Day: September 8, 2021

The Delta Variant and China’s Need to Change Its Covid-19 Policy

Chin@Strategy

“How lucky I was born in China,” a young Chinese scholar declared last month in his WeChat. He was proud: Following the worst domestic Covid-19 outbreak since Wuhan, China had brought daily new case counts down to a few dozen. The case numbers — when contrasted with the United States, which has less than a quarter of China’s population yet daily average cases above 130,000 — might not seem too concerning on their own. But they illustrate that China’s zero-infections policy is no longer working as designed. At the outset…

The US Still Doesn’t Understand China’s Strategy in Latin America

Chin@Strategy

Advertisement During the Cold War, the United States had a clear opponent, the Soviet Union, and a strong understanding of their intentions and capabilities. The Soviet Union encouraged aggressive anti-U.S. narratives, increasing its influence and, eventually, engaged in political interventions that led to the installation of communist and socialist governments – subservient to Moscow’s wishes and instructions. Many analysts treat the tensions between the United States and China as a prelude to a Second Cold War; in so doing, they miss China’s complexity. For example, in Latin America, China does…

Hong Kong’s Global Watch Dominance Comes to an End

Chin@Strategy

Hong Kong was the Swiss watch industry’s No. 1 export market for more than a decade. Not anymore. “It is the end of El Dorado,” Thierry Huron, founder of The Mercury Project, a Swiss watch and jewelry consultancy, wrote in an email. With its tourism-driven sales dented by pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019 and then blocked entirely by a coronavirus-related ban on tourist arrivals, Hong Kong lost half its watch and jewelry sales between 2018 and 2021, according to the July edition of the Sell-Out Index, Mr. Huron’s monthly report. The…

At Jaeger-Le Coultre, Time for Dessert

Chin@Strategy

Haute cuisine and haute horlogerie may not seem like the most obvious companions, but to Nina Métayer, they are meant for one another. The Paris-based pastry chef has created four desserts for the Swiss watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre’s 1931 Café, an attraction that accompanies an exhibition celebrating the 90th anniversary of its Reverso model. The 8,600-square-foot display, “Reverso: Timeless Stories Since 1931,” opened this summer at K11, an arts center in Shanghai, and is scheduled to move to 15 Rue Faubourg-St. Honoré in Paris in October. Ms. Métayer, 33, said craftsmanship, small…