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...wealthiest economies. While much of Indonesia is still poor (18% live under the poverty line), the country is finally using the profits from its plentiful natural resources, such as natural gas and a horde of minerals, to lift up its citizens. "Foreigners used to think of Indonesia as a place of natural disasters," says Gita Wirjawan, the head of the nation's investment board, who earlier this year traveled to the U.S. to drum up interest in his homeland. "But now they realize that this is a $550 billion economy that's on an upward trajectory...
...head of the Indonesian investment board, jokes that, "If I want to get Americans going, all I have to say is China's interested in a deal and they don't worry about the sanctity of contracts or other legal niceties." The creation of an Asian trade alliance could place American big business at a disadvantage. Though U.S. companies have historically invested far more in ASEAN than China, the pace of investment has slowed in recent years as the U.S. is squeezed by Asian competition. (See pictures of Obama's diplomacy...
...ought to be in his element. The 55-year-old Chinese writer (Mo Yan is a pen name, Guan Moye his real one) is in his hometown of Gaomi, Shandong province, a place he has described as the wellspring of his creativity. It's also the location of most of his vivid, at times brilliant, novels. Local Communist Party officials are honoring the town's famous son with a lavish lunch, but as the dishes are served - three kinds of fish, oysters, sea cucumber - the author looks increasingly surprised. "I had no idea that Gaomi had a restaurant of such...
...Although it remains his touchstone, Mo Yan acknowledges that the gritty modern Gaomi is very different from the midcentury, rural township of his fiction - a place where peasants ride stoic donkeys and heavily laden camels walk the dusty streets. Film buffs may know it from Zhang Yimou's 1988 adaptation of Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, set during the Japanese occupation. In fact, much of Mo Yan's fiction - from the 1996 epic he describes as his magnum opus, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, to Frog, published at the end of 2009 - is set in a world seemingly remote...
...Dagenham's decline is emblematic of the ebbing of Britain's manufacturing prowess - and the way in which shifts in the global economy can strip a place of jobs like a hurricane takes leaves off a tree - then its main street captures a national mood of hopelessness and anger. All of Britain is in a deep funk: although its economy is finally growing after a prolonged recession, that growth is so tender that many fear it will shrivel and give way to a second, deeper contraction. Britons are downcast, their politicians discredited. In one of the world's oldest democracies...