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  • Tibetan Monks May Hold Clue to Dollar's Future
    By Amity Shlaes, Senior Fellow for Economic History
    Op-Ed
    April 9, 2008

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  China

  China's Katrina Shows Post-Communism No Big Easy

  Author:	Amity Shlaes, Senior Fellow for Economic History

  May 21, 2008
  Bloomberg

  May 21 (Bloomberg)—The picture of the angry parents protesting the collapse of the school in Wufu is so sad that you get the impression there could be nothing like it. But then you remember something like it in, of all places, Louisiana.

  Writing about the corruption in that state in the 1920s, the author Robert Penn Warren described a man’s shock “when the first brick schoolhouse ever built in his county collapsed because it was built of politics-rotten brick and it killed and mangled a dozen poor little scholars.”

  “Tofu construction,” is what some are saying after a massive earthquake struck central China last week. But that’s just Chinese for “politics-rotten brick.”

  The Chinese disaster is occurring on a magnitude several times greater than anything in Louisiana, including of course, Hurricane Katrina.

  Yet what is going on in China recalls what Louisiana was demonstrating well before World War II: Preparation for and reaction to floods, earthquakes or hurricanes reveals much about government and growth. A government can cause economic growth to happen, though it’s not always the best growth.

  The result can be disasters that are not only natural but also “man-made,” as grieving Chinese parents now put it. This is so even when the government has set impeccable goals—sound federalism, political reform and better infrastructure for the locals.

  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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