Ann: Appendix 3B, page-7

I am sorry to say that I believe those days are long gone (Xi is very different from his predecessors, and his policy is positioning China between a rock and a hard place, and I am talking about Economics, here). In the near future, the relationship between Australia and China will be bumpy (the same is happenning with EU). But don't fret. There is life outside China, and Australia will turn the shift to other geographies. As China is doing the same. One day, China will change. Because it will need to. It has moved the needle in one direction, but that will not be forever. Xi is subverting the "one country, two systems" in HK and Macau, and that broke confidence with investors.


What Australia (and other countries) needs, IMO, to do is to reinvent itself as industrial power. Not the old industry, those days are past. But there are so many things to do, that no country should depend in one kind of activity (be it mining, tourism, agriculture, whatever). It's impossible and undesirable to produce everything, in the same way it is to be a monoproducer.

The world is dividing in blocks, again. That happened so many times in History, it will be only one more. Then, one day, the blocks will start to dissolve. It's like a pendulum.