View this email in your browser Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good   July 23, 2019 Here Comes Boris With Boris Johnson on his way to becoming the UK's next prime minister, a panel of Guardian analysts seems united in the opinion that Johnson offers little more than posturing and won't be able to deliver on his promises; he's now being assigned that task of cleaning up his "own Brexit mess," Gary Younge writes. They're less unanimous on whether Johnson should look past Brexit: Martha Gill urges him to ignore calls for a broader platform, likening Brexit to the shark in Jaws, while Isabel Hardman suggests Johnson offer up some needed domestic reforms, as he may not have time to do so later. How Hong Kong Got Here In a National Interest essay, Doug Bandow traces the history of how Hong Kong reached its present moment of instability. Most notably, he sees its roots in the 2014 pro-democratic Umbrella Revolution protesters "(m)isjudging their own leverage," rather than pursuing a cautious strategy more likely to win concessions from Beijing. Beijing showed some restraint then, but an eventual encroachment on Hong Kong's independence was inevitable; now that protesters have grown even more outspoken in their demands for democratic governance, the possibility of a serious crackdown by China has only grown more likely. Along with this analysis, Bandow offers an ominous prediction: "Hong Kong's unique status looks likely to disappear much sooner than the 2047 promised by the Deng government." Germany's Hollowed Center Three decades after unification, Germany finds itself suffering the effects of a long political slide, Adam Tooze writes in a London Review of Books essay, tracing the collapse of Germany's traditional socialist left and the rise of its hard-right party, the AfD. After the Berlin Wall fell, Germany's left failed to make inroads in the post-communist East (against expectations), he writes; thanks to deindustrialization and austerity-driven reforms to Germany's welfare state, the East has since become a bastion of far-right support. The migration crisis (and an uncertain response) didn't help, and as the traditional left has fallen, the further-left Greens have also benefited. With the fringes rising, Germany faces a political reality in which Chancellor Angela Merkel's centrist government is a "political zombie, a relic of a bygone age," Tooze writes. State Power Returns For too long, multinational corporations have gotten away with legal tax dodges—but no more, Martin Sandbu writes for the Financial Times. Now that France has enacted a tax on digital services within its borders, aimed at companies such as Google and Facebook—a move Lilian V. Faulhaber predicts, in a New York Times op-ed, will spark a wider trend—Sandbu hails this as a reassertion of state power, in an era when governments have grown complacent. That's a good thing, he argues, because the world faces big challenges, and not just from tech giants or multinationals working around tax regimes. "A more political use of state power may be just what the liberal order needs," Sandbu writes. To Save Its Economy, China Must Kill Its 'Zombies' China's lagging growth has been a major headwind for the global economy; its rate of GDP increase reached its lowest point in nearly 30 years last quarter, posing a test of China's domestic economic strength amid its trade war with the US, as The Economist surmised. In an editorial, the South China Morning Post calls out as part of the problem "zombie" firms—inefficient, underperforming companies that enjoy connections to local government, survive by devouring state credit, and gum up the economic works. The paper recommends cutting them off, sacrificing some short-term pain in exchange for long-term economic health. "If the government can drive a stake through the heart of the zombie sector, it will go a long way towards helping China solve the local debt problem and deepen market reform," it writes. Share Tweet Fwd unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences  Copyright © 2019 Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company., All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to CNN newsletters. Our mailing address is: Cable News Network, Inc. A WarnerMedia Company. One CNN Center Atlanta, GA 30303 Add us to your address book What did you like about today's Global Briefing? What did we miss? Let us know what you think: GlobalBriefing@cnn.com Sign up to get updates on your favorite CNN Original Series, special CNN news coverage and other newsletters.​   Sign Up for Fareed's Global Briefing