I'm John Batchel. I welcome my colleague and co-host Gordon Chang at Gordon G. Chang.

And we immediately go to our colleague and Stevenson Yang in Taipei, Taiwan, the capital of Taiwan,

to note that while the West, that would be the United States and the Americas and Europe,

enjoy a very promising 2026 predictions, very promising.

The money, it costs money to be cheaper. That's the Federal Reserve and other central banks.

Consumer class restored and spending lavishly at Christmas time. They're looking at something approaching 5% for the final fourth quarter GDP number.

And we have even better prospects for 26, not just at the big industry, but small businesses

as well have rosy outlooks.

All that is boom time.

And then we come to China.

And as Anne has explicated over the years, the property market is a time. And then we come to China. And as Anne has explicated over the years, the property

market is a horror. And the consumers don't show up much. While America is consumerism,

China is hide the gold under the floorboards. I exaggerate only slightly. Now we come to an

aspect of China's reluctance in the apparent failure of the Chinese miracle

that Anne explocates in her book Wild Ride a high recommendation because Anne's years in China

are where we're coming from.

And in order to get out of that hole that the Chinese Communist Party

had put a nation into, they developed an economy that had obvious failures. And one of them was

real estate, another of them was consumerism. And a third was the state-owned enterprises,

putting their thumb on the scales of competition.

We come now to an aspect of this.

This is South China Morning Post, a newspaper in English, but it's heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party's intentions.

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