Yesterday, as I grabbed The World in 2009 from my mailbox, I recalled a blog post I wrote last November summarizing The Economist's predictions for China in 2008. I think it would be good fun to evaluate those predictions.
Editor Daniel Franklin's China Predictions
Mr. Franklin predicted that Taiwan's elections could lead to geopolitical crisis, and he predicted that China would win more gold metals than the US in the Summer Games. I wrote that Mr. Franklin got "a little carried away" with the Olympic prediction.
The election of Ma Ying-jeou has warmed relations between the PRC and the ROC, which is nice.
China skunked us on golds, but, uh, we still got more overall.
Charles Lee's China Predictions
Mr. Lee predicted that the Olympics would expose the world to several major Chinese businesses, but that none of them would join the "global A-list." Instead, those companies would focus on "their booming home market." He also made special mention of Nine Dragons Paper.
The severity of the financial crisis seemed to have a negative impact on the exposure that Chinese brands received during the Olympics. Or maybe I was paying too much attention to former Soviet satellite states. The China telecom industry has taken a bit of an image hit with the telecom dispute over 3G neutrality. Overall, he was right, though "booming" is probably not the right word to describe any consumer market right now.
Nine Dragons and Zhang Yin have taken an unfortunately significant hit over the past year.
Steven Xu's Predictions
Mr. Xu predicted that China would face two easily overcome economic problems in 2008: inflation and faltering export markets. If only these were the only economic problems.
Thomas Easton's Predictions
He was definitely right: the Shanghai stock exchange has performed horribly over the past year. China is trying to fix some of the corporate transparency problems with the Basic Standard for Enterprise Internal Control which becomes effective on July 1, 2009.
Jack Ma's Prediction
"A million internet entrepreneurs will bloom." Maybe next year.
Conclusion
The unpredictability of 2008 makes 2008 a pretty crappy year to use to stick it to predictor's.
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