Think-Tanks'Press

Liberal democracy and capitalism have been the two commanding political and economic ideas of Western history since the 19th century. Now, however, the fate of these once-galvanizing global principles is increasingly uncertain.

After the end of the Cold War, however, four structural challenges emerged to endanger the future of democratic capitalism: financial instability, technological disruption, widening social and economic inequality and structural weaknesses in democratic politics. If the West cannot overcome these challenges, they will, over time, spread to the rest of the world and undermine open polities, economies and societies.

Both democracy and capitalism are relatively recent developments in the long history of the West. They represent even more recent developments in the considerably longer history of the East. Both represent the enduring idea of freedom. Yet both rest on increasingly fragile political and economic institutions.

China’s heft in the global crude oil market exerts profound global effects across the energy, environmental, and human well-being dimensions. Yet comprehensive, high-frequency, reliable, and publicly available data on China’s domestic oil flows and inventory movements are essentially inaccessible.

Making high-quality satellite imagery available to the broader global energy research community can help crack open the “Great Wall of Secrecy” and improve data transparency and insights into the inner workings of the world’s second-largest crude oil market.

First and foremost, satellite data showing oil inventory changes would help fill in currently massive gaps in the publicly available data on changes in crude oil storage levels in China.

A simple model suggests that obtaining monthly high-resolution satellite views of China’s key oil storage infrastructure points (refineries and stand-alone crude oil and refined product tank terminals) could cost roughly $4.5 million per year, or about $1.1 million per year if monitoring were done quarterly.

According to our analysis of 2011-13 Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) data, fewer eligible Hispanic, American Indian, Native Alaskan, and Asian children received CCDBG subsidies than the national average.

Race also factors significantly in child care and early education suspensions; fewer than 20 percent of public preschoolers are Black but these children receive 42 percent of all first-time suspensions from those programs.

Moreover, race affects compensation, as well. Early educators of color are often relegated to the lowest-paying positions in child care centers and are paid, on average, 84 cents for every dollar their white colleagues make.

States and advocates are using many approaches to make their child care systems more equitable. In Oregon, the new CCDBG funds prompted the state to launch an initiative called Baby Promise. This initiative uses contracting, professional development, and pilot programs to sustainably expand access to high-quality infant and toddler care for low-income populations, including African American, Latinx, and homeless families, and other groups.

As a relatively open and democratic society Japan offers several points of entry for CPC influence operations.

The first of these points is Japanese universities. According to areport by AidData, Japan was home to 14 Confucius Institutes in 2016. Although this pales in comparison to the U.S. figure ( 107 as of July 2018), it is tied for second-most in Asia and Oceania (behind South Korea).

Indeed, according to the report 29 percent of China’s public diplomacy activities are conducted through the institutes. Compared to media coverage in the United States, however, concern about the institutes remains sparse.

Japanese universities also offer the CPC access to their students. According to AidData’s report, the CPC sets up exchange programs between universities “to create personal relationships between Chinese people and their counterparts in receiving countries to build trust and grow a ‘cadre of willing interpreters and receivers’ that adopt China’s norms and values in the political . . . sphere.”

Given that Beijing has positioned China’s interests as diametrically opposed to Japan’s in some cases, such as the dispute over the Senkaku islands, its “cadre growing” efforts have been met with opposition from Tokyo.