Der Spiegel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
China‘s slowing economy has German industry worried about its exports to Asia. But as it goes about beefing up the transportation sector, the country poses a completely different threat in the longer-term.
Source: Ready for Take-Off: China Steers Course Between Prestige and Profit – SPIEGEL ONLINE
Spiegel is an outstanding world-class newspaper. It looks for evidence and is prepared to invest time to research a subjective viewpoint. Normally, the conclusions are carefully drawn from the argument and evidence.
This is so different to many Western media organizations, especially UK newspapers, where biased reporting is quite common. When I was a youngster, kind of quaint really, newspapers reported the facts and opinion was left for the editorials. These days, it is quite common for expensive editors to doctor the news to their own bias. Because of my politics, I notice this behavior most quickly at the BBC and in the Guardian. Compare this leading German media article on George Osborne to one from the Guardian.
Spiegel and the NYT, for example, are liberal, left-leaning but they manage quality reporting, unlike other left-leaning organizations, and the BBC and the Guardian come instantly to mind.
I hope that increasing competition in the global media sector will promote quality and integrity.
Thoughts?
Dr Alf's Blog 
I think Dr Alf will hope in vain because Western newspapers and media outlets, like the BBC, churn out propaganda at an alarming rate, and seem disinterested in evidence-based reporting about China or countries outside the Western orbit.
For instance, how many people in the West are aware that China is teaching 650 million people English in a joint venture with Carnegie Mellon to produce IT experts and software programmers?
All the training is in American English and no Mandarin is allowed to be spoken during the course of a gruelling day that is a lot longer than 8 hours.
Most people have not heard of China Merchants Group or its two co competitors.
The first is a small insignificant Lloyds broker, the second is part of a warehousing and shipping group.
Price Waterhouse Coopers are grooming China Merchants Group, which will become the biggest insurer in the world and the other two will not be far behind.
The developments in aviation, car manufacturing and railways that Spiegel Online writes about are part of a pattern of development which will eventually lead to profit and prestige but you will not hear anything about it on the BBC, the Guardian nor any of the Murdoch titles. What you get from there is the sort of triumphalist nonsense that James Rubin wrote about yesterday which essentially said that America would remain light years ahead of every other country in the world. Probably there were people in ancient Rome who thought that way and people in ancient Greece, Atlantis, Lemuria and the Austro Hungarian empire who thought that they too would always remain top dog. All these empires are now as dust, along with the empires of Japan, Kublai Khan, Persia and the Ottoman Turks under the Sultan.
Everything in the universe and in this world operates in cycles with a beginning, a rise to prominence, a decline and then oblivion, followed by the work of archaeologists and historians to look into the past to see what these empires were like and how they were ruled.
China with it’s present economic difficulties is in the “rise to prominence ” stage of the cycle and has a long way to go. It will succeed in getting there and at least Spiegel Online will accurately report upon the journey as it does with Teutonic thoroughness on everything else.
In the UK, and probably in America as well, the reporting will be sanitised pap designed for a person with a reading age of between 6 and 9 years, interspersed with speculation and in the case of the BBC bias, obfuscation, supposition and the rantings left-wing reporters.