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• Related Materials

  • World Energy Outlook 2007: China and India Insights (Video)
    Video
    November 27, 2007

  • World Energy Outlook 2007: China and India Insights (Video Highlight)
    Video
    November 27, 2007

  • World Energy Outlook 2007: China and India Insights (Audio)
    Audio
    November 27, 2007

  • China’s Environmental Crisis
    By Carin Zissis
    Backgrounder
    February 9, 2007

  • China-U.S. Energy Policies: A Choice of Cooperation or Collision—Remarks by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman [Rush Transcript; Federal News Service, Inc.]
    Transcript
    November 30, 2005

  See Also

  China, India, Energy, Energy Security, Environmental Pollution

  Asia's Achilles Heel

  Author:	David G. Victor, Adjunct Senior Fellow for Science and Technology

  February 28, 2008
  Newsweek

  Earlier this month Chinese revelers welcomed the new lunar year with a few more candles than usual. The country was gripped by a crisis in electric power production that caused California-style blackouts across the central and southern parts of the country.  Power plants could not keep up with demand, especially because they didn’t have enough coal on hand to burn.

  The immediate causes of China’s power crisis are straightforward. Snow storms disrupted the railroads that carry most coal to power plants. Record low temperatures also boosted demand for electricity and coal. But there was a deeper cause at work. China’s free-market policies—the same ones that led to China’s extraordinary growth in the past decade—have eroded the government’s ability to control its economy. Economic activity, by design, is shifting away from state-owned enterprises and central planning. But Beijing doesn’t have structures in place to control those aspects of the economy it doesn’t own outright. Market reforms are making Beijing less and less relevant to what’s really going on in the economy, threatening to turn China into a “weak state.” And it’s not just China—India, too, is having trouble regulating its industry and economy. The phenomenon is a dark cloud on the Asian century.

  View full text of article

• 

  New CFR Books

  

  In Termites in the Trading System, Jagdish Bhagwati reveals how the rapid spread of preferential trade agreements endangers the world trading system.

  

  America Between the Wars explores how the decisions and debates of the years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers shaped the events, arguments, and politics of the world we live in today.

  

  In The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, Noah Feldman tells the story behind the increasingly popular call for the establishment of the sharia—the law of the traditional Islamic state—in the modern Muslim world.

  Complete list of CFR Books.

  

  

  New Independent Task Force Reports

  Confronting Climate Change

  This report argues that the United States must lead with domestic action on climate change and proposes a U.S. negotiating strategy for a global UN climate agreement that includes commitments from all major economies, while also promoting a less formal Partnership for Climate Cooperation that would focus the world's largest emitters on implementing aggressive emissions reductions.

  U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality

  This Task Force report examines changes in Latin America and in U.S. influence there, while taking account of the region's enduring importance to the United States. The Task Force offers an agenda for U.S. policy toward Latin America and identifies four critical areas that should provide the basis of a new U.S. approach.

  About Independent Task Forces at the Council.

  

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