China

By Edward Wong/International Herald Tribune
November 14, 2008: Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets of this southern Chinese town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children's school tuition.

By Peter Boyle
As the US, Japan and Europe slide into recession, the leaders of many smaller countries are desperately hoping that continued strong growth in the Chinese economy, which has contributed about 15 per cent of world economic growth in recent years, might save them from this meltdown.
There's hope and then there's hard facts. Recently the latter has replaced those desperate hopes with terror. A measure of this was the November 4 decision of Australia's Reserve Bank to make a bigger than expected interest rate cut. Any temptation by holders of large mortgages and other debts in Australia to reach for the champagne was killed by the realisation that this decision, in the words of one business correspondent, "was a recognition by Australia's top policymakers that the Chinese economy is no longer providing a firewall to insulate the Australian economy from the international crisis".

By Walden Bello
Despite the glitter that surrounded the Olympics in Beijing, the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, the messages coming to Asia from these events were very different.
From Beijing, the message was, to put it in the words of one pundit, China has had a few bad centuries but is back on its feet. From Denver, the word was that the world’s most powerful country has been on a desperate decade-long downspin that can only get worse if the Republicans keep the White House. From Minneapolis, the message was that things weren’t that bad but they would definitely get worse under the Democrats.