China's Open Underground; Taiwan's Aperture

Never before in history have China and Japan been great powers at the same time. Today they must figure out how to live together as equals. The promise of mutual prosperity ties them together; the remembrance of bad things past pushes them apart. If that wary dance were not complicated enough, a nuclear provocateur from neighboring North Korea intrudes. A legendary figure of Japan's post‐war miracle, Tsuneo Watanabe, weighs in on these big questions. Hans Blix, a former UN arms inspector and the former South Korean prime minister and Nobel laureate, Kim Dae Jung, address the North Korean conundrum.     

Japan's Lessons for China

The United States accuses China of subsidizing its entire export economy through artificially undervaluing its currency. China accuses the United States of fiscal profligacy while flooding the world with easy credit to keep its economy afloat. This dispute reflects the reality that the world's two largest economies are built on opposite dynamics of production and savings vs. consumerism and debt. In Europe, the wages of unsustainable debt that financed the welfare state have also come due. Rebalancing the global economy in this context is not only a matter of fixing exchange or interest rates and extending the retirement age. It must also involve a recalibration of democracy in both East and West. Two Nobel economists, the Greek prime minister, a ranking Chinese economist and the former chief economist of the IMF address these issues.     

Political Meritocracy and Direct Democracy: A Hybrid Experiment

At the turn of the 20th Century when Western power was at its height, Sun Yat‐Sen sought to blend the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance and Western‐style democracy in his vision for modern China. With the “rise of the rest” in the 21st Century—led by China—perhaps the political imagination is open once again, this time not only to Western ideas flowing East, but Eastern ideas flowing West as well. The political imagination has been pried open anew not only because of the sustained success of non‐Western modernity in places like Singapore and China, but because democracy itself has become so dysfunctional across the West, from its ancient birthplace in Greece to its most advanced outpost in California. That liberal democracy is the best form of governance ever achieved in the long arc of history is no longer self‐evident. Today, democracy, which has been captured by a short‐term, special‐interest political culture, has to prove and improve itself by incorporating elements of meritocracy and the long‐term perspective. If not, political decay beckons. In this section, we evaluate the tradeoeffs and ponder the possibilities of combining a more knowledegable democracy with a more accountable meritocracy.     

Think Local

Terrorism is the wrong term. War is the wrong metaphor. Iraq is the wrong war. That pretty much sums up how the fight against the Islamist jihadists who targeted America has gone awry in the five years since September 11, 2001 — a similar period of time in which the United States had mobilized from virtual scratch and defeated Germany and Japan in World War II.