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The International Relations Review China to become a new leader and for the yuan to become a reserve currency. Though this trend continued through early December, the most revealing article appeared in People’s Daily on 23 November 2010, in which Li Jia wrote, “China’s market is increasingly appealing to foreign capital given the expectation that China’s currency will appreciate and the United States’ recent quantitative easing action.”[16]
Summary of Review Overall, opinion pieces and articles in the Chinese media have quoted international economic leaders and academics both to reject American demands of the Chinese government regarding currency reform and to defend Chinese currency policy. However, this rhetoric seems to be changing as the topic has evolved in the press. For most of the fall of 2010, Chinese journalists rejected
Democracy for All Seasons Arab Dictatorships, Political Islamism and American Foreign Policy By Sam Leone, CAS ’13 For the past decade, the specter of terrorism has largely dominated foreign-policy debates in the United States. The discussions have frequently involved intelligent probing into the best intelligence practices and the most appropriate counterinsurgency strategies to use in the War on Terror. However, a subtle form of intellectual laziness has also made its way into many of these conversations, and that is to equate all forms of Islamism with violent, al Qaedastyle jihadi Islamism. While President Bush and other American leaders have been rigorous in denying that the War on Terror is in fact a War on Islam, American policy-making circles have tended to see Islamism (i.e. activism which seeks a greater role for Islamic principles in government and society) as intrinsically opposed to Western interests. The reality is that many forms of political Islamism and their relevant parties espouse Western ideals of democracy and liberal economy, and hence, it is in the interests of the United States to reevaluate its tacit opposition to Islamism as a whole. As popular uprisings sweep the Middle East, the reaction among American diplomats has been mixed. On the one hand, there is excitement that, at long last, after years of military intervention and an amorphous desire seems to have a reasonable chance of success in the region. However, this hope
is tempered by the fear that a resulting power vacuum will allow radical Islamists to seize power for themselves at the expense of the various protest groups.[1] So far, observers have breathed a sigh of relief that the movements in Tunisia and Egypt have been largely secular. However, appearances can be deceiving. Tunisia, after all, has long been recognized as an anomaly because of the relatively weak position that Islamists occupy in civil society. In Egypt, the support of the Muslim Brotherhood proved invaluable in the Tahrir Square protests, including the violent face-off with Mubarak’s supporters on the 2nd and 3rd of February. [2] It is certainly a mistake to think that, as protests spread to countries as diverse as Bahrain, Jordan and Yemen, political Islamism will always take a backseat to secular liberalism. Indeed, modern Islamism arose decades ago to counter the very same forces of backwardness and oppression that have galvanized the discontent of those Arabs marching on the streets today. Throughout the oil boom years of the 1960’s and 1970’s, left-leaning secular governments dominated the Middle East and North Africa;[3] Arab socialists, Ba’athists and even those who called themselves “liberals” controlled the levers of power for both the state and the economy. Propped up by high oil prices from exports or remittances from laborers working abroad, states invested in education and health, and did in fact make improvements in the lives of their citizens. However, the eventual fall of oil prices was followed
exchange rate, calling American demands for this preposterous. In late November and early December, however, these pieces changed. Instead, the prospect of allowing the yuan to appreciate seems not to be submission to American demands, but rather, a way for China to seize the opportunity to make the yuan a global as the dollar and euro.
by the inevitable decline in economic and human development, and for the past three decades, the Arab world has experienced intense stagnation under these secular regimes. Without growth, many Muslims have come to detest their ineffectual and authoritarian governments and to see Islamism as an alternative to the failed ideologies. In other words, there is not now nor has there ever been a successful
come to accept that there is nothing inherently antidemocratic or antiAmerican about political Islamism .” model of secular democracy in the Middle East, and in fact states masquerading as secular democracies have given Western governance a bad name. Hence in these times of increasing uncertainty and chaos, many Arabs may turn to Islam, historically a source of stability and social peace.[4] Yet, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The United States’ mindset has largely been that it is better to have secular authoritarian states in power than to cede any control to the Islamists: better to have a dictator who can keep his house in order than a democrat who may support, or be powerless to stop, terrorism. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has