Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. August 13, 2024 |
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China's Downgrade Economy |
China's economy has big problems.
Over the long term, dark clouds loom. Much has been made of China's low birthrate and aging population—products, in large part, of the decades-long "one child policy"—which will weigh on productivity and cost the country in health care and social support. But since the pandemic, overall population shrinkage has posed a problem, too, combining with age to put China's economy "on a road of demographic no-return," as University of California, Irvine professor Wang Feng writes in the current issue of The Wilson Quarterly.
In more immediate terms, China never bounced back from the Covid-19 crash as vigorously as the world hoped it would. After the lockdowns evaporated there was continued sluggishness, not a buying frenzy. Demand has been widely identified as a problem, but party-state buzzwords continue to focus on production (though not exclusively). At a major policy-planning event this year, the third plenum, party officials effectively stood pat, declining to stimulate consumption.
"Consumers are rapidly trading down, from higher-cost goods to cheap substitutes, and many want to squeeze out every last drop of their spending power," The Economist writes. "The bitter truth is that consumer confidence has continued to weaken this year, instead of recovering from the covid-19 pandemic. Even Shanghai, China's consumption capital, witnessed retail spending fall by 2.3% year on year in the first half of 2024. … [D]owngrading is becoming a fact of life, as documented by writers across China. … Near-expiry-date make-up shops have grabbed attention on social media. Many clearance stores now sell snacks and lipstick at less than half price." |
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… and an Economic Design Flaw? |
That's not the end of it. Lagging GDP, trade headwinds blowing from a geopolitical standoff with the US, a collapse in property prices (which prompted the default of real-estate giant Evergrande), and tight regulation under leader Xi Jinping are all working against the Chinese economy, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Zongyuan Zoe Liu writes in Foreign Affairs.
But a bigger problem is one of design, Liu writes, citing "a decades-old economic strategy that privileges industrial production over all else, an approach that, over time, has resulted in enormous structural overcapacity. For years, Beijing's industrial policies have led to overinvestment in production facilities in sectors from raw materials to emerging technologies such as batteries and robots, often saddling Chinese cities and firms with huge debt burdens in the process. Simply put, in many crucial economic sectors, China is producing far more output than it, or foreign markets, can sustainably absorb. As a result, the Chinese economy runs the risk of getting caught in a doom loop of falling prices, insolvency, factory closures, and, ultimately, job losses."
China's industrial base is viewed by leaders as a virtuous strength, Liu writes. Consumption, by contrast, is viewed as "an individualistic distraction." Liu warns that an intensified trade war might only cause Beijing to "double down" on its problematic, production-first strategy. |
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Is Harris Winning? Not Exactly. A Bit of Polling 101 |
Not long ago, former President Donald Trump was leading the election. Now, the picture is different. But to discuss what we know, one has to understand what it means to be "leading" a US presidential race—before votes are counted on Election Day, anyway.
It comes down to polling: not just the results, but the kinds of surveys available. First, there's an issue of quality. Major news outlets like CNN not only conduct their own polls but vet other pollsters' methodologies. Here at CNN, we consider our own polling to be solid (no surprise); we also find it worthwhile to talk about polls from The New York Times, Quinnipiac University, and other pollsters in that established, reputable class; we generally do not report on polling from surveyors with unrepresentative (in our view) pools of respondents, smaller samples, partisan backing, apparent biases, or question phrasings that could influence the results. So if you look at the rolling RealClearPolitics average of survey results, for instance, you'll see an amalgam of underlying numbers that aren't all necessarily up to snuff.
Then there's the kind of polling. The US presidency is won in the Electoral College, not by a national popular vote, so nationwide polling is a mood indicator at best. State-by-state polling is what matters—and given how elections have gone in recent years and decades, we know that a small handful of states are up for grabs. Swing-state polling is all important; it's also somewhat rarer than national polling and usually involves smaller samples, partly due to the cost and difficulty of conducting five to eight robust surveys, not just one.
Then, there are the results themselves. Is a one-percentage-point lead indeed a real lead? Not if a poll has a "margin of sampling error" of +/- three percentage points. That means that if we were to conduct the poll 20 times, we'd expect the result to be within three percentage points of the true measure 19 times. But sampling error is only one possible source of error in a poll, and there are others that are harder to quantify that provide even more reason to be skeptical that what looks like a small lead is really a lead.
Having been thoroughly prefaced, here's the story of the 2024 election, in polling terms: A month ago, Trump was "leading" President Joe Biden because Trump truly led (by more than the error margin) in at least some credible polling in most of the swing states. After Biden exited the race and Vice President Kamala Harris became Trump's presumptive opponent, CNN national polling indicated a mood boost for the Democratic ticket.
Then came a major indicator of the state of the race in its Harris-vs.-Trump phase: On Saturday, swing-state polling by The New York Times/Siena College showed Harris leading in a handful of critical swing states by around four percentage points. A complete reversal, it would seem.
Not so fast. The error margin on those polls was between +/- 4.2% and 4.8%, so statistically speaking, we can't be confident Harris led any of them.
Betting markets and quite a few political strategists and pundits are willing to lower their confidence threshold—and loosen their usage of who's "leading"—for a mix of reasons, but one is that there will be a real-world result in November, one way or another, and until it happens we're all guessing. Importantly, more swing-state polling will emerge in the coming days and weeks. Then, we'll get a fuller picture. For now, we can't really say Harris is leading and Trump is trailing … at least not confidently. |
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Harris' campaign has been light on substance and heavy on vibes, Fareed pointed out on Sunday's GPS. But that approach fits within a new-ish school of thought concerning voter behavior: that voters choose with their guts, not their brains, then rationalize those choices later. Voting is more human and emotional than strictly rational and self-interested, that thinking goes, and Harris is presenting herself to the public in human terms. So far, Fareed said, this different approach seems to be working. |
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Recent years have seen wildfires spread not just in the American Southwest and Australia, but around the Mediterranean. Just last summer, Greece faced hundreds of wildfires—and now it faces more of the same, as a wildfire near Athens has prompted evacuations and has "trigger[ed] a multi-pronged rescue effort coordinated with European allies," as CNN's Chris Liakos, Alex Stambaugh and Caitlin Danaher report.
At Le Monde, Marina Rafenberg reports frustration that authorities haven't taken more effective measures to prevent such fires. "If concrete solutions are not found," Rafenberg writes, "Greece will have to deal with exceptionally large wildfires every summer." Hearing from fire researcher Theodore Giannaros with the National Observatory of Athens, Rafenberger adds: "'We need a comprehensive management plan [for these disasters], to analyze the causes, to limit the dangers by dealing especially with the plant debris [branches, brush, anything that could be combustible during fire season], to have a rapid and immediate reaction,' said the researcher. And on this last point, Giannaros admitted that 'fire departments were beefed up in recent years and this had an effect, but only until mid-August.'" |
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The Paris Olympics are over, but the Global Briefing will note one final bit of the Olympics-related coverage that has filled newspapers and magazines around the world this summer: At The Atlantic, Joshua Benton recounts the origin of the marathon race.
The popular legend is well known: After the Battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., messenger Pheidippides ran approximately 26 miles to inform Athenians that their army had defeated a much larger Persian force. He exclaimed "nenikēkamen!", or, "we won!"—and died of exhaustion.
Perhaps. At The Atlantic, journalist Benton notes that this version of the story was injected into sporting myth by French linguist Michel Bréal, coiner of the word "semantics" and friend of Pierre de Coubertin, who headed the Union of French Sports Associations and planned a revival of the ancient Olympic Games in the 1890s. Bréal thought the long, historically tinged marathon race would lend "an antique flavor" to the newly reincarnated 1896 Games held in Athens, as Benton recounts.
On the possibly apocryphal quality of this well-known tale, Benton writes: "The historian Herodotus, writing only a few decades after the battle, attributed an entirely different run to the messenger Pheidippides—from Athens to Sparta to seek Spartan military aid, a distance of about 160 miles. Five hundred years later, Plutarch wrote of a marathonlike run post-battle but said that the runner was named either Thersippus or Eucles. A few decades after that, the satirist Lucian, who's known for being loose with his facts, apparently conflated the two stories into one, and Lucian's was the version that eventually reached Browning and Bréal. But the sketchiness of the origin story was known at the time." The exact length of 26.2 miles isn't historically airtight, either, it seems. The Florida Times-Union wrote in 2011: "Historians agree that Pheidippides' Marathon-to-Athens route was 24.85 miles, which was re-created in the running of the first modern marathon at the Greek-hosted Olympic Games in 1896. Twelve years later at the Olympics in London, the race was lengthened by an extra mile and 385 yards so it could start at Windsor Castle and end in front of the Royal Box at Olympic Stadium. That distance of 26.2 miles is now the fixed official marathon distance." |
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