Foreign Policy Winter 2022

DEBATES ABOUT THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DEMOCRACY are as old as democracy itself. But in the broader span of history, people power has only ever gotten more desirable. It was the quest for democracy that dominated so much of the last century, especially after World War II, when there was an unprecedented wave of independence movements and decolonization across Africa and Asia. In the following decades, amid the Cold War, democracy was pitted against communism in a grand clash of ideas. But the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union settled that debate. Democracy continued to make further inroads around the world. By the early 1990s, it was difficult to imagine an appealing or feasible alternative. The mood of that moment was summed up in The End…

Bangladesh is feted for its robust growth performance over the last three decades, sterling record of poverty reduction, and well-above-peer-level performance on many health, education, and demographic outcomes. Given its abject poverty at the time of its independence in 1971 and poor rankings on cross-country governance indicators, these achievements have together been labeled a “development surprise.” A big part of Bangladesh’s success story comes from labor-intensive, export-oriented industrialization. It boasts the biggest manufacturing sector (as a share of GDP) in South Asia, and it continues to grow. In 2001, Bangladesh’s merchandize exports amounted to $6.6 billion; in 2019, they were $47.2 billion, more than doubling its share of world exports from 0.1 percent in 2001 to 0.25 percent in 2019. But this export-driven success story comes from an extreme concentration in garment…

You would think Chinese President Xi Jinping is dead set on kneecapping his country’s much-vaunted tech industry, which makes up nearly 40 percent of China’s GDP. His government’s crack-down on some of China’s biggest internet companies has already wiped out more than $1.5 trillion in stock market value. This comes at a troubling time for the Chinese economy. Even as it is letting the air out of tech, Beijing must scramble to control the popping bubble in the country’s infamously inflated real estate sector. These problems are now compounded by an energy crisis that has led to power blackouts and could soon impact manufacturing. How these cascading Chinese crises will affect markets elsewhere is still unclear, with one exception: Capital with fewer opportunities in China clearly needs a refuge, and some…

Last May, when China released the results of its most recent census, the numbers showed a problem the government already knew about but whose magnitude it might not have expected. China’s fertility rate—the number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—stood at just 1.3, one of the lowest in the world. (For comparison, the rate was 1.64 for the United States and 2.2 for India in 2020.) Since then, state media has kept up a flow of reports parsing the decline’s causes, which articles argue range from improved living standards to advancements in women’s education. Notably absent, however, is a factor the government is not keen to bring up—especially amid current talk of promoting child-friendly social policies—but one that has deeply shaped the way Chinese families think. The…

Arising chorus of analysts now describe China as a “peaking power”—one that might take greater risks to revise the international order before its strategic window of opportunity closes. They cite the country’s aging population, slowing economy, and hostile external environment as evidence that time is no longer on China’s side. The fear of decline, they argue, could lead China to act sooner rather than later to solidify its position in East Asia, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While there is a compelling case to be made about the downward trajectory of China’s power, it is difficult to argue that Chinese leaders perceive themselves to be running short on time. In recent years, the actions and rhetoric of the Chinese government reveal little doubt about how it sees the future. Moreover, Beijing appears…