Prepare for a crackdown on China’s overheated rental market.President Xi Jinping’s push to develop housing for lease was supposed to take the edge off soaring home prices. It hasn’t worked out that way. Rents instead have rocketed as the government’s call triggered a stampede of investment into the sector, fueling discontent among a millennial population that had already been priced out of the market for home purchases.Chengdu led the surge with a 31 percent jump in average rents in the year thr

Viewpoints Oct. 14, 2018

US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley will become the latest senior foreign policy official to leave the Donald Trump administration, following former National Security Advisers Mike Flynn and H.R. McMaster, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, top economic adviser Gary Cohn, and others. More will likely head for the exits in the wake of the midterm elections in November.Haley’s departure, scheduled for the end of the year, will have two major repercussions on US foreign policy, one short

Viewpoints Oct. 14, 2018

The disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a US resident and writer for the Washington Post, is the biggest crisis in US-Saudi relations in years. While the Trump administration is resistant, unless the emerging narrative about what happened changes, a clear American response will be inevitable and warranted.But we need to be clear about what we want and why we want it, and to accept our own responsibility for the international climate in which this has occurred.Everyone agrees that

Viewpoints Oct. 14, 2018

Japan Inc. is getting its groove back. An overlooked policy change could be a driver.In recent months, Japanese companies have been posting a wave of positive data. Machinery orders -- a key indicator of companies’ capital spending in the future -- rose 12.6 percent on the year in August to the highest level in a decade, data Wednesday showed, much faster than forecast. Several analysts had expected orders to fall.Meanwhile, corporate investment shot up last quarter to the fastest pace in over a

Viewpoints Oct. 11, 2018

In the high-stakes drama over the detention of Interpol President Meng Hongwei, one thing stands out. It’s the plea the international police agency’s secretary-general, Juergen Stock, made to his captors in China.Over the weekend, Stock officially requested that Chinese police clarify the status of Meng, who had not been heard from since leaving Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, to travel to Beijing nearly a week before. “Interpol’s General Secretariat looks forward to an official respons

Viewpoints Oct. 10, 2018

President Donald Trump’s trade war is less bad than it was just a short time ago. After some tense negotiations, the North American Free Trade Agreement has been replaced with a new, very similar arrangement, meaning the disruption to trade -- and to US relations with Canada and Mexico -- will be contained. The agreement might even ease the damage from the president’s misguided steel and aluminum tariffs. Trump has also turned his attention away from Europe, avoiding the mistake of getting into

Viewpoints Oct. 10, 2018

If you thought the US-China relationship couldn‘t get much worse, consider what happened on Thursday alone. First there was a bombshell report from Bloomberg Businessweek of a major Chinese espionage effort targeting dozens of US corporations and the Pentagon. Then came Vice President Mike Pence’s speech, which offered the sharpest, most comprehensive indictment of Beijing’s behavior by any American leader since the Cold War. Pence labeled the situation with China a “great-power competition.” Wh

Viewpoints Oct. 9, 2018

The Trump administration’s renegotiation of NAFTA is decidedly underwhelming, the product of a toxic process that made only a modest modification of the original deal. The administration’s renaming of NAFTA, however -- it will henceforth be known as the USMCA, for the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement -- could prove to be a stroke of political and marketing genius.　Names really matter, and politicians should give as much thought to them as corporations do. Amazon, Google and Apple, for instance, have b

Viewpoints Oct. 9, 2018

Immigrants who want to work in the US can be sponsored either by individuals -- usually family members -- or companies. Regional immigration is a proposed variation on this system, in which a region -- probably a city, but perhaps a county or state -- sponsors an immigrant for a green card or work visa. It’s an idea that’s been tossed around in policy circles as a way to revive “old industrial cities that have been hollowed out.”I used to be against regional immigration. The reason is that if re

Viewpoints Oct. 9, 2018

The latest failures of Russia’s military intelligence service, commonly known as the GRU, expose a major flaw in President Vladimir Putin’s habitual way of dealing with public fiascos: He mistakenly believes the uproar will blow over.Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his British counterpart Theresa May said Thursday that the GRU had tried to hack the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, which was testing the substance used to poison ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his d

Viewpoints Oct. 7, 2018

Visiting Beijing in August, Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s recently elected prime minister, startled his hosts by boldly warning against a “new version of colonialism.” He was referring to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that aims to put the People’s Republic at the heart of a global commercial web.Mahathir’s invocation of colonialism could only have wounded leaders in Beijing, for the Chinese nation-state has built its self-image on anti-colonialist rheto

Viewpoints Oct. 3, 2018

As Americans become more negative about the state of their society, a number of people have tried to cheer them up by reminding them of the improvements made, both inside their society and out. The Cato Institute’s Human Progress project puts out a steady stream of data about improved living standards and social indicators in the US and around the world. Psychologist Steven Pinker writes popular books about the topic. Technologists trumpet the impressive range of new goods that people can buy, w

Viewpoints Oct. 3, 2018

Most news analyses are written by experts. But sometimes an event is of such importance that it is worth sampling some outsiders, and so I would like to consider last week’s Senate testimony from Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. I don’t know who “Squi” is, my day job stopped me from watching and I don’t recall the possible names of the cited drinking games. Still, the broader saga has made a big impression on me. Stepping back from the most partisan elements of the day-to-day, I see th

Viewpoints Oct. 3, 2018