this is bbc news, we will have the headlines— this is bbc news, we will have the headlines and _ this is bbc news, we will have the headlines and all— this is bbc news, we will have the headlines and all the - the headlines and all the main stories— the headlines and all the main stories for— the headlines and all the main stories for you _ the headlines and all the main stories for you at _ the headlines and all the main stories for you at the - the headlines and all the main stories for you at the top - the headlines and all the main stories for you at the top of i stories for you at the top of the hour_ stories for you at the top of the hour straight— stories for you at the top of the hour straight after- the hour straight after this programme _ hello everybody, a very warm welcome to talking business with me, aaron heslehurst. let's take a look at what is on the show. china's leader xi jinping consolidates power and resets the super economy's future. so what do the changes ast the top mean for the global economy, the supply chain and relations with its biggest competitor the united states? i'm going to be discussing all of that with these two — there they are. zoe liu from the council on foreign relations, and nirav patel, the big boss of the asia group and former us diplomat in the region.

also on the show, as global leaders meet in egypt for the cop27 summit on the environment, what are the stakes for one of the most beautiful places on earth? i'm going to be asking the big boss of the caribbean development bank, dr gene leon. wherever you'rejoining me from around the world, a power grab at the top of china's communist party has big consequences for the global economy. yet with war raging in europe, a cost of living crisis, surging interest rates and a global energy crisis, china's president xijinping's consolidation of power at the communist party's 20th congress could easily get a bit

lost amidst the noise. but china's critical place in the global supply chain, in world politics, in manufacturing and exporting and its growing power as a consumer and tourist powerhouse means that these changes are incredibly significant for the way the world's economy is going to develop in the next few years. so with the benefit of a few weeks' perspective, let'sjust take a look at what went down at the congress and what it means the global economy. underlying that congress was president xijinping's growing influence and power. president xi secured an unprecedented third term in office and at the same time he removed premier li keqiang, replacing him with someone more closely tied to himself. a lot of attention in the media was also focused on this moment. former president hu jintao seemingly being escorted from the hall before a key vote on the party's programme. all of this as for the first time in a generation questions are starting to be asked

about china's barnstorming economic growth. covid policy which is seen mass testing and lockdown well in big cities across china. certainly provoking some protest. and weighing on the economy further, a slowdown in china's property market. overall, the chinese economy grew by nearly 4% in the past three months, that is lower than the official targets but still better than most western economies. and the fiscal deficit — that is simply the difference between what the government takes in and what it spends — has grown to an all—time high this year, reaching nearly $1 trillion in the first nine months of this year. that's three times higher than the same period last year. the market reaction, boy, it was swift. in the days after the congress, shares listed on the hang seng market, that's the the main market in hong kong fell to 13 years lows. so, what does all this means for the future of china's

economy, and importantly, how will it impact on the rest of the global economy? let's start with a fellow at the think tank, the council on foreign relations. zoe liu, a real pleasure having you on my show. thank you for your time. let's start with this because i am wondering what do the personal changes at the top of the communist party, what do they tell us about the way decisions are likely to be made? because i'm wondering — all of the commentary is like centralising power and decision—making around president xijinping. thank you very much, first of all, for having me on your show. it does look like xi jinping replaced a lot of those pro reform oriented minds with his loyalists. it does show that there is a major consolidation of power, especially people who are personally loyal to president xijinping, by putting himself in front of all of this decision—making, he basically reviewed that he is going to personally put a stand on major policy

making in china going forward. tell us about china's economic direction, is it going to be one that looks outward or one that looks inward? that is a great question. i would say that right now, again if we just look at the politburo standing committee, it feels like none of these people are particularly pro reform or pro open up. and more specifically during president xijinping's second term, he has been talking about the so—called deal circulation a lot, which means an emphasis on the domestic circulation, which is domestic consumption and the domestic market. so i interpret a lot of this movement as a departure from the previous going out

strategy laid by hu jintao. on top of that, combined with a zero covid policy and more specifically the promotion of li keqiang, who presided over shanghai's lockdown. none of these suggest that the new policymaker inside the party are particularly pro reform or pro opening up. and, zoe, as we know, this zero covid is a very controversial policy, impacting on the policy within china, where we know there have been lockdown is major cities, but also on the world, keeping the chinese tourists at home, for example. on the show, just a few weeks ago i had the big boss of the radison hotel group who told me he doesn't think that that policy will stay.

i am wondering, what did the congress suggest? if i was a hotelier, i would also want to see the zero covid policy being removed very soon. the party congress signalled that beijing is probably unlikely to remove the covid policy any time soon despite the immense socioeconomic costs. so xi jinping did say that by permanently implementing the zero covid policy, the communist party has been able to maximise chinese people's life and health, so by sticking with china's zero covid policy, xijinping can control china's interaction jinping can't control china's interaction with the rest of the world.

from that perspective he can prepare the chinese people and the chinese economy for further isolation if the west were to impose sanctions if war broke out in taiwan. zoe, there was as extraordinary, some would get say quite a sad moment, when we saw hu jintao seemingly just led away from the hall. what was your reading of that moment? he is the last chinese leader being appointed and chosen to lead china. the removal of him right at the closing ceremony of this party congress were xi jinping is getting confirmed as the unprecedented third term with his loyal people there, i would consider that as putting an end to china's four decade movement towards a bigger degree or a higher degree of reform and opening up. zoe liu, a real pleasure having you on the show, thank you for your input

and i will talk to you soon. what does all of this mean the economic and political relations between the two biggest powers, china and united states? my next guest is the big boss of the asia group, which offers clients strategic advice on operating and expanding on the region. he is also a former deputy assistant secretary of state for east asia and pacific affairs under president obama. nirav patel, thanks for coming on the show. in 2009 when you started at the state department, you wrote a report calling china's rise one of the most important geopolitical events in history and raised questions on how america should deal with it. do you think this third term of xi jinping changes things? thank you for having me on the show, it is a real pleasure. in many ways, the recent party congress just shows that china's leader is very focused

and determined to increase china's role in the international environment. as a result there is increasing points of divergence between china and united states and in those areas of divergence, we are seeing more competition between the two sides, whether it's the economic sphere, the military sphere etc. and what we are seeing now is a structural deterioration of the china and united states relationship that will present profound consequences for the international order in the months and years and decades to come. you advise businesses on entry and expansion into china, i am wondering, will that advice change, given the developments over the last few weeks? in many ways, it has changed but those changes have been occurring for a number of years. here at the asia group, the number of companies that we work with that have really increased their thinking behind where they start to diversify, not only investments but manufacturing, really started about four to five years ago.

so if we look at broader corporate development strategy trends, the evolution is towards a china plus one module, yes, china seems to have leading edge in its manufacturing ecosystem, but for a variety of range we are seeing companies increase their overall capital investment in markets like india, vietnam, and thailand. all of those areas create opportunities and challenges but probably in many instances also lined with a changing geopolitical environment that is facing greater emphasis the challenges we experienced during covid and the rush to increase supply chain diversity as well. do you think that china's appearance to be more closely aligned to russia in these times, do think that a significant? i think unequivocally it is significant.

in my view it really demonstrates leadership in beijing that feels like it is better for its interest as well as interview in the antinational order to be aligned with orthography is the have a very destabilising orientation not only to the international order but the us and allied interests around the world. former president trump and president biden, they seem to be quite hawkish on trade with china, how much is an issue is that according to international businesses looking to expand? that was a 2018 phenomenon, in this way in time international businesses particularly those that are in the united states have ready—made determinations based side about the prudence of continued investment in china. so if trade was phase one of the reorientation of the us corporate investor strategy, phase two really has accelerated the last three plus years, driven animated by concerns of china's intern and its concerns our

national security. as china becomes as much of a consumer power is one of that manufacturing power, is the economic balance changing? does the united states need china more than china needs the us? is a difficult question. analytically you have to break it down. american consumers as we know enjoy access to cheap products that are manufactured principally in asia and that helps us and at the same time chinese companies and chinese government need access to highly advanced us technology in order to move their own economy so i think in the short term there continues to be a degree of mutual independence and demand that is probably being driven both by the consumers and also by the government in china that make that mediation or dislocation economically

very difficult to be out to achieve but on par, i think over time particularly in areas that align once again with national security, the importance of self—reliance will move more towards a subtle but clear points of differentiation and dislocation, particularly in technology and probably pharmaceutical spaces. as we know, covid threw global supply chains into absolute chaos, china's zero covid policy continues to disrupt trade and now it seems like it's going to look more internally for growth in the middle of a major realignment. my answer to that is that it is in the nature of a major realignment but it takes time. at the end of the day in the two past decades, global businesses supported trillions of dollars into the chinese economy. it is very hard for companies that have spent hundreds

of millions if not and tens of millions of dollars building up world—class manufacturing capacity to unplug that overnight and to ship to a different jurisdiction, the problem is when you look at where are the likely company is going to move in terms of different areas that have strong manufacturing capacity where in mexico or central america or in parts of southeast asia or india, those companies still lack that the government had made in china to be able to allowed for that type of manufacturing capacity to be built at scale to service the global markets. so at the end of the day realignment will take time but if we look at it from a sector by sector basis, we have seen consumer electronics ship a lot more dramatically into parts of southeast asia, with vietnam being the biggest vector of that. and now we are seeing from logical projects really as well as a growing base in the us are onshore back the number of those

manufacturing capacities, not necessarily because it is the best business decision but really because it does align more closely with what people have come to understand on this covid environment. the governments job fundamentally is to that those risks are offset to having access to stable, reliable and domestic sets of capacities which is what i think we have seen trends, not only in the us but in large parts of western europe as well as a number of economies in the middle east as well as asia. you know i have to ask you, if you were still in the state department, what would your advice be to the current administration? you know, right now my main focus and advice to colleagues in the administration is a, to keep up what you're doing because there is a clear focus on effort on keeping allies

and partners, and there is understood unity on how we speak about our interest globally. the second is we are in a period of increased tension, but there needs to be greater efforts to improve dialogue between china and the us. in the height of the cold war, the us and the soviet union maintained dialogue as a means to prevent miscalculation and inadvertent acts that could create real crises. and i think the state of communication and the stakes are high stop and now it is important for policy members to be able to ensure that space is being carved out for the channels and coordination are necessary to offset the harder and more difficult parts of the risk assessment. the third and last is to also identify confidence building efforts that do create points of trust. this is a generational challenge in the united states and china, but at the same time as hopi and optimise my view is that we should also be laying the seeds for the environment

where there is a prospect of approach meant. decelerating this type of strategic decision and accelerated over the past five years. for that you have got to find a way of identifying small things governments can do to try and create the right conditions, not only the these countries before the international order. let me end on this, five years' time, the united states and china closer or further apart? further apart. i appreciate the answer. thank you for your time much appreciated and i would check in with you soon. thank you, i appreciate it. as world leaders are gathering to the cop 27 summit to battle climate change, one of the places the impact of the climate emergency is felt most keenly is in the caribbean, storms that battered the island infrastructure is co—bed battled its tourist economy. so how can these beautiful islands work its way

through these difficulties and can the cop 27 summit make a difference? i caught up with the big boss of the caribbean development bank. a real pleasure having you on my show. let start with this, caribbean countries are some of the most vulnerable to weather—related shocks, simply because of geographic location. just paint me a picture, just how bad is it? it can be very bad in two ways. one is the frequency at which it occurs, every year storms for example goes through the region from the west coast of africa across the caribbean and we have our annual hurricane and they range from tropical storms through to category five hurricanes which decimate countries as we speak equally now there is the climate issue.

which as we know did not really originate in a sense of being caused. by the small countries of the region. but who faced a larger brunt of the impact of climate change through the very vulnerabilities that you spoke of in regards to natural hazards. so you have the storms every year. but we have the pandemic like all of us in the world. how much was an impact on covid on the island and are you starting to recover? the impact was immense. let's first accept that it was notjust the reduction about, but the way it impacted lives relative to reduced incomes, education opportunities, inequalities even gender violence.

the diminishing of the status of, for example, women that typically head households, the reduction in livelihoods from the crash almost of the informal market structures that we... that we have. and in terms of recovery we have started, i wouldn't say we are recovered yet. the problem that we have in the region is our ability to recover takes a long time. and you're attending cop 27 in egypt. of course, that's the un's annual climate change convention. what are you hoping to achieve from that gathering? i wouldn't say me per se, but i would say the world is hoping for two things. one is that the prior commitments that the developed countries had made would begin to be honoured. we would like equally that the pledges with regard to

mitigation and decarbonization are strengthened and notjust strengthened in world, but now strengthened indeed. so we can begin to narrow the gap towards reducing or capping the trajectory of climate increase, the temperature increases to at least give us a fighting chance to reach i.5%. we've already talked about the intensity and frequency of these hurricanes that hit us but we do not have access now to finance, to be able to undertake the necessary adaptation and mitigation elements that we need. but, can i ask you this? isn't this part of your problem? i'm wondering, i mean, yes, the caribbean islands suffer from the consequences of climate change. and yet, as you've said, you emit very little in terms of emissions. but those islands are very

heavily dependent on tourism. and those tourists, they have to fly there. they have to get there by ship. and you need that for the economies. but you want to combat climate change. how do you balance that picture? well, let's first begin to recognize that the only transportation is not and doesn't have to be fossil fuel generated. i would flip this over and say, why can't we begin the match to have ships that are fueled either by solar, by water, by wind, by hydrogen. that will allow you to be able to transport notjust people, but goods across the globe. the same could hold for airplanes. so it is not the case. we already have electric cars, for example, on our roads. but it's not the case that transportation can only be through fossilfuels. and so when you make the point that we have tourism as a key product and for tourism

to occur, you need to have transportation. it does not automatically mean that that transportation has to be fossilfuel driven. yes but, but it is fossil driven at the moment, you know that. at the moment. at the moment, yes. you can't suddenly make the shipping industry go fossil free or the airline industry. yeah, but that is part of the long term need that we are talking about because the investment in that technology is equivalent to the same investments we are talking about when we say let's embrace renewables, because embracing renewables is notjust only in your national space where you are seeing now factories need to be based on some form of renewables or transportation needs to be electrified. the entire integrated logistics network that facilitates trade across the entire world needs

to be able to now explore. i'm not suggesting we go 100%, but explore. how can you reduce that footprint from your decarbonisation by facilitating the very activity that you're looking to promote? and so i think these are some of the things we are talking about. yes, we need tourism, yes, we need to make it green tourism. but at the same time, we we need to make sure the bridge, the infrastructure, the integrated logistics are equally green. but i would go further, aaron. we as a nation do not have a comparative disadvantage in at least intellectual assets. and if we can reconvene those intellectual assets into an industrial chain, we can in principle create the whole development of economies that could be based upon knowledge creation

services. and those in principle could actually allow us to not move away from tourism, but widen our economic diversification, reduce that vulnerability that we are talking about, do it in a green way and help the planet at the same time and improve livelihoods within our countries. always a pleasure, my friend. thanks for your time and i'll check in with you soon. thank you, aaron. i hope you enjoyed it. don't forget, you can keep up with the latest on our global economy on the bbc website or the smartphone app. you can also, of course, know did not really originate in a sense of being caused. follow me on twitter, tweet me, i'll tweet you back. you can get me at bbc aaron. i'll see you soon.

sunny spells and scattered showers for many, accompanied by some squally winds from time to time. we have seen this massive cloud spelling m from the atlantic and the weather front is producing some rain, some of it quite heavy, it is quite a barrow —— narrow band of rain. by around six o'clock in the morning, the front will be sitting out in the north sea and leaves a trail of squally showers to follow behind. they will also be a little more sunshine around third tuesday, some of those showers quite heavy with hail, thunder, and they are going to push their way in from the west. as we go through the afternoon, we will still see some gusty winds, widely 30 to a0 miles an hour but we could still see gusts of to 77 to 50 tv to 50 miles 77 to 50 miles an 77 to 50 miles an houij to 50 miles an houfdown in up to 50 miles an hour down in the south—west. a relatively mild story because the wind

direction coming from a south—westerly so temperature is above where they should be for the time of year, highs of ii to 15 for the time of year, highs of ii to 15 degrees. the wind direction will change the direction will change from the south—westerly to a bit more of a westerly as we go into wednesday, weather fronts waiting out in the wings, but that means a slightly fresher to 77: to the 77 j to the day 77 to the day first; to the day firstfthing start to the day first thing on wednesday morning, single in one or two places figures in one or two places are not as mild as has been are not as mild as it has been of late. again, another day of sunny spells and blustery showers to look out �* on showers to look out for on wednesday, showers most frequent, perhaps, developing in the far north—west as we go through the afternoon. they should continue to be some of sunshine because spells of sunshine because we've got the westerly flow, temperatures may be down a notch for some areas but generally between ten and 15 degrees. as we move into thursday, and towards the end the week, we've got an area of the week, we've got an area of the week, we've got an area of high pressure that is going to build and centre itself across europe and that will keep these weather fronts out

in the far north—west. it still continues to dry in this —— this south—westerly flow, the milder air the country, milder air across the country, so temperatures will continue to be above the average for the time of yearand to be above the average for the time of year and the high pressure should keep things a little bit quieter and drier.

welcome to bbc news, i'm mark lobel. our top stories. on the eve of the us mid—term elections, democrats and republicans make their closing arguments to american voters. president biden has been addressing the crowds in maryland, while donald trump is in ohio. elon musk, the new owner of twitter, wades into the politicalfight, urging people to vote republican. a stark warning at the opening of the un's climate summit — humanity must co—operate or perish. the clock is ticking. we are in the fight of our lives — and we are losing. and why europe's energy crisis is forcing some communities to rethink how they will celebrate christmas.