Miranda Green: Returning from what he calls an unusually frank dialogue held between China’s elite and the foreign scholars and journalists invited by Tsinghua University, of whom he was one, Martin Wolf uses his column to summarise the seven tenets of the superpower’s current worldview.
Perhaps the most reassuring proposition is that China has no ambition to run the world, while the most depressing one is that western models are discredited. Beijing wants to co-operate to solve global problems, the top Chinese officials, academics and business people explained, but find its main interlocutor, the US, incomprehensible under the current leadership.
It will be “a testing year” as one participant remarked: signs of hope appeared in the Korean peace talks, and signs of increased discord, even enmity, persist in the trade disputes.
Two-tier workforce
Sarah O’Connor examines the imminent job losses at Jaguar Land Rover and finds that managers’ preference for using agency workers creates a category of people who can be laid off more easily. Those for the chop tend to be young, too.
Austerity cuts through
Polling analyst Matt Singh offers some fresh insights into how British voters feel about nearly eight years of public spending cuts: the nation is “fed up”, he writes. Supporters of every party, both sexes and Leave and Remain voters alike feel the cuts have gone too far.
Tehran’s tightening grip
David Gardner argues that Trump and Netanyahu are missing the real threats posed by Iran. Forget the melodramatic rhetoric about the nuclear accord, he writes: the real increase in Tehran’s influence in the Middle East will come after elections in Iraq and Lebanon.
Bins and Brexit
On London doorsteps, Fred Studemann finds rival opposition parties trying to woo EU nationals to vote against the Conservatives in this Thursday’s local government elections. The issues straddle neighbourhood niggles and the huge continental controversy of the UK’s Leave vote. – Financial Times
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