For those of you in our BRA WeChat group (limited to 500 members by WeChat, and with a waiting list of hundreds) you know we have been doing daily updates for a couple of years now.
But many of our Belt & Road Advisory (BRA) followers don’t have WeChat and the group can’t handle anymore members so we have decided to expand the daily updates with this new offering called BRAmble.
Since our company’s intials are BRA and we like to ramble on about things happening on China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the U.S. China Trade and Technology Wars and anything else relevant to doing business in or with China, we thought the word was fitting. By defintion, “bramble” is a thorny bed of roses.
An Economist by training and a entrepreneur by trade I am also an avid reader who has devoured more than 200 books a year since I was 7 years old. And I am a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This “thorny bed of roses” that is China’s Belt and Road Inititiative (BRI) and the recent thorniness of the trade and technology relations between the country of my birth (the U.S.A.) and my adopted home (the People’s Republic of China) reminds me of many of the aphorisms Taleb discusses in his 2016 book “The Bed of Procrustes”
Bed of Procrustes is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. - from the Amazon.com listing
Many things about the U.S. - China relationship regarding trade has come to resemble a “Procrustrian bed”.
The U.S. (a country with a mere 243 year history) expecting China (a civilization with 5,000 years of history) to act like a Western democracy with regards to trade, human rights, freedom of speech, etc., is simply not going to work. The two biggest economies in the world need to spend the time to understand each other better or we will pay dearly in the near future.
China for its part want to enhance its worldwide influence via infrastructure assistance (BRI) and not via direct projection of military might in the way the U.S. does. But while the U.S. protests China’s methods, the BRI investment continues and outside of punitive tariffs the U.S. has done little to counter or provide an alternative for developing nations.
In some sense you can say that China’s BRI itself can bee seen as a sort of Procrustrian be for underdeleloped nations who need infrastructure so bad it (literally) hurts. Whether the bed actually fits or not, China has been successful in getting 160+ countries to sign up to sleep in it.
Thus the roses are thorny brambles and the beds for sleeping in are Procrustian. It is complicated. The BRAmble exists to try to make some sense out of it each day without taking sides.
So what is BRAmble all about? It is, among other things:
the daily curated and somewhat famous “Belt & Road Today” top 5 news items of the day
Editorial comments from myself, the Belt & Road Advisory Team
Interviews and editorial contributions by industry experts and researchers from around the world
relevant and revealing statistics regarding the BRI, world trade, the technology “space race”, supply chains and etc.
and, most of all it is a daily pulse on what is happening in 160+ countries of the BRI and the latest news and analysis on the trade wars between the U.S., China and the E.U. that threaten the stability of the global economy.
BRAmble is free to first time subscribers for the first 30 days. After that will cost you only 7 cents a day to stay up to date. Hope you enjoy the free month. Feedback is not only welcomed but encouraged.
James LaLonde, Co-Founder and Managing Partner, The Belt and Road Advisory