More than 60 countries and institutions have embraced President Xi Jinping’s call for connectivity programs both within Asia and between Asia and Europe, both by land and by the sea, to strengthen traditional infrastructure and build highways of trade, finance, and cultural exchange.

It’s my great pleasure to be invited to speak at the Singapore-China Business Forum. Let me commend the organizers for taking this timely and important theme.

It’s my great pleasure to be invited to speak at the Singapore-China Business Forum. Let me commend the organizers for taking this timely and important theme.

The partnership of developing countries offers a benign counterweight to Western dominance in the world, and can help shape a “new normal” in international relations.

China invites the nations of the world to join in its strategy of opening up featuring mutual benefit and win-win outcomes. By opening doors wider and wider to the outside world, the environment for development will be more transparent, equitable, well-regulated, and predictable.

Financial engineering largely benefits the wealthiest class; monetary easing has failed to spur meaningful recovery in post-crisis economies, threatening to keep the global economy trapped in a continuous series of crises. As Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stressed, the answer is a commitment to structural reform – a strategic focus of China’s that, he noted, is not shared by others.

Instead of viewing the AIIB as a symbol of looming Chinese economic hegemony, the AIIB should instead be viewed as a global climate change solution with powerful, vastly distributed benefits. Stewart Taggart claims it would create non-discriminatory access to a massive regional market for energy sources ranging from sun, wind, and biomass to hydro and geothermal. Without the external labor sink of infrastructure projects, domestic Chinese unemployment will also rise.

There is no guarantee the U.S. remains in the dominant position on the world stage. In fact according to The International Monetary Fund, as reported by The Daily Mail -- we no longer are, at least economically.

The end of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Quantitative Easing (QE) monetary policy will affect U.S. growth predictions over the next two years, and may weaken the U.S. dollar. However, as Xiao Lian contends, this might not have an obvious impact on China, yet could result in new development opportunities – as well as new risks.

While many of China’s largest brands – Haier, Huawei and Xiaomi – have not yet become household names, Joel Backaler describes how China’s domestic market is changing and the companies that are focusing on developing their brand internationally.