You wouldn’t try to sell coal to Newcastle. So how would you rate your chances of peddling meat substitutes to the country that invented tofu? Beyond Meat Inc., the US maker of plant-based burgers and sausages, on Wednesday announced a new product designed to crack China, the world’s biggest meat market: imitation ground pork. It’s not hard to see why this was a necessary step. For decades, China has consumed about half the world’s pork. Even in the wake of an epidemic

Viewpoints Nov. 25, 2020

The world now seems likely to have at least two effective vaccines against COVID-19 with Monday’s announcement of positive early data from Moderna Therapeutics’s 30,000-person clinical trial. The result comes a week after Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a protection rate of more than 90 percent against disease. Moderna slightly one-upped its rivals, estimating that its shot is 94.5 percent effective at preventing COVID-19. Both results are highly impressive for inoculations developed at

Viewpoints Nov. 19, 2020

If you wanted a demonstration of how the world’s largest free trade area is likely to fall short of expectations, you could do worse than look at the customs sheds at Shanghai’s Pudong airport. As final preparations for signing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership pact, or RCEP, were being made earlier this month, several metric tons of Australian lobster were being delayed at the Chinese border for several days — far longer than the six-hour time frame for perishab

Viewpoints Nov. 18, 2020

“So when our Sickness, and our Poverty Had greater wants than we could well supply; Strict Orders did but more enrage our grief, And hinder in accomplishing relief.” That’s how the British poet George Wither explained a spreading rebellion against social-distancing rules. Seeing quarantines and lockdowns as unfair and tyrannical punishments, people were taking to the streets. The year was 1625, the place was London, the disease was plague. The same psychology brought some 20

Viewpoints Nov. 17, 2020

The grinding recovery from the epic global recession has generated a deep divide within Asia: Economies in the north are ascendant and their once faster-growing southern neighbors are mired in a deep funk. The chasm can be seen in recent gross domestic product numbers. China’s recovery hastened, and Taiwan returned to growth last quarter. South Korea’s better-than-forecast results suggest it’s not far behind. The contrast with once flashy emerging markets is stark. Far from f

Viewpoints Nov. 13, 2020

To look at the politics of it, you might think that four years of President Donald Trump’s trade war on China were just starting to bear fruit as he prepares to leave office. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga used his first foreign tour since taking office to visit Vietnam and Indonesia, notably China-skeptical allies, and push for a strengthening of bilateral supply chains that would avoid the region’s 800-pound gorilla. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, who has been purs

Viewpoints Nov. 12, 2020

Joe Biden has been elected to be the next president of the United States. Now he’ll have to get creative. When the president-elect takes office, he’ll confront the country’s two most acute challenges: an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the economic damage it’s wrought. But he’ll have an uphill battle to enact the sort of bold policy agenda that many supporters were hoping for. Barring a January surprise in Georgia’s runoff election, Republicans are likely to r

Viewpoints Nov. 11, 2020

In 2015, the year before Donald Trump became president of the US, a similar power shift occurred in Eastern Europe, albeit on a smaller scale. Like America soon after, Poland veered hard-right toward an anti-elitist populism built on the politics of grievance and resentment. What’s Poland like today? Bitterly divided. “This is war,” read some of the banners carried by hundreds of thousands of Poles, mainly women, who took to the streets in recent days. They’re marching

Viewpoints Nov. 10, 2020

Regardless of what happens in the vote counting, President Donald Trump has said he is going to the Supreme Court to ask for … something or other. When he does, he will have to overcome a hurdle of his own making: his claim to have “already” won the election, made during his rambling speech at 2:30 a.m. The justices -- including the crucial conservatives like Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett -- will not like the speech, which puts them in the position of being as

Viewpoints Nov. 6, 2020

It’s Election Day, and there are already lawsuits challenging votes and voting procedures. Some of them are invoking the Supreme Court’s 2000 decision in Bush v. Gore, which effectively handed that year’s presidential election to George W. Bush. We should expect a lot more to come. Bush v. Gore is widely misunderstood. It rested on exceedingly narrow grounds. As the court put it, the key issue was “whether the use of standardless manual recounts violates the Equal Protec

Viewpoints Nov. 5, 2020

After four years of President Donald Trump’s assault on the US constitution, it comes down to this. The courts have done what they could to limit the damage; the House of Representatives impeached him; and the Senate let him get away with it. Now all that remains is the final check provided by the constitution: a vote of the people. James Madison would have seen this coming. While the constitution was being ratified, he argued that its checks and balances would preserve the liberty that t

Viewpoints Nov. 4, 2020

As Election Day nears, the possibility of a disputed presidential election is worrying a lot of people. You’ve heard the scenarios: An embittered Donald Trump loses but refuses to leave the Oval Office. An embittered Joe Biden loses but refuses to concede. Absentee ballots that arrive after Nov. 3 aren’t counted. Or they are counted. The angry left takes to the streets. The angry right takes to the streets. Lawyers take to the courts. Whatever goes wrong -- and chances are somethin

Viewpoints Nov. 3, 2020

Japan’s bold pledge to cut net carbon emissions to zero by 2050 is very doable, but will require a degree of political will and coordinated, farsighted policymaking that the nation hasn’t enjoyed for some time. The government’s declaration comes as part of a wave of similar promises. In particular, China, Japan’s regional rival, recently pledged carbon neutrality by 2060. The European Union’s date is 2050, and presidential candidate Joe Biden has promised to commi

Viewpoints Nov. 2, 2020

It’s only natural to be skeptical when a political leader stands up and makes a promise about a target that’s far off, hard to achieve, and lacks a clear pathway. So one reaction to a report that Japan’s new prime minister, Yoshihide Suga, will pledge next week to reduce the country’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2050 might be: Really? After all, public and private Japanese banks are still funding new coal-fired power stations in Vietnam, Indonesia and Bangladesh, ex

Viewpoints Oct. 28, 2020

Like self-improvement books, the purpose of pension adequacy surveys is to make us feel lousy about ourselves.　 Lousy and scared: We haven’t saved enough because we’re myopic and lack self-control. We don’t have a retirement plan, and it’s getting late.　 And the nagging chases us right into our graves. At the back of our minds, there’s always the guilt that we should be leaving something -- actually, a lot -- to our children. So perhaps we shouldn’t bother h

Viewpoints Oct. 27, 2020