By Michal Meidan, China analyst, Eurasia Group

China’s new leadership must be extremely jittery if reports that domestic hackers attacked prominent Western news outlets are accurate. Such attempts to control the flow of information and dominate the narrative about China will only lead to social tension domestically and unnerve foreign investors.

The year of the Dragon—which ends this weekend, when the Year of the Snake begins—has been a trying year for Beijing. In 2012, Chinese and foreign media aired the Communist Party’s dirty laundry, unearthing the most gruesome details of the Bo Xilai scandal and exposing Chinese elites’ unseemly wealth, just as Beijing was undergoing a complicated leadership transition. Constantly being one step behind the blogosphere and the media has been unsettling for officials who desperately want to control the flow of information.

A Domestic Problem

It is clear to see why they want do so. China’s expanding middle class is demanding greater accountability

By Desmond Lachman, Resident Fellow, the American Enterprise Institute

With the world on the verge of a currency war, the need for macroeconomic policy coordination among the world’s major industrialized economies has never been more urgent. Yet the IMF, the organization best suited to orchestrate such coordination and whose very mandate is to avoid the recurrence of the beggar-my-neighbor type of policies that blighted the 1930 economic landscape, is conspicuously in denial about the risks of any such war. This has to be regretted since it heightens the dangers of a return to a world of competitive currency depreciation and capital controls that could be harmful to global economic growth and prosperity.

As early as September 2010, Guido Mantega, the Brazilian Finance Minister, sounded the alarm about the dangers of a global currency war. He did so as his country was overwhelmed by a flood of capital inflows that pushed Brazil’s currency into the stratosphere with considerable