Valdai Club

As practice shows, the implementation of legislatively formalised decisions on the confiscation of sovereign assets can be difficult due to the lack of procedural issues, Ekaterina Arapova writes. Despite the intensification of confiscation rhetoric, the Western authorities cannot fail to understand that the cascading of such practices from the United States both causes serious damage to the reputation of a reliable financial hub of their jurisdictions, and provokes retaliatory measures from Russia.

The United States has released the “genie from the bottle” and now it is not known in which direction global sanctions may begin to develop. If the United States uses its dominance in the global financial system and the dollar monopoly in the mechanism of secondary sanctions, then China uses its positions in global value chains. And this response, in the medium term, may turn out to be quite symmetrical, given the share of Chinese materials and components in global production, writes Valdai Club expert Ekaterina Arapova.

Topping the agenda of the 2017 BRICS Summit was Chinese President Xi Jinping’s newly introduced concept of BRICS+ aimed at expanding partnerships within the group of emerging markets and establishing South-South cooperation.


The low monetisation of the economy essentially “kills” deferred demand within the country, and subsidising interest rates will require significantly larger cash injections than the announced 1 trillion rubles, which will actually settle in the banking system instead of being effectively used for project financing and accelerated import substitution in critical important sectors of the economy, Valdai Club expert Ekaterina Arapova writes.

The COVID-19 crisis resulted in a dramatic drop in manufacturing, global demand and incomes, and brought much of global economic activity to a halt. The “Great Lockdown” hurt businesses and engendered a rise in unemployment all over the world.

It became obvious that the China’s economy entered a critical stage of its development. It needed to integrate into new reality, diversify its economic growth sources, adopt structural reforms, as well as fi nd new instruments and mechanisms of their implementation in order to transform into a higher-value knowledge and technology-based economy.

There is no doubt that getting the deal done is in China’s best interests. The country desperately needs large tariff-free markets as it faces a slowing economy, negative growth of international reserves, increasing budget deficit and growing corporate debt, as well as unstable and extremely vulnerable and divergent capital flows.