China: What kind of dragon?

Forget euro summits and G7 gatherings: for the countries that like to style themselves as the world’s rising powers, the real summitry takes place this week in central Russia, where Vladimir Putin will hold court.

Leaders of the Brics countries (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) will meet Putin in Ufa on Wednesday, then make way for the Asian powers grouped in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.

Russia and China are the common denominators, as in so much geopolitics these days. The UN security council, Apec, the G20 - Russia and China are the ever-presents, a powerful pairing whose interests coincide more often than not.

Since the start of its post-Mao reforms in the late 1970s, the communist regime in China has repeatedly defied predictions of its impending demise. The key to its success lies in what one might call “authoritarian adaptation”—the use of policy reforms to substitute for fundamental institutional change. Under Deng Xiaoping, this meant reforming agriculture and unleashing entrepreneurship. Under Jiang Zemin, it meant officially enshrining a market economy, reforming state-owned enterprises, and joining the World Trade Organization. Under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, it meant reforming social security. Many expect yet another round of sweeping reforms under Xi Jinping—but they may be disappointed.

The need for further reforms still exists, due to widespread corruption, rising inequality, slowing growth, and environmental problems. But the era of authoritarian adaptation is reaching its end, because there is not much potential for further evolution within China’s current authoritarian framework. A self-strengthening equilibrium of stagnation is being formed, which will be hard to break without some major economic, social, or international shock.

"A federal security system that failed to prevent millions of sensitive files on government employees from being improperly accessed has been plagued by delays and is largely unable to stop the most sophisticated attacks, current and former U.S. officials said.

The security system in place at the Office of Personnel Management, known as Einstein, is incapable in most cases of stopping previously unknown malware from penetrating government networks. It mostly relies instead on “signatures” from past computer breaches, and then looks for similar digital fingerprints.

Stopping hacks from never-before-seen spyware—called 'zero-day exploits'—is a major challenge for both the government and corporations. Private-sector firms such as FireEye Inc. and Palo Alto Networks Inc. sell technology that sometimes detects previously unknown threats, while other systems quickly respond with protective security patches once a new intrusion code appears."

"I [Wang Yang, China's Vice Premier] have the honor of co-chairing the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington, D.C., this week. This meeting is of particular significance as it lays the groundwork for President Xi Jinping’s state visit to the U.S. in September. We look forward to engaging in candid discussions with U.S. colleagues to achieve broader consensus, better solutions and mutual success.

The role of this dialogue has been commended by many, but unfortunately also criticized by some who see it as producing more accusations than results. The facts clearly prove otherwise. The dialogue has helped both countries identify and expand common interests and achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

For example, the talks were critical in kick-starting negotiations on a bilateral investment treaty that had been stalled since 1982. This breakthrough came in 2013 during the fifth round of the dialogue with the adoption of a pre-establishment national treatment clause, which means national treatment will apply to U.S. businesses as they establish a presence in China. We also adopted a “negative list” approach, which clearly details which sectors aren’t covered in the treaty."

"Top U.S. officials this week pressed China for greater market access to its economy, reflecting growing corporate concerns that Beijing’s promised economic overhauls will prove to be more rhetoric than reality.

Cabinet-level talks in Washington between U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts yielded little progress on several key economic issues, including a bilateral investment treaty, or BIT, that two years ago fueled hopes of major new business opportunities for both countries.

In late 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined a set of new economic policies that would give market forces a “decisive” role in the world’s second-largest economy. Those policy blueprints, the revived investment treaty talks and other signals spurred optimism in the U.S. that American companies would gain unprecedented access to the country’s 1.4 billion consumers as they moved into the middle class, a market largely closed to outside investment despite China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

'Those pronouncements led one to believe that good things were going to happen,' said William Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a trade group. 'But it appears now that we’re going backward; things are getting worse, not better,' he said."

Without most of us noticing, our everyday activities -- everything from getting cash at an ATM to watching this program -- depend on satellites in space. And for the U.S. military, it's not just everyday activities. The way it fights depends on space. Satellites are used to communicate with troops, gather intelligence, fly drones and target weapons. But top military and intelligence leaders are now worried those satellites are vulnerable to attack. They say China, in particular, has been actively testing anti-satellite weapons that could, in effect, knock out America's eyes and ears.

France suffered a notoriously quick defeat at the hands of its German neighbor in World War II.

The country capitulated just six weeks after Hitler's land invasion began on May 10, 1940.

France had a system of defense, built in the more than ten years leading up to 1939, but it failed miserably.

The problem was that Maginot Line, a great line of fortifications that spanned France's borders with several neighbors, was essentially a glorified trench.

And like any trench, it belonged to the age of the First World War, not the mechanized warfare known as blitzkrieg that Hitler brought to the Second.

The Wehrmacht simply went around the line, borrowing the low plains of Belgium to France's north.