China internet giant Alibaba struck a major deal last week with Russia’s  Mail.ru – one of Russia’s leading tech and media conglomerates that is already called Russia’s Alibaba. A smart move says Russian Ashley Dudarenok, a veteran marketer on China’s e-commerce and author of Unlocking the World’s Largest E-market: A Guide To Selling on Chinese Social Media in the China Economic Review.Read More →

Concerns have been raised about the quality of the deals closed under the wide One Belt, One Road program. Economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know, admits that some deals could be “wacky”, he tells the New York Times.“It certainly is a very capacious arena for opportunists, that’s for sure,” Mr. Kroeber added.Read More →

Two decades ago Jim Rogers moved to Singapore as he emerges as a major bull on Asia. Since then he stuck to his guns as a successful investor, made sure his daughters were fluent in Mandarin and became a leading voice on investments in China, Asia and elsewhere. Now he is predicting a bear market, the worst we have ever seen. Most recently he published Street Smarts: Adventures on the Road and in the Markets. Read More →

State moloch CITIC moved in to pick up 49% of Czech assets from CEFC Europe, owned by tycoon Ye Jianming. It is part of a trend, says business analyst Shaun Rein, author of The War for China’s Wallet: Profiting from the New World Order to the South China Morning Post, as state firms are easier to control by China’s central government and expand its policies abroad.Read More →

Who killed more, Hitler or Stalin, is a question often asked. Journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, argues – 60 years after the Great Leap Forward started – that Mao Zedong is often wrongly excluded from this debate. But he opts for a nuanced approach in The New York Review of Books, although in numbers Mao beats both Stalin and Hitler.Read More →

China’s close to one trillion US dollar investment program One Belt, One Road (OBOR) is facing serious pitfalls that could stop it from succeeding, writes financial analyst Sara Hsu in the Huffington Post. Insufficient due diligence is just one of a range of potential barriers, she writes.Read More →

When it comes to caviar, China seems to be able to become a major producer, despite its reputation of food-scandals, says business analyst Shaun Rein in Bloomberg. A boycott of both other producers, Iran and Russia, does help too, he adds.Read More →

Author Howard French, of China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa explains in Foreign Policy what President Obama did not mention in his Nairobi speech. Obama did not really get the fast development of Africa, and has ignored the continent.Read More →