Run It Cold: Why Xi Jinping Is Letting China's Economy Flail | Saudi forces killed hundreds of Ethiopians at Yemen border, report says | Having shaken off nationalism, Europe risks civilisationalism

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Run It Cold: Why Xi Jinping Is Letting China's Economy Flail

Xi Jinping’s quest to rewrite the playbook that drove China’s economic miracle for a generation is facing its sternest test yet.

The $18 trillion economy is decelerating, consumers are downbeat, exports are struggling, prices are falling and more than one in five young people are out of work. Country Garden Holdings Co., with 3,000 pending property projects up and down the country, is on the cusp of default and protestors have gathered at Zhongzhi Enterprise Group Co., one of the biggest shadow banks, demanding their money as payments are halted.

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Saudi forces killed hundreds of Ethiopians at Yemen border, report says

Saudi security forces have killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross the country’s border with Yemen, Human Rights Watch said, shooting people at close range and firing explosive weapons at groups in the mountains in what could amount to crimes against humanity.

In a report released Monday, the New-York based human rights organization detailed a pattern of killings it said was widespread and systematic, based on interviews with witnesses and an analysis of photos, videos and satellite imagery going back to 2021.

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Having shaken off nationalism, Europe risks civilisationalism

It is possible to be black and Dutch, or for a person of Moroccan descent to be unequivocally French. But is it possible to be non-white and to think of oneself as “European”? In most ways, certainly. Plenty of non-white people are born in Europe, and a citizen of any EU country is a citizen of the bloc, no matter what their ethnicity. Yet the term “European” is sometimes also used to connote whiteness: in apartheid-era South Africa, the terms were interchangeable. Those who think of Europe as a civic construction—a place underpinned by laws and values that people freely adhere to—can welcome anyone as a citizen. But of late some have tended to think of Europe in civilisational terms, an idea rooted not just in laws and institutions but in history, culture and identity. To be European in that meaning is to be of a place, to belong there, and therefore for others not to belong. That has unsettling implications for those who live in Europe yet do not look traditionally European. Might eight decades of EU integration accidentally foment a form of ugly, pan-continental bigotry?

The case that something discomfiting might be afoot is put forward by Hans Kundnani, a fellow at Chatham House, a think-tank in London. In “Eurowhiteness”, the British son of a Dutch mother and an Indian father describes his own inability (even before Brexit) to think of himself as 100% European, as many British liberals in pro-EU circles routinely do. Those who cheer the European project laud the way it consigned nationalist competition between EU members to history—forget fighting a war, being narrowly French or Swedish looks old-hat these days, at least outside football stadiums. Even the hard right seems to be stepping back from country-first nationalism. Leaving the EU was once a populist priority. Now the likes of Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orban in Hungary want Europeans to band together to collectively build higher fences better to keep Middle Easterners and Africans out instead.

Surely the rout of any and all forms of nationalism (apart from the odd populist) is one of the EU’s signature achievements? Not so fast. Hannah Arendt, a German political theorist, warned in 1948 that one day people might find a way to become “as narrowly and chauvinistically European as they were formerly German, Italian, or French”. Mr Kundnani does not suggest that skinheads with tattoos of EU flags will soon start roaming the streets of Brussels and Strasbourg. But he describes what he thinks is a “civilisational turn” in Europe of late. It comes not just among the likes of Mr Orban. Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, has defended the idea of promoting European civilisation, the better to fend off rivals in China, America and beyond. When Ursula von der Leyen, the boss of the European Commission, appointed a staff member to stem migration four years ago, she named him commissioner for “Protecting Our European Way of Life” (after an uproar, he finally got a similar job “promoting” this elusive euro-lifestyle).

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