The country could yet again change the way the world sees it. Here’s a shortlist of realistic possibilities.
How will China surprise us next? Shocks, tipping points, and revelations have become basic staples of the world’s daily news diet. But with so many eyes now on this emerging Asian giant, what happens there continues to have an exceptional ability to draw attention and to shift perceptions drastically and suddenly.
Will the surprise be planned, like the magnificent Beijing Olympics Games, whose nearly flawless execution set a counterpoint to
Here’s a list of some realistic possibilities for the next year. Will all of them come to pass? I doubt it. But any one of them could, and each might make us see
China announces that by 2020, half of the cars in the country will be electric. It invests tens of billions of dollars in R&D toward achieving that goal.
Such a move could make
The Chinese government buys a 50-year lease on an entire geographic region of
Chinese companies would then become the undisputed leaders in outsourced production. No longer constrained by geography, they could bring their expertise in low-cost manufacturing to
A major office block collapses in Chaoyang,
Although officials would scramble to rewrite construction regulations, a disaster in the capital or another large city would change the relationship between the country’s growing middle class and the government and might threaten its ability to keep social unrest in check. True, construction standards came under fire after the May 2008
A leading Chinese company tries to buy an iconic
A major deal could be worth 10 or 100 times Lenovo’s $1.35 billion purchase of IBM’s PC division. If the
A successful deal, by contrast, could create a truly global company, unlike anything seen before, with a multinational culture superseding any sense of national origins.
A restructuring of
Regulatory failure and competitive imbalances have already reduced competition down to three major players, from four, and telecom companies are now being encouraged to share infrastructure. If stock prices continue their freefall and these imbalances remain, the inability of the second- and third-ranked players to chart a path to success could bring a full reconsolidation of the domestic industry.
The English Premier League football association buys its Chinese counterpart, the Chinese Super League.
What better way to signal a coming of age for
Warming cross-strait relationships lead to a merger between the mainland’s Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and Taiwan’s Chinatrust Commercial Bank.
The reaction in
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