China links: FDI, climate change, internet czar, economic governance and more

• The New York Times profiles China's 'loud, direct and gregarious' internet czar Lu Wei, who has been a driving force behind stricter internet controls.
• South Africa's African National Congress to build a new political leadership school, which is inspired and funded by the Communist Party of China.
• Hugh Jorgensen and Daniela Strube argue in a Lowy Institute Analysis that China will seek a greater role in global economic governance processes, but will pursue a combination of approaches involving both existing Bretton Woods institutions and new forums.
• Xi Jinping's recent speech to Communist Party officials asserts China's global role. Rory Medcalf writes that the speech emphasises diplomacy, not raw power.
• CSIS has a good introduction to Taiwan's recent nine-in-one local elections, the results of which have seen Ma Ying-jeou quit as KMT chairman.
• Official figures for China's global outward FDI indicate impressive growth,but they neglect the stagnant or even declining level of net outbound FDI. State-owned extractive megadeals are also disappearing.
• This James Leibold interview is a good primer for China's ethnic policies. He says Falun Gong is a bigger threat than ethnic minorities simply because of its numbers.
• The People's Bank of China's latest fixes for the Yuan indicate it won't weaken China's currency to boost exports as growth slows.
• China's Chief climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, says in a wide-ranging interview with Caixin that 'countries will resolve disagreements through negotiations and draft a tidy agreement' before next year's climate change conference in Paris.
• Chinese historian Zhang Lifan argues in an interview that recent anti-foreign sentiment mirrors historical trends from other periods of domestic instability and that this round is merely political point scoring:

Members of the Chinese political establishment are not anti-foreign themselves. Xi sent his own daughter to be educated to the United States. [The daughter, Xi Mingze, was a recent undergraduate at Harvard University.] The anti-foreign sentiment is merely a political necessity. The people have many grievances, because income disparity has reached crisis levels. The political establishment needs the public to turn their rage toward foreign countries.

Dirk van der Kley