World View Hot Topics in Pivotal Markets

On the evening of Sept. 25, Xi Jinping debuted in his role as China’s father-confessor across state-owned television stations. The occasion was the conclusion of three days of self-criticism sessions that the Chinese president oversaw in Hebei province. Wearing his signature black jacket and open-collared white shirt, Xi sat listening to nervous high-ranking local officials. They had reason to be worried: According to Xinhua News Agency, the state newswire, Xi had stern expectations for what would be accomplished (according to official press accounts, he attended four half-day sessions): “I don’t want to hear fancy words from you when I take part in your sessions. I want real criticisms and self-criticisms.”

For older people, the phrase “self-criticism” evokes the excesses of Maoism in a way few other terms can. Under Mao Zedong, such sessions were, in theory, a way individuals could be freed of their selfish tendencies and better align themselves with the Communist Party’s ideological goals. In actuality, especially during the Cultural Revolution, they were a means of public punishment and humiliation.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev says he recognizes the problems holding back the country's economy. Sadly, nobody has much confidence in his plans to address them.

With the country's rate of economic growth declining toward zero, Medvedev is making a renewed effort to show the business community that he knows what to do. In an unusually long article published in the business daily Vedomosti, he acknowledged that what growth the country has is largely artificial, that the government is too dependent on revenue from the oil industry, and that Russia offers a terrible environment for investment.

Venezuela's government is known for its state-must-do-it-all mindset, inherited from late President Hugo Chavez and his radical followers, known as Chavistas. But late last week, the notoriously inefficient government went above and beyond to shine its populist credentials: It stepped right into Venezuelan bathrooms.

On Sept. 20, President Nicolas Maduro and a new economic panel ordered national price regulator Sundecop to “temporarily” seize plants owned by Manufacturas de Papel CA, or Manpa, the company that supplies 40 percent of the country’s demand for toilet paper and personal-care paper goods. Their reasoning? To oversee production, because consumers can't seem to find enough rolls of toilet paper.

What Indian economic phenomenon is at once marginal, even illegal, and enormously independent and entrepreneurial? That would be the street vendor, the small capitalist of the poor, and reservoir of off-the-books penalties that grease the machine of every municipal authority and police station in urban India.

There are an estimated 10 million street vendors (another term is the more pejorative "hawkers") in the cities of India, functioning mostly in breach of a host of urban laws governing licensing, selling and zoning -- and challenging bourgeois ideas of what a metropolis should look like. Street vendors have long battled to be recognized as a professional guild, not a shadowy underclass. Earlier this month, after more than a decade of agitation, the National Association of Street Vendors won a significant victory when the Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, recognized the rights of street vendors by passing the Street Vendors Bill, 2012.

On Sept. 17, Yang Hui was summoned from his afternoon math class by his junior high school’s vice-principal, according to an account the student provided to the state-owned Beijing News newspaper that was published on Tuesday. The 16-year-old quickly learned that he was in serious trouble. Three plainclothes and a uniformed police officer were waiting in the principal’s office. They asked for his phone, interrogated him, conveyed him to the police station for further questioning and then locked him up in a local detention center. His apparent crime?

He was re-tweeted.

(Corrects size of Ukrainian economy in third paragraph.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin's success in defusing the Syria conflict contrasts sharply with a fiasco developing closer to home: the disintegration of his grand plan to build a Eurasian economic union on the ruins of the former USSR.

Putin sees a free-trade agreement uniting former Soviet states as a big part of his political legacy. He has mentioned the project in every major speech for almost two years. "Tight integration with our neighbors is our absolute priority," Putin told international Russia experts last week at a conference in Novgorod. "The Eurasian union is a project meant to preserve the identities of nations and the historic Eurasian community in the new century, in a new world."

An unlikely political voice recently reminded Argentines of the economic difficulties they face due to President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s bankrupt economic policies: the president’s own 23-year-old daughter.

Florencia Kirchner told reporters on Sept. 15 at the government-sponsored Unasur International Film Festival: “I like visiting slums, and I believe everyone should have access to the same things the middle and upper class have.” The young Kirchner was at the festival to unveil her film project “La Propia Mirada” (One’s Own View), a series of short stories told from the perspective of Argentina’s poor. Her work “goes beyond politics. That's because it's social inclusion, which is the duty of every citizen," not just those in politics, she said. A tape of her remarks has been viewed almost 70,000 times on YouTube.

At some point after his Aug. 23 arrest for allegedly soliciting a prostitute, Chinese Internet celebrity Charles Xue began losing his 12 million followers on Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblogging site. The abandonment of Xue, a billionaire investor and online activist, has been subtle but unmistakable: At 12:36 p.m. on Monday in China, he had 12,054,441 followers; 10 seconds later, he had 12,054,435; after another 10 seconds, he was down to 12,054,430. In five minutes, 50 followers had cut their online ties.

In the drip-by-drip desertion of a man once (and possibly still) counted among the most influential voices on China’s microblogs, we can also see the vibrant life draining out of the Chinese Internet, and Sina Weibo in particular. Since its 2009 launch, the service has acquired more than 500 million registered accounts and become the nation’s virtual town square, fostering discussion, driving change and relentlessly pursuing transparency -- all while unnerving a government accustomed to holding a monopoly on the business of shaping public opinion.

The story of India's contributions to the U.S. melting pot of cultures made a huge symbolic advance this week when Nina Davuluri, a 24-year-old New Yorker, became the first woman of Indian origin to claim the Miss America title.

A measure of the significance of Davuluri's achievement was provided unintentionally by the hostile reactions of some Americans.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's successful push for Syria's chemical disarmament may have given him a rare shot at global statesmanship. A photo of the Obamas with a banana demonstrates why his country's political class isn't ready for that role.

Any legislature has its share of idiots. Russia's parliament, though, has the special distinction of being dominated by people whose primary qualification is loyalty to Putin. The natural result is that they tend to be deficient in other areas -- such as in their understanding of racial issues.

The howl of condemnation heard in Mexico in response to the fiscal-reform proposal President Enrique Pena Nieto unveiled Sept. 8 is not surprising: The plan angered political allies, irked the private sector, worried bondholders and scared the middle class. Yet, though not perfect, the reform provides a needed overhaul of the Mexican economy.

The plan aims to raise government revenue by approximately 1.4 percentage points of gross domestic product next year, through taxing a host of goods and services and slashing exemptions. But it would also raise spending, by creating a new unemployment insurance system for instance, which added to the country’s oil-investment budget would increase the government deficit to about 3.5 percent of GDP next year, the highest deficit level in 24 years according to Barclays Plc. Moreover, the proposal would raise debt issuance 35 percent above what was planned for this year, which may be a problem given that investors are already fleeing emerging-market debt as the U.S. Federal Reserve prepares to tighten monetary policy.

India was convulsed by grief, outrage and shame Tuesday after five men accused in a brutal assault in December 2012 were found guilty of rape and cold-blooded murder.

As the eight-month trial came to an end, the country paid tribute one last time to the 23-year-old physiotherapy student who paid with her life for an evening out in the nation's capital last year. Brutalized on a moving bus by six assailants, among them a juvenile, and dumped unconscious on a deserted street, the woman fought for her life for almost two weeks before succumbing to her injuries.

Anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny didn’t win the Sept. 8 mayoral election in Moscow, but all the people who came out to monitor the vote succeeded in making it one of the more honest Russia has seen in a long time.

Consider a vignette from one Moscow polling station. A number of grim-faced, muscular men, accompanied by silent wives and subdued children, gave rise to suspicion when they lined up to vote. Given the low turnout for the election -- just over 32 percent -- a line of any kind suggested an effort to rig the vote. The reality proved surprising: The men, military intelligence operatives with protected identities, had been forced to use a public polling place because observers wouldn't allow them to vote in private at work. Vote counters checked them off on a separate, classified roster.

The revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and her Mexican counterpart, Enrique Pena Nieto, are a rude surprise for the citizens of those countries. For the presidents targeted, the scandal should be a reminder of how geopolitics works.

After TV Globo’s newsmagazine "Fantastico" in Brazil broke the story on Sept. 1 -- citing documents leaked by former Central Intelligence Agency hand Edward Snowden -- Brazilian politicians reacted with outrage. Lawmakers launched an investigation. Rousseff called a meeting of her closest ministers and summoned the U.S. ambassador for an explanation. Foreign Minister Luiz Alberto Figueiredo called the case “an inadmissible and unacceptable violation of Brazilian sovereignty,” and said Brazil expected a "written” explanation from U.S. President Barack Obama sometime “this week.”

In New Delhi this week, the findings of an ambitious and methodologically inventive survey of Indian linguistic plenitude were made available to the public. The project, called the People's Linguistic Survey of India, establishes the number of languages currently in circulation at an astonishing 780.

The survey, headed by the scholar Ganesh Devy, and drawing on hundreds of scholars and research workers, is impressive not just for its findings but also for the principles it applied in thinking about India's languages. They dramatically extend, for instance, the official view of India's languages in the Constitution of 1950, which recognizes 22 official languages, or Scheduled Languages. All have their own script and print cultures, and are now sanctified as the "high languages" of modern India.

As the U.S. prepares for a potential attack on Syria, China is left in the awkward position of reacting to the news and occasionally justifying opposition to any U.S. action.

This is not new. In early 2012, China joined Russia in vetoing a United Nations Security Council draft resolution condemning Syrian violence and supporting an Arab League peace plan. It was a controversial move at the time, and the criticism was so overwhelming that People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece newspaper, felt compelled to editorialize in favor of China’s veto -- after the fact.

For U.S. President Barack Obama, the conflict in Syria is fraught with challenges and risks. For Russian President Vladimir Putin, it has its advantages.

Officials in Moscow are following Obama's standoff with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with bated breath. Their jumpiness over possible U.S. military action was evident in the lightning speed with which the Russian Defense Ministry reported a ballistic-missile launch in the Mediterranean on Sept. 3 that turned out to be a joint U.S.-Israeli test.

One almost feels sorry for Brazil’s central bank President Alexandre Tombini these days. The man charged with steering the monetary policy of the world’s sixth largest economy has a lot to handle.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has signaled it will finally reduce its quantitative-easing policy, a move that spells the end of the easy money that has helped Brazil's economy coast for years. This has contributed to an initial blow to the Brazilian real, which last week dropped to its lowest level in 4 1/2 years. The currency is now down about 11 percent against the U.S. dollar in the past three months according to Bloomberg data. Meanwhile, yesterday the central bank raised its lending rate by 50 basis points in a signal it plans to keep inflation below 6.5 percent -- the government's upper bound on its target range -- despite its exchange-rate woes.

For most of 2013, the Indian rupee, like the currencies of almost all emerging economies, has been steadily losing ground against the dollar. Over the last week, though, this drift has become a disturbance as the rupee has gone into free fall, repeatedly plumbing new lows and sending stock markets into a panic. The rupee fell by more than 2 percent against the dollar on both Tuesday and Wednesday this week, each time the biggest single-day declines in its value for more than two decades.

The rupee has been hard hit by a combination of adverse global and domestic triggers, including India's economic slowdown (growth is down to 5 percent annually), an unsustainable current account deficit, high inflation and the flow of capital away from emerging markets after the announcements from the U.S. Federal Reserve in June that it was tapering its quantitative easing program. At beginning of the year, the dollar traded at 55 rupees; it was just above 60 rupees at the beginning of August. It has advanced more than 10 percent this month to just over 68 rupees, and no one believes the end is in sight.

Could a celebrity critic of the Chinese government be so stupid as to hire a prostitute while in Beijing? Advocates of a free Chinese Internet certainly hope so, thanks to the weekend arrest of one of China’s most outspoken Web personalities for allegedly hiring a prostitute almost four decades his junior.

The news -- and the uncertainty surrounding it -- has electrified the Chinese blogosphere, raising questions about just how far the authorities intend to go to control online speech and shame those who threaten its grip on public opinion.