Xi lived in a cave dwelling with villagers, slept on a kang, a traditional Chinese bed made of bricks and clay, endured flea bites, carried manure, built dams and repaired roads.” It leaves out some brutal details. At one point, he received a letter informing him that his older half-sister Xi Heping had died. The Australian journalist John Garnaut, the author of an upcoming book on the rise of Xi and his cohort, said, “It was suicide. Close associates have said to me, on the record, that after a decade of persecution she hanged herself from a shower rail.”

Xi chose to join the Communist Party’s Youth League. Because of his father’s status, his application was rejected seven times, by his count. After Xi befriended a local official, he was accepted. In January, 1974, he gained full Party membership and became secretary of the village. His drive to join the Party baffled some of his peers. A longtime friend who became a professor later told an American diplomat that he felt “betrayed” by Xi’s ambition to “join the system.” According to a U.S. diplomatic cable recounting his views, many in Xi’s élite cohort were desperate to escape politics; they dated, drank, and read Western literature. They were “trying to catch up for lost years by having fun,” the professor said. He eventually concluded that Xi was “exceptionally ambitious,” and knew that he would “not be special” outside China, so he “chose to survive by becoming redder than the red.” After all, Yang Guobin told me, referring to the sons of the former leaders, “the sense of ownership did not die. A sense of pride and superiority persisted, and there was some confidence that their fathers’ adversity would be temporary and sooner or later they would make a comeback. That’s exactly what happened.”

The following year, Xi enrolled at Tsinghua University as a “worker-peasant-soldier” student (applicants who were admitted on the basis of political merit rather than test scores). That spring, Xi Zhongxun was rehabilitated, after sixteen years of persecution. When the family reunited, he could not recognize his grown sons. His faith never wavered. In November, 1976, he wrote to Hua Guofeng, the head of the Party, asking for reassignment, in order to “devote the rest of my life to the Party and strive to do more for the people.” He signed it, “Xi Zhongxun, a Follower of Chairman Mao and a Party Member Who Has Not Regained Admission to Regular Party Activities.”

Xi Jinping’s pedigree had exposed him to a brutal politics—purges, retribution, rehabilitation—and he drew blunt lessons from it. In a 2000 interview with the journalist Chen Peng, of the Beijing-based Chinese Times, Xi said, “People who have little experience with power, those who have been far away from it, tend to regard these things as mysterious and novel. But I look past the superficial things: the power and the flowers and the glory and the applause. I see the detention houses, the fickleness of human relationships. I understand politics on a deeper level.” The Cultural Revolution and his years in Yan’an, the region where he was sent as a teen-ager, had created him. “Yan’an is the starting point of my life,” he said in 2007. “Many of the fundamental ideas and qualities I have today were formed in Yan’an.” Rudd, the former Australian Prime Minister, told me, “The bottom line in any understanding of who Xi Jinping is must begin with his dedication to the Party as an institution—despite the fact that through his personal life, and his political life, he has experienced the best of the Party and the worst of the Party.”

Xi’s siblings scattered: his brother and a sister went into business in Hong Kong, the other sister reportedly settled in Canada. But Xi stayed and, year by year, invested more deeply in the Party. After graduating, in 1979, he took a coveted job as an aide to Geng Biao, a senior defense official whom Xi’s father called “my closest comrade-in-arms” from the revolution. Xi wore a military uniform and made valuable connections at Party headquarters. Not long after college, he married Ke Xiaoming, the cosmopolitan daughter of China’s Ambassador to Britain. But they fought “almost every day,” according to the professor, who lived across the hall. He told the diplomat that the couple divorced when Ke decided to move to England and Xi stayed behind.

China’s revolutionaries were aging, and the Party needed to groom new leaders. Xi told the professor that going to the provinces was the “only path to central power.” Staying at Party headquarters in Beijing would narrow his network and invite resentment from lesser-born peers. In 1982, shortly before Xi turned thirty, he asked to be sent back to the countryside, and was assigned to a horse-cart county in Hebei Province. He wanted to be the county secretary—the boss—but the provincial chief resented privileged offspring from Party headquarters and made Xi the No. 2. It was the Chinese equivalent of trading an executive suite at the Pentagon for a mid-level post in rural Virginia.

Within a year, though, Xi was promoted, and he honed his political skills. He gave perks to retired cadres who could shape his reputation; he arranged for them to receive priority at doctors’ offices; when he bought the county’s first imported car, he donated it to the “veteran-cadre office,” and used an old jeep for himself. He retained his green Army-issue trousers to convey humility, and he learned the value of political theatrics: at times, “if you don’t bang on the table, it’s not frightening enough, and people won’t take it seriously,” he told a Chinese interviewer in 2003. He experimented with market economics, by allowing farmers to use more land for raising animals instead of growing grain for the state, and he pushed splashy local projects, including the construction of a television studio based on the classic novel “A Dream of Red Mansions.”

In 1985, he spent two weeks in Iowa as part of an agricultural delegation. In the town of Muscatine, he stayed with Eleanor and Thomas Dvorchak. “The boys had gone off to college, so there were some spare bedrooms,” Eleanor told me. Xi slept in a room with football-themed wallpaper and “Star Trek” action figures. “He was looking out the window, and it seemed like he was saying, ‘Oh, my God,’ and I thought, What’s so unusual? It’s just a split-level,” she said. Xi did not introduce himself as a Communist Party secretary; his business card identified him as the head of the Shijiazhuang Feed Association. In 2012, on a trip to the U.S. before becoming top leader, he returned to Muscatine, to see Dvorchak and others, trailed by the world press. She said, “No one in their right mind would ever think that that guy who stayed in my house would become the President. I don’t care what country you’re talking about.”

By 1985, Xi was ready for another promotion, but the provincial Party head blocked him again, so he moved to the southern province of Fujian, where one of his father’s friends was the Party secretary, and could help him. Not long after he arrived, he met Liao Wanlong, a Taiwanese businessman, who recalled, “He was tall and stocky, and he looked a little dopey.” Liao, who has visited Xi repeatedly in the decades since, told me, “He appeared to be guileless, honest. He came from the north and he didn’t understand the south well.” Liao went on, “He would speak only if he really had something to say, and he didn’t make casual promises. He would think everything through before opening his mouth. He rarely talked about his family, because he had a difficult past and a disappointing marriage.” Xi didn’t have a questing mind, but he excelled at managing his image and his relationships; he was now meeting foreign investors, so he stopped wearing Army fatigues and adopted a wardrobe of Western suits. Liao said, “Not everyone could get an audience with him; he would screen those who wanted to meet him. He was a good judge of people.”

The following year, when Xi was thirty-three, a friend introduced him to Peng Liyuan, who, at twenty-four, was already one of China’s most famous opera and folk singers. Xi told her that he didn’t watch television, she recalled in a 2007 interview. “What kind of songs do you sing?” he asked. Peng thought that he looked “uncultured and much older than his age,” but he asked her questions about singing technique, which she took as a sign of intelligence. Xi later said that he decided within forty minutes to ask her to marry him. They married the following year, and in 1989, after the crackdown on student demonstrators, Peng was among the military singers who were sent to Tiananmen Square to serenade the troops. (Images of that scene, along with information about Peng’s private life and her commercial dealings, have been largely expunged from the Web.) In 1992, they had a daughter. As it became clear that Xi would be a top leader, Peng gave up the diva gowns and elaborate hairdos in favor of pants suits and the occasional military uniform. Fans still mobbed her, while he stood patiently to the side, but for the most part she stopped performing and turned her attention to activism around H.I.V., tobacco control, and women’s education. For years, Xi and Peng spent most of their time apart. But, in the flurry of attention around Big Uncle Xi, the state-run media has promoted a pop song entitled “Xi Dada Loves Peng Mama,” which includes the line “Men should learn from Xi and women should learn from Peng.”

The posting to the south put Xi closer to his father. Since 1978, his father had served in neighboring Guangdong, home to China’s experiments with the free market, and the elder Xi had become a zealous believer in economic reform as the answer to poverty. It was a risky position: at a Politburo meeting in 1987, the Old Guard attacked the liberal standard-bearer, Hu Yaobang. Xi’s father was the only senior official who spoke in his defense. “What are you guys doing here? Don’t repeat what Mao did to us,” he said, according to Richard Baum’s 1994 chronicle of élite politics, “Burying Mao.” But Xi lost and was stripped of power for the last time. He was allowed to live in comfortable obscurity until his death, in 2002, and is remembered fondly as “a man of principle, not of strategy,” as the editor in Beijing put it to me.

His son avoided overly controversial reforms as he rose through the ranks. “My approach is to heat a pot with a small, continuous fire, pouring in cold water to keep it from boiling over,” he said. In 1989, a local propaganda official, Kang Yanping, submitted a proposal for a TV miniseries promoting political reform, but Xi replied with skepticism. According to “China’s Future,” he asked, “Is there a source for the opinion? Is it a reasonable point?” The show, which Xi predicted would leave people “discouraged,” was not produced. He also paid special attention to cultivating local military units; he upgraded equipment, raised subsidies for soldiers’ living expenses, and found jobs for retiring officers. He liked to say, “To meet the Army’s needs, nothing is excessive.”

Xi prosecuted corruption at some moments and ignored it at others. A Chinese executive told the U.S. Embassy in Beijing that Xi was considered “Mr. Clean” for turning down a bribe, and yet, for the many years that Xi worked in Fujian, the Yuanhua Group, one of China’s largest corrupt enterprises, continued smuggling billions of dollars’ worth of oil, cars, cigarettes, and appliances into China, with the help of the Fujian military and police. Xi also found a way to live with Chen Kai, a local tycoon who ran casinos and brothels in the center of town, protected by the police chief. Later, Chen was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, and fifty government officials were prosecuted for accepting bribes from him. Xi was never linked to the cases, but they left a stain on his tenure. “Sometimes I have posted colleagues wrongly,” he said in 2000. “Some were posted wrongly because I thought they were better than they actually were, others because I thought they were worse than they actually were.”

Xi proved adept at navigating internal feuds and alliances. After he took over the economically vibrant province of Zhejiang, in 2002, he created policies intended to promote private businesses. He encouraged taxi services to buy from Geely, the car company that later bought Volvo. He soothed conservatives, in part by reciting socialist incantations. “The private economy has become an exotic flower in the garden of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he declared. In 2007, he encountered a prime opportunity to show his political skills: a corruption scandal in Shanghai was implicating associates of Jiang Zemin, the powerful former President, who served from 1989 to 2002. Xi was sent to Shanghai to take over. He projected toughness to the public without alienating Jiang. He rejected the villa that had been arranged for him, announcing that it would be better used as a retirement home for veteran comrades.

His timing was fortunate: a few months later, senior Party officials were choosing the next generation of top leaders. Xi was expected to lose to Li Keqiang, a comrade who had no revolutionary family pedigree, and had postgraduate degrees in law and economics from Peking University. Since 2002, the highest ranks of Chinese politics had been dominated by men who elbowed their way in on the basis of academic or technocratic merit. President Hu’s father ran a tea shop, and the Premier, Wen Jiabao, was the son of a teacher, but Chen Yun, the late economic czar, had advised his peers that born reds, now known as “second-generation reds,” or princelings, would make more reliable stewards of the Party’s future. One princeling told a Western diplomat, “The feeling among us is: ‘Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, your fathers were selling shoelaces while our fathers were dying for this revolution.’ ” In private, some princelings referred to the President and the Premier as huoji—“hired hands.” In October, 2007, Xi was unveiled as the likely heir apparent. It was not entirely a compliment. “Party leaders prefer weak successors, so they can rule behind the scenes,” Ho Pin, the founder of Mingjing News, an overseas Chinese site, said. Xi’s rise had been so abrupt, in the eyes of the general public, that people joked, “Who is Xi Jinping? He’s Peng Liyuan’s husband.”

Xi was tested by a pageant of dysfunction that erupted in the run-up to his début as General Secretary, in 2012. In February, Wang Lijun, a former police chief, tried to defect to the U.S. and accused the family of his former patron, Bo Xilai, the Party secretary of Chongqing, of murder and embezzlement. Party leaders feared that Bo might protect himself with the security services at his command, disrupt the transition of power, and tear the Party apart. In September, Ling Jihua, the chief of staff of the outgoing President, was abruptly demoted, and he was later accused of trying to cover up the death of his son, who had crashed a black Ferrari while accompanied by two women.

Beset by crises, Xi suddenly disappeared. On September 4, 2012, he cancelled a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and visits with other dignitaries. As the days passed, lurid rumors emerged, ranging from a grave illness to an assassination attempt. When he reappeared, on September 19th, he told American officials that he had injured his back. Analysts of Chinese politics still raise the subject of Xi’s disappearance in the belief that a fuller explanation of why he vanished might illuminate the depth, or fragility, of his support. In dozens of conversations this winter, scholars, officials, journalists, and executives told me that they suspect he did have a health problem, and also reasons to exploit it. They speculate that Xi, in effect, went on strike; he wanted to install key allies, and remove opponents, before taking power, but Party elders ordered him to wait. A former intelligence official told me, “Xi basically says, ‘O.K., fuck you, let’s see you find someone else for this job. I’m going to disappear for two weeks and miss the Secretary of State.’ And that’s what he did. It caused a stir, and they went running and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ ” The handoff went ahead as planned. On November 15, 2012, Xi became General Secretary.

Xi headed a Politburo Standing Committee of seven men: four were considered princelings by birth or marriage, a larger ratio than in any Politburo in the history of the People’s Republic. Western politicians often note that Xi has the habits of a retail pol: comfort on the rope line, gentle questions for every visitor, homey anecdotes. On a trip to Los Angeles, he told students that he likes to swim, read, and watch sports on television, but rarely has time. “To borrow a title from an American film, it’s like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ ” he said. But Chinese observers tend to mention something else: his guizuqi, or “air of nobility.” It can come off as a reassuring link to the past or, at times, as a distance from his peers. In a meeting at the Great Hall of the People last year, Party officials were chatting and glad-handing during a lengthy break, but Xi never budged. “It went on for hours, and he sat there, staring straight ahead,” a foreign attendee told me. “He never wandered down from the podium to say, ‘How’s it going in Ningxia?’ ”

Xi believed that there was a grave threat to China from within. According to U.S. diplomats, Xi’s friend the professor described Xi as “repulsed by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” If he ever became China’s top leader, the professor had predicted, “he would likely aggressively attempt to address these evils, perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.” Though princelings and their siblings had profited comfortably from China’s rise (Xi’s sister Qi Qiaoqiao is reported to have large corporate and real-estate assets), the revolutionary families considered their gains appropriate, and they blamed the hired hands for allowing corruption and extravagance, which stirred up public rage and threatened the Party’s future.

The first step to a solution was to reëstablish control. The “collective Presidency,” which spread power across the Standing Committee, had constrained Hu Jintao so thoroughly that he was nicknamed the Woman with Bound Feet. Xi surrounded himself with a shadow cabinet that was defined less by a single ideology than by school ties and political reliability. Members included Liu He, a childhood playmate who had become a reform-minded economist, and Liu Yuan, a hawkish general and the son of former President Liu Shaoqi. The most important was Wang Qishan, a friend for decades, who was placed in charge of the Central Commission on Discipline and Inspection, the agency that launched the vast anticorruption campaign.

The Party had long cultivated an image of virtuous unanimity. But, during the next two years, Wang’s investigators, who were granted broad powers to detain and interrogate, attacked agencies that might counter Xi’s authority, accusing them of conspiracies and abuses. They brought corruption charges against officials at the state-planning and state-assets commissions, which protect the privileges of large government-run monopolies. They arrested China’s security chief, Zhou Yongkang, a former oil baron with the jowls of an Easter Island statue, who had built the police and military into a personal kingdom that received more funding each year for domestic spying and policing than it did for foreign defense. They reached into the ranks of the military, where flamboyant corruption was not only upsetting the public—pedestrians had learned to watch out for luxury sedans with military license plates, which careered around Beijing with impunity—but also undermining China’s national defense. When police searched homes belonging to the family of Lieutenant General Gu Junshan, a senior logistics chief, they removed four truckloads of wine, art, cash, and other luxuries. According to a diplomat in Beijing, Gu’s furnishings included a gold replica of China’s first aircraft carrier. “When questioned about it, he said it was a sign of patriotism,” the diplomat said.

By the end of 2014, the Party had announced the punishment of more than a hundred thousand officials on corruption charges. Many foreign observers asked if Xi’s crusade was truly intended to stamp out corruption or if it was a tool to attack his enemies. It was not simply one or the other: corruption had become so threatening to the Party’s legitimacy that only the most isolated leader could have avoided forcing it back to a more manageable level, but railing against corruption was also a proven instrument for political consolidation, and at the highest levels Xi has deployed it largely against his opponents. Geremie Barme, the historian who heads the Australian Centre on China in the World, analyzed the forty-eight most high-profile arrests, and discovered that none of them were second-generation reds. “I don’t call it an anticorruption campaign,” a Western diplomat told me. “This is grinding trench warfare.”

Shortly after taking over, Xi asked, “Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” and declared, “It’s a profound lesson for us.” Chinese scholars had studied that puzzle from dozens of angles, but Xi wanted more. “In 2009, he commissioned a long study of the Soviet Union from somebody who works in the policy-research office,” the diplomat in Beijing told me. “It concluded that the rot started under Brezhnev. In the paper, the guy cited a joke: Brezhnev brings his mother to Moscow. He proudly shows her the state apartments at the Kremlin, his Zil limousine, and the life of luxury he now lives. ‘Well, what do you think, Mama,’ says Brezhnev. ‘You’ll never have to worry about a thing, ever again.’ ‘I’m so proud of you, Leonid Ilyich,’ says Mama, ‘but what happens if the Communists find out?’ Xi loved the story.” Xi reserved special scorn for Gorbachev, for failing to defend the Party against its opponents, and told his colleagues, “Nobody was man enough to stand up and resist.”

The year after Xi took office, cadres were required to watch a six-part documentary on the Soviet Union’s collapse, which showed violent scenes of unrest and described an American conspiracy to topple Communism through “peaceful evolution”: the steady infiltration of subversive Western political ideas. Ever since the early aughts, when “color revolutions” erupted in the former Soviet bloc, Chinese Communists have cited the risk of contagion as a reason to constrict political life. That fear was heightened by a surge of unrest in Tibet in 2008, in Xinjiang in 2009, and across the Arab world in 2011. Last September, when pro-democracy protests erupted in Hong Kong, an opinion piece in the Global Times, a state-run daily, accused the National Endowment for Democracy and the C.I.A. of being “black hands” behind the unrest, intent on “stimulating Taiwanese independence, Xinjiang independence, and Tibetan independence.” (The U.S. denied involvement.)

Xi’s government has no place for loyal opposition. When he launched the anticorruption campaign, activists—such as the lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who had served as a local legislator in Beijing—joined in, calling on officials to disclose their incomes. But Xu and many others were arrested. (He was later sentenced to four years in prison for “gathering crowds to disrupt public order.”) One of Xu’s former colleagues, Teng Biao, told me, “For the government, ‘peaceful evolution’ was not just a slogan. It was real. The influence of Western states was becoming more obvious and more powerful.” Teng was at a conference in Germany soon after Xu and another colleague were arrested. “People advised me not to return to China, or I’d be arrested, too,” Teng said. He is now a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.

A prominent editor in Beijing told me that Chinese philanthropists have been warned, “You can’t give money to this N.G.O. or that N.G.O.—basically all N.G.O.s.” In December, the Committee to Protect Journalists counted forty-four reporters in Chinese jails, more than in any other country. Well-known human-rights lawyers—Pu Zhiqiang, Ding Jiaxi, Xia Lin—have been jailed. Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch called this the harshest suppression of dissent in a decade.

Although Vladimir Putin has suffocated Russian civil society and neutered the press, Moscow stores still carry books that are critical of him, and a few long-suffering blogs still find ways to attack him. Xi is less tolerant. In February, 2014, Yiu Mantin, a seventy-nine-year-old editor at Hong Kong’s Morning Bell Press, who had planned to release a biography critical of Xi, by the exiled writer Yu Jie, was arrested during a visit to the mainland. He had received a phone call warning him not to proceed with publication. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, on charges of smuggling seven cans of paint.

For years, Chinese intellectuals distinguished between words and actions: Western political ideas could be discussed in China as long as nobody tried to enact them. In 2011, China’s education minister, Yuan Guiren, extolled the benefits of exchanges with foreign countries. “Whether they’re rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, as long as they’re beneficial to our development we can learn from all of them,” he told the Jinghua Times, a state newspaper. But in January Yuan told a conference, “Young teachers and students are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces.” He said, “We must, by no means, allow into our classrooms material that propagates Western values.” An article on the Web site of Seeking Truth, an official Party journal, warned against professors who “blacken China’s name,” and it singled out the law professor He Weifang by name. When I spoke to He, a few days later, he said, “I’ve always been unpopular with conservatives, but recently the situation has become more serious. The political standpoint of this new slate of leaders isn’t like that of the Hu or Jiang era. They’re more restraining. They’re not as willing to permit an active discussion.”

Sealing China off from Western ideas poses some practical problems. The Party has announced “rule of law” reforms intended to strengthen top-down control over the legal system and shield courts from local interference. The professor said, “Many colleagues working on civil law and that sort of thing have a large portion of their lectures about German law or French law. So, if you want to stop Western values from spreading in Chinese universities, one thing you’d have to do is close down the law schools and make sure they never exist again.” Xi, for his part, sees no contradiction, because preservation of the Party comes before preservation of the law. In January, he said that China must “nurture a legal corps loyal to the Party, loyal to the country, loyal to the people, and loyal to the law.” Echoing Mao, he added, “Insure that the handle of the knife is firmly in the hand of the Party and the people.”

Xi’s wariness of Western influence is reflected in his foreign policy. On a personal level, he expresses warm memories of Iowa, and he sent his daughter, Xi Mingze, to Harvard. (She graduated last year, under a pseudonym, and has returned to China.) But Xi has also expressed an essentialist view of national characteristics such that, in his telling, China’s history and social makeup render it unfit for multiparty democracy or a monarchy or any other non-Communist system. “We considered them, tried them, but none worked,” he told an audience at the College of Europe, in Bruges, last spring. Adopting an alternative, he said, “might even lead to catastrophic consequences.” On his watch, state-run media have accentuated the threat of “peaceful evolution,” and have accused American companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel, of being “warriors” for the U.S. government.

As for a broad diplomatic vision, Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping have adhered to a principle known as “Hide your strength, bide your time.” Xi has effectively replaced that concept with declarations of China’s arrival. In Paris last year, he invoked Napoleon’s remark that China was “a sleeping lion,” and said that the lion “has already awakened, but this is a peaceful, pleasant, and civilized lion.” He told the Politburo in December that he intends to “make China’s voice heard, and inject more Chinese elements into international rules.” As alternatives to the Washington-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Xi’s government has established the New Development Bank, the Silk Road infrastructure fund, and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which, together, intend to amass two hundred and forty billion dollars in capital. Xi has been far bolder than his predecessors in asserting Chinese control over airspace and land, sending an oil rig into contested waters, and erecting buildings, helipads, and other facilities on reefs that are claimed by multiple nations. He has also taken advantage of Putin’s growing economic isolation; Xi has met with Putin more than with any other foreign leader, and, last May, as Russia faced new sanctions over the annexation of Crimea, Xi and Putin agreed on a four-hundred-billion-dollar deal to supply gas to China at rates that favor Beijing. According to the prominent editor, Xi has told people that he was impressed by Putin’s seizure of Crimea—“He got a large piece of land and resources” and boosted his poll numbers at home. But, as war in Ukraine has dragged on, Xi has become less complimentary of Putin.

No diplomatic relationship matters more to China’s future than its dealings with the United States, and Xi has urged the U.S. to adopt a “new type of great-power relationship”—to regard China as an equal and to acknowledge its claims to contested islands and other interests. (The Obama Administration has declined to adopt the phrase.) Xi and Obama have met, at length, five times. American officials describe the relationship as occasionally candid but not close. They have “brutally frank exchanges on difficult issues, and it doesn’t upset the apple cart,” a senior Administration official told me. “So it’s different from the era of Hu Jintao, where there was very little exchange.” Hu almost never departed from his notes, and American counterparts wondered how much he believed his talking points. “Xi is reading what I’m confident Xi believes,” the official said, though their engagements remain stilted: “There’s still a cadence that is very difficult to extract yourself from in these exchanges. . . . We want to have a conversation.”

For years, American military leaders worried that there was a growing risk of an accidental clash between China and the U.S., in part because Beijing protested U.S. policies by declining meetings between senior commanders. In 2011, Mike Mullen, then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, visited Xi in Beijing, and appealed to his military experience, telling him, as he recalled to me, “I just need you to stop cutting off military relationships as step one, every time you get ticked off.” That has improved. In Beijing last November, Xi and Obama spent five hours at dinner and meetings and announced coöperation on climate change, a high-tech free-trade deal that China had previously resisted, and two military agreements to encourage communication between forces operating near each other in the South China and East China Seas. Mullen, who has met Xi again since their initial encounter, is encouraged: “They still get ticked off, they take steps, but they don’t cut it off.”

As China ejects Western ideas, Xi is trying to fill that void with an affirmative set of ideas to offer at home and abroad. Recently, I rode the No. 1 subway line eastbound, beneath the Avenue of Eternal Peace—under Party headquarters, the Central Propaganda Department, and the Ministries of Commerce and Public Security—and got off the train at the Second Ring Road, where the old City Wall once stood. Near the station, at a Starbucks, I met Zhang Lifan, a well-known historian. At sixty-four, he defies the usual rumpled stereotype of the liberal intelligentsia; he is tall, with elegant hints of gray hair, and he wore a black mandarin-collar jacket and a winter cap covered in smooth black fur. Zhang grew up around politics; his father, a banker before the revolution, served as a minister in the early years of Mao’s government. I asked him what message Xi hoped to promote from China around the world. He said, “Ever since Mao’s day, and the beginning of reform and opening up, we all talk about a ‘crisis of faith,’ ” the sense that rapid growth and political turmoil have cut China off from its moral history. “He is trying to solve that problem, so that there can be another new ideology.”

Zhang writes about politics, and he is occasionally visited by police who remind him to avoid sensitive subjects. “Sometimes, they will pass by and say it through the closed front door,” Zhang said. He commented, “They tried to stop me from coming today. They followed me here.” He indicated a slim young man in a windbreaker, watching us from a nearby table. In remote areas, where police are unaccustomed to the presence of foreigners, authorities often try to prevent people from meeting reporters. But, in a decade of writing about China, this was the first time I’d encountered that situation in the capital. I suggested we postpone our discussion. He shook his head. In a stage whisper, he said, “What I say and what I write are the same. There’s no difference.”

The most surprising thing about the era of Xi Jinping is the decision to close off the margins—those minor mutinies and indulgences that used to be tolerated as a way to avoid driving China’s most prosperous and well-educated citizens abroad. For years, the government tacitly allowed people to gain access to virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, which allow users to reach Web sites that are blocked in China. The risks seemed manageable; most Chinese users had less interest in politics than in reaching a celebrity’s Instagram feed (Instagram, like Facebook, Twitter, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the Times, is blocked). Keeping them open, the theory went, allowed sophisticated users to get what they wanted or needed—for instance, researchers accessing Google Scholar, or businesses doing transactions—while preventing the masses from employing technology that worries the Party. But on January 23rd, while I was in Beijing, the government abruptly blocked the V.P.N.s, and state media reiterated that they were illegal. Overnight, it became radically more difficult to reach anything on the Internet outside China. Before the comments were shut down on the Web site Computer News, twelve thousand people left their views. “What are you afraid of?” one asked. “Big step toward becoming a new North Korea,” another wrote. Another wrote: “One more advertisement for emigration.”

A decade ago, the Chinese Internet was alive with debate, confession, humor, and discovery. Month by month, it is becoming more sterilized and self-contained. To the degree that China’s connection to the outside world matters, the digital links are deteriorating. Voice-over-Internet calls, viral videos, podcasts—the minor accessories of contemporary digital life—are less reachable abroad than they were a year ago. It’s an astonishing thing to observe in a rising superpower. How many countries in 2015 have an Internet connection to the world that is worse than it was a year ago?

The General Secretary, in his capacity as Big Uncle Xi, has taken to offering advice on nonpolitical matters: last fall, he lamented an overly “sensual” trend in society. (In response, Chinese auto executives stopped having lightly clad models lounge around vehicles at car shows.) In January, he urged people to get more sleep, “however enthusiastic you may be about the job,” saying that he goes to bed before midnight. Online, people joked that it seemed implausible: since taking office, Xi has acquired heavy bags under his eyes and a look of near-constant irritation.

For a generation, the Communist Party forged a political consensus built on economic growth and legal ambiguity. Liberal activists and corrupt bureaucrats learned to skirt (or flout) legal boundaries, because the Party objected only intermittently. Today, Xi has indicated that consensus, beyond the Party élite, is superfluous—or, at least, less reliable than a hard boundary between enemies and friends.

It is difficult to know precisely how much support Xi enjoys. Private pollsters are not allowed to explicitly measure his public support, but Victor Yuan, the president of Horizon Research Consultancy Group, a Beijing polling firm, told me, “We’ve done some indirect research, and his support seems to be around eighty per cent. It comes from two areas: one is the anticorruption policy and the other is foreign policy. The area where it’s unclear is the economy. People say they’ll have to wait and see.”

China’s economy is likely to be Xi’s greatest obstacle. After economic growth of, on average, nearly ten per cent a year, for more than three decades, the Party expected growth to slow to a sustainable pace of around seven per cent, but it could fall more sharply. China remains the world’s largest manufacturer, with four trillion dollars in foreign-exchange reserves (a sum equivalent to the world’s fourth-largest economy). In November, 2013, the Party announced plans to reinvigorate competition by expanding the role of private banks, allowing the market (instead of bureaucrats) to decide where water, oil, and other precious resources are directed, and forcing state firms to give up larger dividends and compete with private businesses. Last spring, China abolished registered-capital and other requirements for new companies, and in November it allowed foreign investors to trade shares directly on the Shanghai stock market for the first time. “A fair judgment is that Xi’s government has achieved more progress, in more areas, in the past eighteen months than the Hu government did in its entire second term,” Arthur Kroeber, a longtime Beijing-based economist at Gavekal Dragonomics, a research firm, told me. And yet, Kroeber added, “my confidence level is only slightly above fifty per cent” that the reforms will be enough to head off a recession.

The risks to China’s economy have rarely been more visible. The workforce is aging more quickly than in other countries (because of the one-child policy), and businesses are borrowing money more rapidly than they are earning it. David Kelly, a co-founder of China Policy, a Beijing-based research and advisory firm, said, “The turning point in the economy really was about four, five years ago, and now you see the classical problem of the declining productivity of capital. For every dollar you invest, you’re getting far less bang for your buck.” The growth of demand for energy and raw materials has slowed, more houses and malls are empty, and nervous Chinese savers are sending money overseas, to protect it in the event of a crisis. Some factories have not paid wages, and in the last quarter of 2014 workers held strikes, or other forms of protest, at three times the rate of the same period a year earlier.

Xi’s ability to avoid an economic crisis depends partly on whether he has the political strength to prevail over state firms, local governments, and other powerful interests. In his meetings with Rudd, the former Australian Prime Minister, Xi mentioned his father’s frustrated attempts to achieve market-oriented reforms. “Xi Jinping is legitimately proud of his father,” Rudd said, adding, “His father had a record of real achievement and was, frankly, a person who paid a huge political and personal price for being a dedicated Party man and a dedicated economic reformer.”

Historically, the Party has never perceived a contradiction between political crackdown and economic reform. In 2005, Premier Wen Jiabao met with a delegation from the U.S. Congress, and one member, citing a professor who had recently been fired for political reasons, asked the Premier why. Wen was baffled by the inquiry; the professor was a “small problem,” he said. “I don’t know the person you spoke of, but as Premier I have 1.3 billion people on my mind.”

To maintain economic growth, China is straining to promote innovation, but by enforcing a political chill on Chinese campuses Xi risks suppressing precisely the disruptive thinking that the country needs for the future. At times, politics prevails over rational calculations. In 2014, after China had spent years investing in science and technology, the share of its economy devoted to research and development surpassed Europe’s. But, when the government announced the recipients of grants for social-science research, seven of the top ten projects were dedicated to analyzing Xi’s speeches (officially known as “General Secretary Xi’s Series of Important Speeches”) or his signature slogan: the Chinese Dream.

The era of Xi Jinping has defied the assumption that China’s fitful opening to the world is too critical and productive to stall. The Party today perceives an array of threats that, in the view of He Weifang, the law professor, will only increase in the years ahead. Before the Web, the professor said, “there really weren’t very many people who were able to access information from outside, so in Deng Xiaoping’s era the Party could afford to be a lot more open.” But now, if the Internet were unrestricted, “I believe it would bring in things that the leaders would consider very dangerous.”

Like many others I met this winter, He Weifang worries that the Party is narrowing the range of acceptable adaptation to the point that it risks uncontrollable change. I asked him what he thinks the Party will be like in ten or fifteen years. “I think, as intellectuals, we must do everything we can to promote a peaceful transformation of the Party—to encourage it to become a ‘leftist party’ in the European sense, a kind of social-democratic party.” That, he said, would help its members better respect a true system of law and political competition, including freedom of the press and freedom of thought. “If they refuse even these basic changes, then I believe China will undergo another revolution.”

It is a dramatic prediction—and an oddly commonplace one these days. Zhang Lifan, the historian I saw at Starbucks, said, in full view of his minder, “In front of a lot of princeling friends, I’ve said that, if the Communist Party can’t take sufficient political reform in five or ten years, it could miss the chance entirely. As scholars, we always say it’s better to have reform than revolution, but in Chinese history this cycle repeats itself. Mao said we have to get rid of the cycle, but right now we’re still in it. This is very worrying.”

Two months after the events of New Year’s Eve, the Party again confronted a collision between its instinct for control and the complexity of Chinese society. For years, the government had downplayed the severity of environmental pollution, describing it as an unavoidable cost of growth. But, year by year, the middle class was becoming less accommodating; in polls, urban citizens described pollution as their leading concern, and, using smartphones, they compared daily pollution levels to the standards set by the World Health Organization. After a surge of smog in 2013, the government intensified efforts to consolidate power plants, close small polluters, and tighten state control. Last year, it declared a “war against pollution,” but conceded that Beijing will not likely achieve healthy air before 2030. In a moment of candor, the mayor pronounced the city “unlivable.”

In February, Chinese video sites posted a privately funded documentary, titled “Under the Dome,” in which Chai Jing, a former state-television reporter, described her growing alarm at the risks that air pollution poses to her infant daughter. It was a sophisticated production: Chai, in fashionable faded jeans and a white blouse, delivered a fast-paced, TED-style talk to a rapt studio audience, unspooling grim statistics and scenes in which bureaucrats admitted that powerful companies and agencies had rendered them incapable of protecting public health. In spirit, the film was consistent with the official “war on corruption,” and state-run media responded with a coördinated array of flattering coverage.

The film raced across social media, and by the end of the first week it had been viewed two hundred million times—a level usually reserved for pop-music videos rather than dense, two-hour documentaries. The following weekend, the authorities ordered video sites to withdraw the film, and news organizations took down their coverage. As quickly as it had appeared, the film vanished from the Chinese Web—a phenomenon undone.

In the era of Xi Jinping, the public had proved, again, to be an unpredictable partner. It was a lesson that Xi absorbed long ago. “The people elevated me to this position so that I’d listen to them and benefit them,” he said in 2000. “But, in the face of all these opinions and comments, I had to learn to enjoy having my errors pointed out to me, but not to be swayed too much by that. Just because so-and-so says something, I’m not going to start weighing every cost and benefit. I’m not going to lose my appetite over it.”



【美国外交关系协会Council on Foreign Relations】
Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China
Robert D. Blackwill & Ashley J. Tellis
【这是作者一篇长文的摘要，原文可以在上述接链下载】

Overview
"China represents and will remain the most significant competitor to the United States for decades to come. As such, the need for a more coherent U.S. response to increasing Chinese power is long overdue," write CFR Senior Fellow Robert D. Blackwill and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Associate Ashley J. Tellis in a new Council Special Report, Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China.

"Because the American effort to 'integrate' China into the liberal international order has now generated new threats to U.S. primacy in Asia—and could result in a consequential challenge to American power globally—Washington needs a new grand strategy toward China that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy."

The authors argue that such a strategy is designed to limit the dangers that China's geoeconomic and military power pose to U.S. national interests in Asia and globally, even as the United States and its allies maintain diplomatic and economic interactions with China.

Blackwill and Tellis recommend that Washington do the following:

    Revitalize the U.S. economy

"Nothing would better promote the United States' strategic future and grand strategy toward China than robust economic growth…This must be the first priority of the president and Congress."

    Strengthen the U.S. military

"Congress should remove sequestration caps and substantially increase the U.S. defense budget...Washington should intensify a consistent U.S. naval and air presence in the South and East China Seas," and "accelerate the U.S. ballistic-missile defense posture" in the Pacific.

    Expand Asian trade networks

"U.S. grand strategy toward China will be seriously weakened without delivering on the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement]. A major push by the White House for ratification should therefore begin immediately in the new Congress, including seeking trade promotion authority."

    Create a technology-control regime

"Washington should pay increased attention to limiting China's access to advanced weaponry and military critical technologies." The United States should encourage its allies "to develop a coordinated approach to constrict China's access to all technologies, including dual use."

    Implement effective cyber policies

Washington should "impose costs on China that are in excess of the benefits it receives from its violations in cyberspace…increase U.S. offensive cyber capabilities . . . continue improving U.S. cyber defenses," and "pass relevant legislation in Congress, such as the Cyber Information Security Protection Act."

    Reinforce Indo-Pacific partnerships

"The United States cannot defend its interests in Asia without support from its allies," and "should build up the power-political capabilities of its friends and allies on China's periphery."

    Energize high-level diplomacy with Beijing

The United States should work to mitigate tensions with China, and "reassure U.S. allies and friends in Asia and beyond that Washington is doing everything it can to avoid a confrontation with China . . . U.S.-China discourse should be more candid, high-level, and private than is current practice."


【国家利益杂志National Interest】
A New U.S. Grand Strategy towards China
Robert D. Blackwill [2]Ashley J. Tellis

The United States needs to fundamentally change its grand strategy toward China.

One need look no further than the recent Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) debacle to understand how China’s ascent is aimed at challenging American global reach. The China-led international financial institution is poised to undermine the influence of the U.S.-led World Bank and International Monetary Fund while institutionalizing China’s geoeconomic coercion in the Asia-Pacific. Italy, France, Britain, Germany, South Korea, Denmark, and Australia have signed on as members of the AIIB, with Thailand and even Taiwan eyeing imminent entry. Meanwhile, the U.S. remains on the outside looking in as its influence is directly challenged by China’s rise.

Along with the AIIB, China is also pursuing a number of additional initiatives to expand its strategic reach in Asia and beyond. China has announced plans to advance a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP) and Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)—trade agreements that link the economies of China, Japan, and India along with Southeast Asian countries.

Beijing is simultaneously promoting the creation of a New Silk Road, which would open trade routes through Central Asia and maritime routes around Southeast and South Asia, better connecting China geopolitically to growing Asian economies and, through them, to the Middle East and Europe. Add to these projects the ongoing discussions over the creation of a new BRICS Development Bank between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

China’s sustained economic success over the last thirty-odd years has enabled it to aggregate formidable power, making it the nation most capable of dominating the Asian continent. Beijing’s economic rise has been staggering; its economy has grown at 10 percent annually for 35 years, and overall gross domestic product (GDP) has exploded from just $147 billion in 1979 to $9.24 trillion in 2013.

The meteoric growth of the Chinese economy, even if PRC per capita income remains behind that of the United States, has already provided Beijing with the resources necessary to challenge the security of both its Asian neighbors and Washington’s influence in Asia, with potentially dangerous consequences. Even as China’s overall GDP growth slows considerably, its relative growth rates are likely to be higher than those of the United States for the foreseeable future.

Backed by this robust economy, Beijing has embarked on a concerted modernization of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with the intention to amass military power capable of both defeating local adversaries and deterring the United States from coming to their defense in a crisis. China’s military budget, which was just $10 billion in 1997, saw an average annual increase of 15.9 percent between 1998 and 2007.

This year, China has announced that it will increase its defense budget by 10.1 percent, or roughly $145 billion in military spending. That total, however, doesn’t tell the full story; when weapons imports, military research and development, and spending on PLA strategic forces are included, China’s military spending could see an increase of 40 to 55 percent from last year. China’s emerging military capabilities enhance its ability to project power in the Asia-Pacific with the goal of limiting U.S. access to the region.

The fundamental problem in U.S.-China relations concerns, quite simply, the balance of power in Asia. As Henry Kissinger has put it, “In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.” Because of profound differences in history, ideology, strategic culture, and domestic politics, the United States and China have diametrically opposed and mutually incompatible perceptions regarding the future balance of power in Asia.

China’s grand strategy toward the United States is clear: to replace the United States as the primary strategic actor in Asia; to weaken the U.S. alliance system in the region; to undermine the confidence of Asian nations in U.S. credibility, reliability, and staying power; to use China’s economic power to pull Asian nations closer to Beijing’s geopolitical policy preferences; to increase Chinese military capability to strengthen deterrence against U.S. military intervention; to cast doubt on the U.S. economic model; to ensure American democratic values do not diminish the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on domestic power; and to avoid a major confrontation with the United States in the next decade.

In a classic work published at the height of the Second World War, Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, editor Edward Meade Earle defined grand strategy as “the art of controlling and utilizing the resources of a nation…to the end that its vital interests shall be effectively promoted and secured against enemies, actual, potential, or merely presumed.”

For the United States, grand strategy has long focused on acquiring and maintaining preeminent power over various rivals. In the face of a rising China, however, the United States has failed to apply this centuries long approach to its national security.

Instead, a gamut of policy options and rhetoric has emerged for Washington policymakers to employ when it comes to dealing with China. There’s talk of a Group of Two (G2) relationship between Washington and Beijing, of encouraging China to become a “responsible stakeholder,” and—most recently—the emergence in Beijing of the concept of “a new type of great power relations.”

None of these policy alternatives are adequate to reinforce what should be the main thrust of U.S. grand strategy toward China in the 21st century—to maintain American strategic primacy in Asia. Thus, Washington urgently needs a new set of actions in the region that centers on balancing the rise of Chinese power rather than continuing to assist its ascendancy.

A new U.S. grand strategy toward China cannot be built on a bedrock of containment, as the previous effort to limit Soviet power had been, because of the realities of globalization. Nor can it involve abruptly jettisoning the long time U.S. effort of integrating China into the international system. Rather, it must involve crucial changes to current Washington policies in order to limit the dangers that China’s geoeconomic, military and diplomatic expansion pose to U.S. national interests in Asia and globally.

The United States needs to focus its policy on five distinct objectives: revitalizing the American economy to sustain asymmetric economic advantages; creating new preferential trading arrangements among U.S. friends that consciously exclude China; recreating a technology-control regime with U.S. allies to prevent China from acquiring advanced military and strategic capabilities; concertedly building up the capacities of U.S. allies and friends on China’s periphery; and improving the capability of U.S. military forces to effectively project power in the Asia-Pacific region. All of these objectives must be accomplished while continuing to work with China in the diverse ways that are consistent with U.S. national interests.

Of all nations—and in most conceivable scenarios—China is and will remain the most significant competitor to the United States for decades to come. China’s rise is producing increased geopolitical, military, economic and ideological challenges to U.S. power projection, to America’s Asian allies and friends, and to the U.S.-led international order.

Washington’s current approach toward Beijing, one that favors China’s economic and political integration into the liberal international system at the expense of the United States’ global preeminence and Asian primacy, is weakening U.S. influence throughout Asia and beyond.

Robert D. Blackwill is Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ashley J. Tellis is Senior Associate in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. They are co-authors of a new Council on Foreign Relations report, “Revising U.S. Grand Strategy Toward China [5],” available online at CFR.org .


【Geroge Kennan initiated the idea of cold war, containment of USSR, which eventually eveolved into a costly cold confrontation between the U. S. and the U. S. S. R.  An idea that becoame to dominate political thinking.  It is in nobody's interest to see this rep[eat.  But there is a danger】
《Newsweek》
In Washington, a Strategic Shift on China—Toward Containment
By Bill Powell 4/29/15

"China represents and will remain the most significant competitor to the United States for decades to come. As such, the need for a more coherent U.S. response to increasing Chinese power is long overdue.”

The words are dispassionate: “significant competitor”; not "enemy.’’ They are careful: "A more coherent response." That suggests that heretofore the U.S. response to increasing Chinese power has been at least somewhat coherent. But there should be no mistaking the significance of the above sentences. They are the first of many in a lengthy new report issued by the Council on Foreign Relations. For decades, the “council,” as the cognoscenti call it, has been the core of the American foreign policy establishment. When it comes to foreign affairs, it doesn't just regurgitate the conventional wisdom, it creates it.

Given that, the just issued report on U.S.-China relations, co-authored by Robert Blackwill, one of the most distinguished American diplomats of his generation, signifies a major shift in establishment thinking about China. And the conclusion is, as these things go, astonishing: The U.S. should place "less strategic emphasis on the goal of integrating China into the international system, and more on balancing China's rise.” Which is to say, we should basically chuck what has been U.S. policy for the past three decades, and try something that sounds almost (but not quite) like containment.

The report comes amidst whispers that senior foreign policy grandees of former administrations—both Democratic and Republican—have started to sour on hopes that Beijing could be brought without much rancor into the existing international order. They worry that President Xi Jinping is more interested in becoming No. 1, as opposed to co-existing with the U.S. at the apex of the international pecking order. It also comes amidst the Obama administration’s so-called pivot to Asia, which it goes to great lengths to insist is not about containing China. The only problem with that claim is that there isn't anybody among traditional U.S. allies in the region who believes it. And the China as rival and not “strategic partner”—which is what the Obama administration used to call it—is increasingly evident. Pushing for support for the Trans Pacific Partnership—a broad free trade deal with 12 Pacific nations—Obama recently told The Wall Street Journal that “if we don't write the rules, China will write the rules out in that region.”

As that kind of “us-or-them” rhetoric indicates, even the economic relationship between the two countries—which is its fundamental core—is under some strain. In their recently released annual survey of business conditions in China, the American chambers of commerce in both Shanghai and Beijing recently reported an uptick in the number of their members concerned about increasing regulatory and legal scrutiny from the government in Beijing.

The conventional wisdom is that the current leadership in Beijing watches all this and, unified, sets an ever more defiant course both abroad and at home. Beijing, it is said, suspects the U.S. of trying to encircle China—of trying to blunt if not reverse its rise. So it flexes its muscles in the east and south China seas, and moves to exert ever more influence to its west through massive government-led investment plans to create a new “silk road.” (On April 21, Xi was in Islamabad hawking an aid and investment deal with Pakistan with a headline number—$46 billion—that drew attention around the world.)

There is, to be sure, an element of truth in all that. But it's also more complicated. No one at any level of the Chinese leadership ever draws attention to himself by publicly questioning the party line; but there remain people in the Beijing government who can safely be called pro-Western, and who believe a strong relationship with the United States is in the country’s best interest. And they are watching, with increasing (if still muted) concern, the tide go out on what has been an era of bipartisan policy in Washington toward Beijing: one that accentuated the economic benefits to both sides in the short run, with the hope that in longer run, increasing prosperity in China would bring about some form of political liberalization.

Those days—and hopes—are gone. And the day may be drawing near when a behind-the-scenes debate breaks out in Beijing that poses a straightforward question: Who lost Washington?

In the U.S., of course, "Who lost China?" was a rancorous Cold War–era debate in the wake of the 1949 Communist takeover in Beijing. The second-guessing in China over current foreign policy will not, of course, be so public, but that doesn't mean it won't come. A scholar at a government-affiliated think tank with close ties to several senior party officials acknowledges that “there are some questions in the wind now, certainly. No one quite says, “Who lost Washington?”—we're not there yet—but people I would call “internationalists” with a pro-Western bias wonder where this is headed, and “whether we've played our hand intelligently both in terms of relations with Washington but also in our own backyard.”

Those questions have to do with the perception that Beijing over the past few years has bullied small neighbors like the Philippines and Vietnam, as well as whether it needed to pick a fight with Japan over the Senkaku Islands. (China refers to them as the Diaoyu Islands and calls them “disputed”; Tokyo denies there’s any doubt they belong to Japan.)

Beijing points out—and diplomats in Tokyo concur—that the two countries worked hard over the last year to drain some of the poison out of the islands dispute, which had alarmed Washington, and, as one former U.S. diplomat says, put the “pro-China crowd at the State Department very much on the defensive.’’ For now, the issue has receded, and foreign ministry officials in Beijing say the effort shows that the notion that “nationalistic hawks are running wild” in the Chinese capital, as the government think tank scholar puts it, is overblown.

But there’s little question that any measure of trust between Beijing and Washington has diminished; a foreign ministry official late last year told Newsweek that there is "no question" that relations between the two countries were “better when George W. Bush was president than they are today.”

The question is, to what extent does that matter to Beijing? Foreign diplomats there seem increasingly to think it’s not that big a deal to Xi & Co.; Beijing is increasingly suspicious of the U.S. as a rival in Asia and increasingly convinced that its own ascendancy is irreversible. The quest for supremacy in the Pacific, therefore, is likely to intensify.

If true, those attitudes will have consequences. There is increasing talk in Washington that the U.S. needs to reverse the shrinkage in its Navy. Most of the leading Republican presidential candidates support an increase in the number of aircraft carriers in the U.S. fleet, as well as a modernized version of the so-called Ohio class of nuclear submarines, which are slated to go out of business in just over a decade. Nor is it unthinkable that Hillary Clinton, should she be Barack Obama’s successor in less than two years, would add more military heft to the so-called pivot to Asia—particularly if U.S. policy is to “balance” China’s rise. There is also growing anger over Beijing’s purported cyber offensive against both the U.S. government and big U.S. corporations. (And let’s face it, the Fortune 500 is the core of Beijing’s constituency in the United States.)

If China, in fact, doesn’t care that it's “losing Washington,” that only makes it more likely that it will lose it. And at the moment, that appears to be the road Beijing is on.


参见：Nick Beams: US “Grand Strategy” for war against China laid out，Eric Zuesse: CFR Says China Must Be Defeated And TPP Is Essential To That



Why the Contemporary Art World Is Insufferable, Corrupted by the Super-Rich

I used to cover gallery openings, but those days are over.

For the last few years, I’ve hovered above the refreshments table at art events, guzzling free wine like a peasant and stuffing napkins full of bread and cheese into my purse. Usually the art is mediocre, I am alone covering an exhibition, and making small talk is excruciating without the encouragement of alcohol.

I have been to thousands of art events over the course of my life. I come from a family of artists: my grandmother is an African-American assemblage artist, and my mother and aunt are artists as well. Growing up, I was dragged to all kinds of art openings and museum shows. Some art school students would love that kind of exposure, but as a kid, I found them painfully boring. Though informally trained in painting and drawing, I have always considered myself more of a writer and an academic. Nobody wants to be like their parents, even if they are bohemians. But alas, I fell into writing art reviews, despite not having a background in art history, deferring my aspirations of becoming a fiction writer.

I’ve written about art for about three years since moving to New York, though I never managed to really write as an art critic; I was more like a junior copywriter for art. Writing for certain art magazines and blogs allowed me a Gatsbyian entrance into the lives of the extraordinarily wealthy. I got to interview art collectors, gallery dealers, models, artists, and designers who probably spend more on handbags than I do on rent. I’ve sipped champagne in a Bentley and feasted on caviar in penthouse apartments. Though I disliked some of the art I was assigned to cover, as a grad student I couldn’t really be choosy about what I wrote about. I wanted to get published, and getting paid to write, no matter the topic, felt like a blessing.

I approached writing about art from a literary perspective, aiming to uncover some significant meaning by contextualizing the work within the artist’s life and perspective. This made uninteresting art exhibits easier to write about, since a lot of artists are more inspiring than their work. I’m shy, and interviewing people proved to be a valuable experience.

Yet art events continue to make me uncomfortable. Whether it's a press preview at a huge museum, a commercial art fair or a packed gallery opening in Chelsea, I’m always anxious to leave. The lighting is always too bright and everyone acts as though they, like the art, are on display, smiling grotesquely as if a camera is lurking. It’s usually so crowded you can hardly view the art, though it doesn’t seem as though people look at the art as much as they schmooze, and you have to stand the entire time. The social discomfort is the least of my qualms with the art world, though. Here are the main reasons why the art world nauseates me.

1. Art collectors treat art as an investment

For the most part, the only people who can afford to buy art in this economy are people who are not affected by this economy, the top 1 or 2 percent. Of course, rich people have always patronized the arts— Michelangelo would never have been able to produce his masterpieces without the Medici family— but today's billionaires aren’t just patronizing artists, they’re investing in and branding them. The top 10 billionaire art collectors have 18% of their net worth invested in art, though the average billionaire invests about .5% of their net worth in art. Investing in art can sometimes prove more lucrative than the stock market; a recent study shows that works by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst have been appreciating at a higher rate than the S&P 500.

There is money to be made not just in selling art, but also in evaluating its worth. In the same way a financial advisor would help you make investment choices, there are art advisors who counsel your art purchases. “Appearing as if from nowhere, like a biblical swarm of locusts: The art advisors…. in the last few years, advisors have popped up literally everywhere and now outnumber collectors 2 to 1,” says financial writer Adam Lindermann. Many contemporary art collectors have no interest in the art itself, making priceless works of art nothing more than fetishized commodities.

Flipping, selling artworks immediately after purchasing them at exponential prices, is also a common practice among art collectors. Many financial advisors predict that continuing to inflate the value of works of art that are constantly turned over will soon cause the art bubble to burst. “The auction houses are experiencing a situation where every auction total is higher than the last and these vertiginous upward prices cannot be maintained forever. Someday the music is going to stop and somebody is going to be found without a chair to sit on,” says art expert and former Sotheby’s employee Todd Levin.

2. Art is a spectacle

There are certain exhibitions, like James Turrell’s immersive light installation at the Guggenheim, when experiencing the art everyone is extoling is nearly impossible because there are so many viewers clamoring to see what the hype is about. I waited in line for nearly two hours to see Turrell’s Aten Reign, a “meditative spectacle” where I “may or may not see God” (according to New York Times critic Roberta Smith). Perhaps I would have seen God had not every New Yorker who had that day off been breathing down my neck, but mostly, the entire exhibit seemed like a subtle joke. There I was, standing in a line, shuffling up the steps like a prisoner, waiting to see this transformative work that no matter how spectacular would ultimately frustrate me. Perhaps I’m cynical, but the crowded wait only ruined the exhibit for me. I wondered if this wasn’t some kind of existential funhouse, a metaphor for the futility of human existence, ending in a disappointing light show.

3. Conceptual art is a joke

Half of the so-called conceptual art I see makes me wonder if the artist is trolling everyone. I often find myself at odds when reading the press release of an exhibit and looking at the actual work, thinking, this person read some basic critical theory, threw together a bunch of objects, and hastily applied some absurd meaning that they themselves cannot fully explain. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but so much of the art I see is forgettable, like a messy dream I can’t quite articulate.

4. Art factories steal souls

More and more, highly successful artists are relying on mass production factories to produce their masterpieces. There’s nothing wrong with hiring others to help with the artistic process—this has been done for centuries. But artists like Jeff Koons who employ hundreds of workers to complete their works without ever laying a single brushstroke on the canvas (because that might upset the artistic decision-making process) have turned Warhol’s concept of the factory into an artistic dystopia. People are paying millions of dollars for eyesore animal balloon sculptures that were produced by Koons’ underpaid art serfs, who are fired if they do not complete their painstaking tasks exactly as assigned. I believe creative people should turn their own suffering into art, not cause other people’s suffering with their art.

5. Art school is kind of a scam

Mike Kelley once said of the recent boom in art school enrollment, “Young people who would have previously gone into careers in indie rock—which is one of the few arenas where a young person with no particular talent can make some money—can now accomplish the same thing in the art world.” But going to art school doesn’t guarantee success in the art world, and art schools often cater to certain artistic movements, isolating those who don’t fit into current trends.

6. Women artists and artists of color are sidelined

Twenty years after the Guerrilla Girls feminist art group criticized major art museums for their lack of gender and racial diversity, little has changed. Women still need to be naked to get into the Met (4% of women artists make up the modern section of the Metropolitan Museum and 76% of paintings of nudes are female), and white male artists dominate the commercial art world for the most part. It is rare to see a large museum feature a person of color in a solo exhibition—Carrie Mae Weems was the first African-American woman to get a solo show at the Guggenheim museum in 2014.

7. Money for art in public schools is dwindling

There isn’t a lack of money being funneled through the art universe, but public school budgets for art programs are always the first to be cut. Art education has many benefits in child development, including encouraging motor skills, visual learning, decision-making, and inventiveness. If even a fraction of the billions of dollars spent on art went into children’s education, it would make a positive difference in the richness of children’s lives and the diversity of the art world.

Not all aspects of the art world disgust me and I don’t want to stop writing about art entirely. I’m just tired of prostituting my writing abilities for work I have no interest in. I believe in decentralizing the artistic ego by encouraging more art collectives and supporting organizations that give back to the community and encourage creative development in schools. I’d like to feature outsider art, public art and art that has some kind of personal or political meaning, or is at least aesthetically pleasing. And I’d like there to be more free wine and better lighting at openings, and maybe a place to sit down.



【联储论文】
The Middle Class Is Worse Off Than You Think
Behind the Slow Pace of Wage Growth



【华尔街日报】
As China Expands Its Navy, the U.S. Grows Wary
Washington is divided over whether Beijing should be viewed as naval partner or potential adversary

China’s navy chief, Adm. Wu Shengli, strolled the Harvard University campus in a tweed blazer and slacks during a visit to the U.S. last fall, joking with students and quizzing school officials about enrolling some of his officers.

A few days earlier, he became the first Chinese navy chief to attend a 113-nation naval forum in Rhode Island, where he hailed U.S.-China military ties and discussed working together on global maritime challenges.

Shortly after his U.S. visit, Adm. Wu took another trip—this time to the Spratly Islands, an archipelago in the South China Sea where his country appears to be building a network of artificial island fortresses in contested waters. It was his first known visit to facilities U.S. officials fear could be used to enforce Chinese control of nearly all the South China Sea, one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.



As Adm. Wu seeks closer exchanges with the U.S. in his quest to build a modern global navy, Washington faces the dilemma of dealing with China as both a partner and a potential adversary challenging U.S. naval dominance in Asia. “I would say that he doesn’t want to build a navy that’s equivalent to the U.S.,” said Adm. Gary Roughead, the retired U.S. Chief of Naval Operations. “He wants to build a navy that surpasses the U.S.”

Adm. Wu, navy chief since 2006, is one of the architects of China’s maritime expansion, sending ships and submarines deep into the Indian and Pacific oceans, launching China’s first aircraft carrier and overseeing operations to assert control of waters claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines and other nations.


He also has become China’s point man for cinching closer U.S. military ties, a priority of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Adm. Wu met his counterpart, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, four times over the past two years, forging guidelines on how Chinese and U.S. vessels can safely interact.

Adm. Wu now wants deeper exchanges, including help developing aircraft carrier operations and improving education for his naval officers. He says such exchanges would allow China to better work alongside the U.S. to maintain global security, according to people who have spoken with him.

Adm. Greenert and other senior U.S. Navy officials also advocate closer engagement to encourage China to embrace international norms. Some in the Pentagon and Congress, however, worry Adm. Wu’s real mission is absorbing American know-how to advance territorial gains and boost China’s ability to thwart U.S. intervention.

Adm. Wu has been described by the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI, as the “most vocal and successful advocate for a greatly expanded mission” for the Chinese navy since Adm. Liu Huaqing, who first proposed turning China into a sea power in the 1980s.

He is also a so-called princeling, as offspring of senior Communist Party figures are known, and said by defense officials to have strong backing from President Xi—another princeling—who has put sea power at the core of his vision for China. That may explain why Adm. Wu, 69 years old, has kept his post so long. He said during his U.S. visit he expected to retain the job until 2017.

The conflicting views of Adm. Wu mirror a deeper debate over whether China and the U.S. can reconcile their competing strategic interests in Asia and forge a genuinely cooperative military relationship in the 21st Century.

The Pentagon last month denied a proposal by Adm. Wu—and backed by Adm. Greenert—for a port visit by a U.S. aircraft carrier to mainland China this year.

Sen. John McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, opposed the visit. He also was one of four Republican and Democratic senators who wrote a letter this month protesting China’s island building in the South China Sea. “We believe that a formal policy and clearly articulated strategy to address these forms of Chinese coercion are essential,” said the letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter.
China appears to be building a network of artificial island fortresses, shown here, in contested waters in the South China Sea. ENLARGE

The U.S. should consider what actions it could take to slow or stop the island-building, as well as determine what security cooperation should be cut if the work continued, said the letter, also signed by the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Chinese officials say the islands are sovereign territory and work there is not targeted at other countries.

Officially, the Pentagon says defense ties between the two nations continue to improve based on the commitments made by Presidents Barack Obama and Xi during their first summit in 2013.

Privately, though, some Pentagon officials say they are waiting to see if Adm. Wu’s promises, especially on avoiding dangerous sea and air encounters, translate into action. Adm. Wu isn’t scheduled to meet with his U.S. counterpart this year. Asked at a conference this month about what naval exchanges with China were planned in 2015, Adm. Greenert said: “Not a lot. Not as much as I would hope.”

Before his Harvard visit, Adm. Wu told a Hong Kong TV station that Beijing and Washington couldn’t resolve all their disputes, such as U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, because they had “differences of principle.” He said, “America would not be America” if it ceased aerial surveillance operations around China’s coast. But he also pledged to continue intercepting such missions.

Adm. Wu couldn’t be reached for comment, and China’s defense ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment. Asked at a news conference about Adm. Wu’s visit to the Spratly Islands, a defense ministry spokesman said only that China had “indisputable sovereignty” over the area.

China’s last sea battle

Adm. Wu was born in 1945. His name translates as “Victory Wu,” commemorating the defeat of Japan in World War II, according to ONI. His father was a Communist commander who served as vice governor of Zhejiang province.

Adm. Wu joined the People’s Liberation Army at age 19 and went on to captain frigates and destroyers. In 1988, he commanded a detachment of destroyers, one of which helped defeat Vietnamese forces in a skirmish over Spratlys reefs, according to official accounts. That was China’s last sea battle.

Adm. Wu’s authority is technically limited in a system where China’s armed forces are commanded by the 11-man Central Military Commission, headed by President Xi and long dominated by the army.
ENLARGE

But Adm. Wu—as the only sailor on the commission since 2007—has been in a unique position to influence leaders on maritime issues. That year, for example, he commissioned and led a three-year study of the South China Sea’s strategic importance.

He has overseen the replacement of Soviet-era ships with advanced, domestically-produced vessels, including destroyers, frigates and nuclear submarines. China commissioned its first aircraft carrier in 2012.

Under Adm. Wu, the navy has expanded its reach far beyond coastal defense, for years its primary mission. In 2008, Chinese warships were deployed to Africa’s coast for the first time in 600 years to join antipiracy patrols. In 2011, the navy conducted its first operation in the Mediterranean, evacuating Chinese citizens from Libya, and, in 2013, it sent a nuclear submarine to the Indian Ocean for the first time.

In recent writings and speeches, Adm. Wu has argued that China’s “century of humiliation,” beginning with its defeat by the British in the First Opium War in 1842, was caused by insufficient naval power.

Today, “the sea is no obstacle: the history of national humiliation is gone, never to return,” he said in August to mark the anniversary of the start of the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese war, which China lost.
The U.S. is boosting its submarine and anti-sub forces in Asia to counter China’s fast-growing undersea firepower. (Originally published 10/24/14)

In private, he talks openly of the emerging contest with the U.S., even challenging America to send more ships to Asia because that would prompt Chinese leaders to boost naval spending, say people who have dealt with him.

At the same time, those people say, Adm. Wu acknowledges his navy’s lack of combat experience and limited cooperation with other naval powers—weaknesses, he said, the U.S. could help remedy.

Refining China’s aircraft carrier operations is an example. Another is enrolling officers at top U.S. universities and defense academies, as well as creating a Chinese military college modeled on the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, which teaches liberal arts in addition to the sciences.
Limits on U.S. help

During his campus visit, Adm. Wu talked about his interest in sending officers to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, said people in the tour.

He showed a flash of anger over legislative restrictions on defense exchanges with China designed to prevent activity that could enhance its combat capabilities. Chinese officers, for example, can visit but not enroll in U.S. defense colleges.

Adm. Wu said: “ ‘Before, China was afraid of Americans and other foreigners going into China and stealing secrets,’ ” according to Shuang Lu, a Chinese doctoral student who showed him around campus. “ ‘Now, is America afraid of China?’ ”

Those in favor of closer engagement say the U.S. has an opportunity to help shape the evolution of China’s navy. Adm. Greenert portrays Adm. Wu as a fellow mariner who shares the goal of eliminating misunderstandings at sea.

Last year, China, the U.S. and other Western Pacific naval powers signed a code of conduct for unplanned sea encounters. In February, a U.S. Navy ship practiced with a Chinese vessel in the South China Sea.

And China made its debut in June at the world’s largest naval exercises off Hawaii, which are led by the U.S. every two years.

The value of engagement, Adm. Greenert said in an interview, is in “determining who you can trust, who you can talk directly with, person to person, look them in the eyes and understand where they’re coming from so that when a really complicated matter comes, you’re not starting from scratch.”

Adm. Greenert cited the historic relationship between Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, a Soviet military commander, and Adm. William Crowe, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs—ties, he said, that eased tensions at the close of the Cold War.

There also have been setbacks with China. U.S. forces detected a Chinese spy ship monitoring the Hawaii-area naval drills from international waters. And in August, the Pentagon said Chinese fighters flew dangerously close to U.S. surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea. China said its pilots flew safely.

Some U.S. defense officials doubt Adm. Greenert and Adm. Wu can build enough trust to be useful in a crisis. Talk of a hotline failed to gain traction.

In February, 29 Chinese naval officers visited the U.S. Naval Academy and U.S. Naval War College. American officers will make a reciprocal visit later this year. But Pentagon officials say they want more from China before they approve such ambitious exchanges as the carrier visit. One goal is an air-encounters pact in time for President Xi’s U.S. visit in September.

Views in Congress have hardened after the latest reports of China’s island-building in the South China Sea, which U.S. officials see as a navy project.

Adm. Wu hasn’t spoken publicly about the island work. In a 2009 article in the Chinese navy’s newspaper, he described the upgrade of South China Sea island facilities, which included new satellite communications, and called for more.

Taiwan’s intelligence chief, Lee Shying-jow, told a parliamentary hearing in October that Adm. Wu spent a week in September touring the artificial islands. Mr. Lee said Adm. Wu was, in effect, declaring, “I have an entire strategic plan for the South China Sea” that entailed turning small reefs into island fortresses. “We are indeed very worried,” Mr. Lee said.

While at Harvard, Adm. Wu conveyed a very different message, turning on the charm as he confided that he had tried to persuade his granddaughter to apply, and teased staff about their traditional rivalry with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he also toured.

At the end of his visit, he bade farewell in the style of U.S. military officers, slapping a personalized commemorative coin into the palms of his hosts.

 

经典：

 

2015.01.06李彦松
2015，中国经济改革与增长
2014.12.18黄志凌
未来中国经济增长策略展望
刘芍佳（英国布鲁乃尔大学教授）：点评中国：新年经济增长靠什么？



投资潮
《财富杂志》

Fortune
The Age of Unicorns
Erin Griffith, Dan Primack
January 22, 2015

The billion-dollar tech startup was supposed to be the stuff of myth. Now they seem to be … everywhere.

Stewart Butterfield had one objective when he set out to raise money for his startup last fall: a billion dollars or nothing. If he couldn’t reach a $1 billion valuation for Slack, his San Francisco business software company, he wouldn’t bother. Slack was hardly starving for cash. It was a rocket ship, with thousands of people signing up for its workplace collaboration tools each week. What Slack needed, Butterfield believed, was the cachet of the billion-dollar mark.

“Yes, it’s arbitrary because it’s a big round number,” says Butterfield, 41. “It does make a difference psychologically. One billion is better than $800 million because it’s the psychological threshold for potential customers, employees, and the press.”
Unicorn cover horizontalIllustration by Jeremy Enecio for Fortune

Sure enough, in October—less than a year after the company released its namesake product—Slack announced the close of a $120 million round of financing. Its valuation? One billion dollars. Butterfield’s wish had come true: Slack was the tech world’s newest “unicorn.”

It wasn’t long ago that the idea of a pre-IPO tech startup with a $1 billion market value was a fantasy. Google GOOG -1.30% was never worth $1 billion as a private company. Neither was Amazon AMZN 0.54% nor any other alumnus of the original dotcom class.

Today the technology industry is crowded with billion-dollar startups. When Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee coined the term unicorn as a label for such corporate creatures in a November 2013 TechCrunch blog post, just 39 of the past decade’s VC-backed U.S. software startups had topped the $1 billion valuation mark. Now, casting a wider net, Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists (full list here). And given that these companies are privately held, a few are sure to have escaped our detection. The rise of the unicorn has occurred rapidly and without much warning, and it’s starting to freak some people out.

“It used to be that unicorns were these mythical creatures,” says Jason Green, a venture capitalist at Emergence Capital Partners whose investments include Yammer, which sold to Microsoft MSFT -1.06% for $1.2 billion. “Now there are herds of unicorns.”

Not content to run with the pack—or “blessing,” as a group of unicorns is sometimes known—venture capitalists have begun targeting even bigger game. They’re now hunting startups with the potential to rapidly reach a $10 billion valuation—or, as Green calls them, “decacorns.” In late 2013 just one private company had crossed that threshold: Facebook FB -0.13% . Now there are at least eight, including Uber, the on-demand car service worth $41.2 billion. Its valuation is higher than the market capitalization of at least 70% of the companies in the Fortune 500.

Technology is driving the boom. Smartphones, cheap sensors, and cloud computing have enabled a raft of new Internet-connected services that are infiltrating the most tech-averse industries—Uber is roiling the taxi industry; Airbnb is disrupting hotels. Investors see massive opportunity in the upheaval.

Then there are the broader financial trends. A nearly six-year-old raging bull market in public stocks has produced a tailwind for private company valuations and convinced the latest crop of tech entrepreneurs that there will be plenty of time to cash in when they feel like it. Record-low interest rates also have caused some big institutional investors to search for returns in the high-risk, high-reward world of venture capital. Add to that a lack of regulation: After the passage of the JOBS Act in 2012, which aimed to make it easier for small businesses to raise capital, startups could take on many more investors before the Securities and Exchange Commission effectively forced them to go public.

Finally, there is the intangible element of perception. In the startup world, a valuation of $1 billion says that you’re no longer a fly-by-night startup with plans to quickly sell out to Google.

“It absolutely gives us credibility and the ability to hire some very important people,” says Apoorva Mehta, the 28-year-old CEO of on-demand grocery delivery service Instacart, which has been in business for only two years but reportedly is valued at $2 billion. “And it tells the world that we’re looking to build a long-lasting worldwide brand instead of looking to get acquired.”

Venture capitalists justify these soaring valuations by looking backward. After the dotcom crash, a wave of prudence swept over the Valley. Investors kept valuations low and tried not to overcapitalize their companies. That strategy lasted until Hurricane Facebook came along. All of the cautious types who passed on investing in the social network early, because it was too expensive at $250 million or $500 million, were left scarred and paranoid when it went public in May 2012 with a market cap of $104 billion. If a startup is going to be worth billions of dollars in a few years, why quibble over a few million on the entry price?

As a result, the median valuation of a Series A round of funding soared 135% between 2012 and 2014, according to the law firm Cooley LLP. This has created an echo effect, with new gains setting the bar higher for each subsequent round of funding. So venture capitalists have recruited unlikely new partners in the form of traditional money managers such as Fidelity Investments (which led the latest deal for Uber) and Wellington Management (which backed DocuSign and Moderna Therapeutics) to support unicorn-level rounds. Call it trickle-up economics.

It also doesn’t hurt that American corporations have record-breaking stockpiles of cash on their balance sheets. Facebook set tongues wagging when it paid $19 billion for instant-messaging startup WhatsApp last March, then followed it up a month later by shelling out $2 billion for virtual reality headset maker Oculus VR. In 2014, Google paid $3.2 billion for smart thermostat maker Nest, Apple AAPL 0.86% acquired headphone maker Beats for $3 billion, and Microsoft spent $2.5 billion to own the Swedish gaming startup responsible for Minecraft. Even health care VCs cashed in, selling Seragon Pharmaceuticals to Genentech for upwards of $1.7 billion.



All of this has begun to feel bubblicious, especially to those who lived through the last cycle. “If you are a CEO today and you’re age 35 or below, you did not go through 2000, which means you have not actually seen the capital markets shut off,” says venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who nonetheless remains bullish. “People who went through 2000 are psychologically scarred and arguably have been risk-averse for the last 15 years. If you didn’t go through it you’re in danger of always believing you can raise money at a higher valuation.”

Greycroft Partners founder Alan Patricof, who has been investing in startups for more than four decades, is wary. “People are buying traffic growth and revenue growth, but it’s the ‘emperor has no clothes’ theory,” he says. “At some point all of these companies will be valued on a multiple of Ebitda. If the IPO market goes away, or for any reason there’s a blip in the outlook, people could be left holding a lot of inventory they wish they didn’t have.”

Proponents of the unicorn boom posit that this time—no, seriously!—is different. Many of the billion-dollar startups, they argue, have the actual customers and revenue that companies of the dotcom days lacked. But no one in the VC world is so sanguine as to suggest that, sooner or later, we won’t experience a market pullback.

Not surprisingly, many venture capitalists have begun preaching caution to their portfolio companies. A brief swoon in publicly traded tech stock prices last April—particularly in the enterprise sector—was seen industrywide as a warning shot that startups should control their “burn rates” and raise as much new money as possible to protect against a future funding drought. Entrepreneurs listened, at least to the second part: U.S.-based companies raised more venture capital in the fourth quarter of 2014 than they did in any other quarter over the prior 13 years, according to the National Venture Capital Association.

That explains, in part, why a company like Instacart raised $120 million in new funding earlier this month at its reported $2 billion valuation just six months after raising $44 million at a $400 million valuation. Or why social media company Pinterest raised $625 million over three rounds of funding between February 2013 and May 2014, doubling its valuation from $2.5 billion to $5 billion.

But more aggressive fundraising is no guarantee that unicorns will grow into their valuations. “Going from $0 to $50 million in revenue is a lot different from going from $50 million to several hundred million,” says Green. “A lot of folks don’t make that transition. Most don’t. Maybe half of those companies won’t fulfill their potential.” (For a look at a startup struggling to break through, read the story on Jawbone.)

Several unicorns have already experienced a pullback. Open-source software company Hortonworks HDP 0.50% was valued at $1 billion by private investors but lowered its market cap to $666 million when it went public last December. (It has since crossed back over the $1 billion mark in market value.) Box, the data storage company credited with making enterprise technology cool, was preparing to hold an IPO just days after this magazine went to press. Its initial valuation was expected to be at least 30% lower than the $2.4 billion it commanded from private investors like TPG Capital last summer.

And then there is Fab, the design-focused e-commerce site that said it would generate $250 million in revenue in 2013. It ended up bringing in around $100 million. (At one point, it burned as much as $14 million per month.) Fab shrank from 750 employees to 150, and CEO Jason Goldberg repositioned the company as a custom furniture business. Fab was widely reported to have raised some of its $336 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation, but Goldberg acknowledges to Fortune that its valuation never actually topped $875 million. He acknowledges the company isn’t worth close to that today. “If you allow yourself to believe you’re worth $1 billion after two to three years of being in business, you’re going to get yourself caught up in trouble,” Goldberg says.

Even in the best of times, of course, startup investing is high risk. As quickly as the Age of Unicorns arrived, the conditions that created it could reverse and leave entrepreneurs and investors wistful for what might have been.

“I think you’re going to see a lot of failure in 2015,” says Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley, who sits on Uber’s board of directors. “If you’re a public company worth $3 billion and your stock trades down to $1 billion, you can survive it because you can still issue options to hire new employees, etc.  If it happens when you’re private, though, it becomes immediately harder to hire or to get incremental investment.”

In the meantime, expect more billion-dollar startups to emerge—at least for now. “You can’t choose not to play,” Gurley says. “If you’re in the enterprise segment and your competitors are raising $150 million at high valuations and pouring it into sales, you either can do something similar or be conservative and no longer matter.” Which might explain why some VCs continue to invest even as they predict failure. There’s always the hope and belief that the value created by a few successful unicorns will offset the losses of those that fail.

Butterfield knows the easy venture money will dry up at some point. It’s one reason Slack has spent only 1% of the money it’s raised. “You’d have to be in a meteors-hitting-the-Earth scenario before Slack as a business would get into trouble,” he boasts. Staying thrifty is a smart move. The prestige of being a unicorn diminishes with each passing quarter. When it’s gone, he’ll have a whole new fantasy to chase: profitability.


NYT Dealbook
The Rise of the ‘Unicorns’
DAVID GELLES, APRIL 1, 2015

Venture capitalists invest in companies in search of breakout hits that attract millions of users, billions in sales and enormous valuations. These rarities, called unicorns, have grown in size and number as investors chasing returns have bid up their value. More than 70 technology companies are now valued at $1 billion or more, and the number is growing quickly. Several of the best-known Silicon Valley companies listed below are worth over $10 billion.









这并没有阻止奥巴马不停地攻击中国：

2015.04.09路透社：Obama says concerned China uses size to bully 【=欺负】 others in region

"...but just because the Philippines or Vietnam are not as large as China doesn't mean that they can just be elbowed aside."

参见：英国广播公司：Obama: China 'using muscle' to dominate in South China Sea

外交部回应南海问题：希望美方尊重中国和东盟国家的有关努力

问：美国总统奥巴马昨天表示，他对中国可能利用自身“块头和肌肉”在南海地区向小国施压表示关切。中方对此有何评论？
答：说到“块头和肌肉”，恐怕大家都很清楚，谁在世界上拥有最大“块头和肌肉”？
我们已经多次阐明了中方在南海问题上的有关立场。中国是南海和平稳定的坚定维护者和促进者。我们一直积极倡导并主张通过“双轨”思路妥善处理南海问题。当前，中国和东盟国家正就全面落实《南海各方行为宣言》和推进“南海行为准则”磋商保持着积极有效的沟通。希望美方尊重中国和东盟国家的有关努力，为地区和平稳定发挥积极、建设性和负责任的作用。

法新社：China blasts Obama over military 'muscle' in South China Sea


越南？越南在干吗呢？

2015.04.08
中越联合公报
越南网：越共中央总书记阮富仲会见中国人民对外友好协会代表

越共中央总书记阮富仲表示，越南与中国的友好关系源远流长，当前两国关系已提升为全面战略伙伴关系。他说，虽然两国条件有所不同，但双方都致力将本国建设成为独立自主的国家，全力推进社会主义建设。

两国视线超越南海 阮富仲强调“同志加兄弟”关系

阮富仲表示，越南与中国的友好关系源远流长，当前两国关系已提升为全面战略伙伴关系。他还表示，越南在革新事业中一直得到中国人民所提供的宝贵支持，他代表越南党、国家和人民对此表示衷心感谢。阮富仲希望各协会和中国友好人士继续为胡志明主席所说的越中“同志加兄弟”关系不断向前发展作贡献。

而这几天在美洲国家首脑会议（Summits of the Americas）上：
How Obama Rescued The Summit For Latin America – And How He Could Ruin It Again

PRIVATE PANIC
Who is the U.S., they argue, with its Ferguson-style police abuses, to lecture us about Venezuela's kangaroo-court arrests of opposition leaders? Who is the U.S., whose NSA creeps tapped into Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s e-mails, to urge us to question Ecuador's muzzling of its media? Who is the U.S., which has kept an unjust trade embargo on Cuba for 53 years, to tell us we should criticize the repressive Castro regime?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/centralamericaandthecaribbean/cuba/11529580/Obama-days-of-US-meddling-in-Latin-American-affairs-are-over.html

到底是谁欺负谁？