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Leading Indicators: Off the Radar News Roundup

Judah Grunstein | Bio | 05 Feb 2010

- China's foreign minister called 2010 a year of opportunity for French-Chinese relations. Certainly relations between the two countries could get no worse than 2009, when they hit a rough patch following President Nicolas Sarkozy's meeting with the Dalia Lama in December 2008. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that means U.S.-China relations should get back on track sometime in mid-2011.

- A Chinese state researcher suggested that China might let the yuan appreciate due to inflation concerns, lending weight to Daniel McDowell's argument in a recent WPR briefing that perhaps patience will be more effective than pressure when it comes to revaluing the yuan.

- India and the U.K. have finalized their bilateral civil nuclear energy deal, with a signing to be announced soon. That leaves the U.S. as among the last to enter India's nuclear energy market, despite being instrumental in opening it for international business.

- Kazakhstan is considering a plan to lease 2.5 million acres of agricultural land to China, an idea that has been met by fierce domestic opposition.

- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will use the Munich Security Conference to make one last push for a recent Russian proposal for a new European security treaty. The proposed pact, which the West has ignored so far, would more closely integrate U.S., NATO and Russian security interests on the continent.

- If EADS subsidiary Eurocopter didn't purposely time its helicopter sale to Taiwan to minimize the potential Chinese response to it, then it should have. Fallout from the recently announced U.S.-Taiwan arms deal combined with warming EU-China relations -- including a possible lifting of the EU arms embargo on China -- could provide cover for the $111 million deal.

Researched by Kari Lipschutz.