Shanghai seems very quiet. Restaurants are less crowded, taxis are easier to find and the vast acreage of shiny new high-end shopping malls that have sprung up all over the city have an eerie, tumbleweed feel to them. Could it be that the long awaited slowdown in the Chinese economy is starting to bite?

No. If people are staying home, it is less to do with them feeling the economic pinch and all to do with – how can I put this delicately? – an urgent need to procreate.

We are two months into the Chinese Year of the Dragon and it is regarded as extremely auspicious to have a child born in this particular lunar year. So if you want to give birth before the dragon gives way to the much less auspicious snake, you only have a few short weeks to conceive. No wonder the place seems deserted. [Read more…]

Last week in New York, I took part in a roundtable discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations. Billed as an exploration of the business risks and opportunities emerging from the Arab Spring, my fellow panellist – Jared Cohen from Google Ideas – and I had no difficulty in highlighting a plethora of risks. We were harder pressed to identify clear opportunities.

A year after the fall of Mubarak, the democratic promise of last February has been overshadowed by the rising tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme and the bloodshed in Syria. What seemed to be the long overdue emergence of people power has it seems been replaced by a return to a kind of Cold War rivalry between the great powers over their own strategic interests in the Middle East.

In Egypt, the intoxicating euphoria of 2011 has been replaced by a sober realisation that there will be no easy transition to secular liberal democracy. Many in the West are preoccupied by the rise to prominence of Islamic parties both in Egypt and elsewhere and this nervousness tends to overshadow the immediate concern that at a time of falling inward investment, rising unemployment and inflation there is little experience of competent economic management in most of the countries in political flux. In the past twelve months, Egypt has had four finance ministers. [Read more…]