Breaking the Suicide Pact: U.S.-China Cooperation on Climate Change

Douglas H. Paal, former U.S. representative to Taiwan, and national security official in the George H. W. Bush and Reagan White Houses, has joined Carnegie as Director of its China Program in Washington and Beijing. Zhou Dadi, former director general of the Energy and Research Institute of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) in China, has joined Carnegie to run the Beijing arm of the Energy and Climate Program.

In a talk moderated by Carnegie Senior Associate Albert Keidel, Minxin Pei, director of the Carnegie China Program and Wing Thye Woo, senior fellow at the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, discussed the implications of the recent National Party Congress.
 
Related: A New Era? What to Make of the 17th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party

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Carnegie Endowment Senior Associate Albert Keidel discussed his latest policy brief "China's Looming Crisis - Inflation Returns" during a seminar on October 24, 2007.  Nick Lardy of the Peterson Institute provided comments and critique, while Pieter Bottelier of Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies moderated the discussion. 

Related Policy Brief 
China’s Economic Fluctuations

New research challenges conventional wisdom in Washington on China’s economy—the importance of its trade surplus, the size of its GDP, and the scale of its poverty. An updated report from Carnegie Senior Associate Albert Keidel confirms that China’s growth and inflation risks are not trade-related but are instead driven by domestic forces. A recent World Bank announcement also confirmed Keidel’s findings that China’s economy and GDP per capita are 40 percent smaller than earlier analysis had asserted, and that Chinese poverty levels involve 300 million people under the World Bank’s dollar-a-day standard rather than 100 million as previously thought.


Related: New Analysis of China's Economy, BBC World Service's Newshour, November 14, 2007

More on U.S.-China Economic Relations / China's Economy

With the close of the Bali summit, Carnegie Senior Associate William Chandler joins energy expert Holly Gwin, general counsel and co-founder of Transition Energy, to go beneath China's laudable energy-saving policies and gives a path-breaking, detailed, and on-the-ground description of the obstacles energy-efficiency businesses still face. The paper looks beyond complaints about red tape and illogical taxes, and suggests specific, feasible steps Chinese officials could take to reconcile their good energy intentions with their practices. Chandler argues that restrictions on debt financing and foreign equity investment, unfavorable tax policies, and even the UN’s emissions trading system all discourage foreign investment in clean energy in China.

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The China Program at Carnegie Endowment hosted a seminar on October 11, 2007 entitled: "China's Olympian Challenge: Can Beijing Deliver on its Promises?"  The seminar consisted of two panels that both focus on the latest progress in Beijing's preparation for the Olympic Game next year.  Panel 1 featured Sharon Hom, Executive Director of Human Rights in China, Randy Wilber, Senior Sport Physiologist of U.S. Olympic Committee, and Bob Diez, Asia Program Coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalist.  Director of China Program Minxin Pei moderated the first panel.  Speakers for Panel 2 included Jill Savitt, Director of Dream for Darfur, Sean Woo, General Counsel in the Office of Senator Sam Brownback, and Jeffrey Bader, Director of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings Institution.  This second panel was moderated by Carnegie visiting scholar Joshua Kurlantzick.

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The China Program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace co-sponsored the International Conference on PLA Affairs, held in Taipei, Taiwan from November 29 to December 1.  This annual conference on the Chinese military, organized by the Council for Advanced Policy Studies (CAPS) in Taipei (Taiwan's leading research institute on Chinese military affairs) has been held for nearly twenty years.  The CEIP China Program has been a co-sponsor of the conference for the past several years, under the direction of Senior Associate Michael D. Swaine.  Other co-sponsors include The RAND Corporation and (for the first time this year) the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University.  Participants included many of the top specialists on PLA affairs in the U.S. and Taiwan.

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