Back in 2013, the Chinese government laid out a policy agenda that promised real reforms to an economy laden with debt and distorted by the influence of the country’s large state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector.

The United States (US) finds itself confronting several daunting challenges simultaneously. There is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already claimed nearly 120,000 lives and shows little sign of abating in large swaths of the country.

Western societies are currently gripped by the ominous idea that we are entering a new cold war, this time between the United States (US) and China. This narrative started coming to the fore as a result of the Sino-American trade dispute, and now the COVID-19 crisis has given it the final nudge to centre stage.

In a matter of months, the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the world almost beyond recognition. And yet the international cooperation that is so essential to confront a shared threat has been nowhere to be found.

Hong Kong is on a knife’s edge. Once one of Asia’s freest and most open cities, it now faces the spectre of a new China-imposed security law that would curtail its people’s liberties and create a climate of fear. The law is in flagrant breach of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which is registered at the United Nations (UN), and would open the way for widespread human-rights violations.

Last month, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the company would allow its employees, currently working from home in accordance with social-distancing protocols, to stay there for good. Several other big businesses – from Facebook to the French automaker PSA – have followed suit with plans to keep far more employees at home after the COVID-19 crisis ends. Will the office be yet another casualty of the pandemic?In a sense, the death of the office has been a long time coming.

Chinese diplomats have long had a reputation as well-trained, colourless, and cautious professionals who pursue their missions doggedly without attracting much unfavourable attention. But a new crop of younger diplomats is ditching established diplomatic norms in favour of aggressively promoting China’s self-serving COVID-19 narrative.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is “not in a good mood,” United States (US) President Donald Trump recently declared, as he offered to mediate India’s resurgent border conflict with China. After years of bending over backward to appease China, Modi has received yet another Chinese encroachment on Indian territory.

In retrospect, the decision by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to impose a new security law on Hong Kong seems to have been preordained. Historically, rising powers always try to expand their spheres of geopolitical influence once they pass a certain stage of economic development.

It has been a calamity for the United States (US) that, when two national tragedies – the COVID-19 crisis and the country’s legacy of racism – collided this spring, the occupant of the White House was an unstable person, totally unfit to govern.President Donald Trump’s inability to cope with the pandemic has so far led to more than 112,000 deaths, one of the world’s highest per capita mortality rates for COVID-19, with the coronavirus still spreading to areas not previously hit.