When the EU-US summit kicks off in Brussels this week, the prospects of a new trade deal will be jostling for attention with events in Ukraine. The long-term implications might even be more far reaching…
Chinese students begin learning their maths facts at a very early age: maths textbooks begin with multiplication in the first semester of second grade, when children are seven years old. In order to understand…
Australia exported A$94.4 billion in goods to China last year, making China by far the single most important destination for Australian merchandise. Similarly, China is also the most important destination…
China’s equivalent of the Nasdaq stock exchange is failing to attract some of the country’s most innovative companies. ChiNext was supposed to anchor local high-tech businesses on home soil with a secure…
When China kicks off “Consumer Protection Day” this weekend, it’s online shoppers that stand to gain the most. In fact, the growth in online shopping appears to be one of the main factors driving China’s…
China’s Premier, Li Keqiang, presented his annual Work Report to the National People’s Congress on Wednesday, and the media dutifully reported the big ticket items: a 7.5% GDP growth target for 2014 and…
As the world’s second largest military power, China’s announcement of a 12% increase in its military budget has elicited grumbles from Taipei, Tokyo and Washington. But what does this increase signal regarding…
Shortly after 9pm last Saturday night, a group of knife-wielding men stormed into Kunming railway station in the Yunnan Province in southwest China. They went on a killing rampage that brutally ended the…
Beijing has once again experienced extremely poor air quality, in what is becoming a regular event for the Chinese capital and other parts of the country. But has anything changed since the last “airpocalypse…
Carsten Holz, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
The world’s second-largest economy has become the second-most watched and yet investors, politicians and economists are never quite clear what it is they’re looking at. China’s premier, Li Keqiang, is…
Fears over China’s ability to cope with its debt crisis and renewed doubts over recovery in the US have sent investors running back to old faithful: gold. But markets look as if they are favouring tradition…
Education minister Elizabeth Truss has travelled to Shanghai to find out the secrets behind Chinese pupils’ mathematics success. I suspect she will find that it’s a cultural phenomenon, impossible to import…
Chinese pupils are once again at the top of international education rankings. Recent further in-depth analysis of results from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, have…
SPC Ardmona’s $22 million lifeline from the Victorian government seems to have saved Australia’s largest food packaging company. Yet the firm’s recent tribulations are a reminder of why I regularly choose…
These days, if investors ever want a break from fretting over the euro zone or US jobs, they can always look east. China’s bubbling debt problem has become a source of genuine anxiety and a potential threat…
Australia’s federal Department of Health has advised general practitioners to be on the lookout for potential cases of the H7N9 strain of influenza A, or bird flu, following a spate of deaths in China…
The political lobbying accompanying the government decision to withhold financial support from SPC Ardmona has overshadowed the big structural issues facing Australia’s preserved food industry. The two…
Today is the Chinese Lunar New Year – the Year of the Horse – according to the Western Gregorian Calendar. All good? Light the firecrackers! But wait … According to last year’s Southern Hemisphere Australian…
As markets commence the new year in a sense of panic on the back of an uncertain outlook for China’s economy, I am brought back to a bookshop discovery I made in 2001 and the pending doom and gloom which…
In the past decade, US and UK universities have embarked on a program of developing formal relationships, exchanges, and partnerships with their counterparts in China. No scholar interested in promoting…