China’s GDP growth target for 2013 was set at 7.5 percent in March, but just four months later, on July 11 at a press conference in Washington China’s newly established minister of finance, Lou Jiwei, seemed to suggest that Beijing no longer believed the country would hit the target.

What should have been a simple win-win deal is becoming a lot more complicated thanks to Congressional review, writes George Koo. The humble bacon has suddenly risen to become an ominous threat capable of imperiling the security of the United States.

The road to a successful BIT will no doubt be full of political uncertainties and economic bargains in the foreseeable future, but mutual openness of market and investment is allowing a new field of cooperation between China and U.S., writes Qian Liwei.

China's GDP growth in recent decades has been impressive, but also, as former Premier Wen Jiabao put it, "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable." With growth slowing, China must now adopt a more sustainable model that focuses less on GDP and more on fostering innovation and competition.

In the coming years, China’s government will have to confront significant challenges to achieve stable, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth. But, with mounting fiscal and financial risks threatening to derail its efforts, policymakers must act quickly to design and implement prudent, forward-looking policies.

As financial markets adjust to the end of quantitative easing and the “Bernanke shock,” He Weiwen explains that China must also reform and end its dependence on liquidity supplies. As major economies make revisions, economic adjustments must be made with global markets in mind.

The fifth meeting of the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED) is approaching quickly. While the first four S&ED meetings were relatively unproductive, there is hope that this meeting may be different, as the economic situation along with other aspects of the strategic bilateral relationship between the two nations have changed in recent months.

As time progresses, regional trade agreements have grown in number. Although these agreements are effective and beneficial to those nations involved, they cannot and should not replace the global "free-trade" framework.

Everyone is talking about China’s economic slowdown, writes Zhang Jun. But, as Premier Li Keqiang seems to recognize, this trend could actually be beneficial, spurring the structural reforms that China needs.

Although China’s economic growth continues to slow, with economic data coming well below market expectations, Yi Xianrong explains that the People’s Bank of China will not rush to endorse quantitative easing.