 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
"Last year, the Guardian shed light on an uncomfortable—and unfortunate—truth about much of the shrimp sold in North America, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere around the world. A six-month long investigation revealed that torture, wage-theft, beatings, and various other illegal practices were a reality in the production chain of the world's largest supplier. • 'If you buy prawns or shrimp from Thailand, you will be buying the produce of slave labor,' Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International, told the Guardian at the time. And many countries do, including the United States, which imports about half of the shrimp Thailand harvests."
The United States has raised its military aid to the Philippines this year to $79 million, the U.S. ambassador said on Wednesday, as tension rises in the region over China's new assertiveness in the South China Sea.
Since 2002, the United States has provided the Philippines with nearly $500 million in military assistance as well as various types of military equipment.
"We have upped our foreign military funding for the Philippines," Ambassador Philip Goldberg told ANC television, without giving a percentage. "It will be somewhere in the range of $79 million this year. It's increasing and what has been proposed is something called a maritime security initiative in the region."
China has overlapping claims with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei in the South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year.
"It seems like a distant memory now, but just one month ago, the international community was lauding China for stepping up its commitment to address climate change by pledging to initiate a cap-and-trade system for CO2 by 2017 and contributing $3.1 billion to a fund to help poor countries combat climate change. Now, however, the talk is all about the release of a new set of game-changing Chinese statistics on coal consumption. A New York Times headline blared: 'China burns much more coal than reported, complicating climate talks.' And the Guardian reported: 'China underreporting coal consumption by up to 17%, data suggests.'" "Once you head down the rabbit hole of what is fact in China and what is fiction, it is very difficult to crawl back out again. If one is looking for a light at the end of the tunnel, however, let me suggest two: first, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) had already released statistics on Chinese coal consumption in September that suggested that China had underreported its coal consumption by 14% during 2000-2013. It also, however, suggested that coal consumption was nearly flat in 2014. If the EIA is right on that score, then there may be some merit to all the reporting that China is turning the corner on its coal consumption, and the world could see a plateau in CO2 emissions (albeit at a much higher level) earlier than 2030. Second, the mere fact that the Chinese government actually reported the change in coal consumption is a positive. The timing of Beijing’s announcement, right before the Paris climate talks, may be unfortunate. However, greater transparency from a government that thrives on opacity is always welcome."
"HONG KONG — One Chinese technology company receives crucial technical guidance from a former People’s Liberation Army rear admiral. Another company developed the electronics on China’s first atomic bomb. A third sells technology to China’s air-to-air missile research academy. • Their ties to the Chinese military run deep, and they all have something else in common: Each Chinese company counts one of America’s tech giants — IBM, Cisco Systems or Microsoft — as a partner. • Such links, which are generally not well publicized, are now at the center of a debate among some in the American defense community, including former United States military officials, analysts and others. While the cross-border partnerships, under which American tech companies share, license or jointly develop advanced technologies with Chinese counterparts, are a growth area for business, security experts are increasingly questioning whether the deals harm United States national security. • While the capabilities shared in the partnerships are commercial in nature, such technologies have also become more critical to defense. That is spurring concerns that widespread cooperation with Chinese companies could quickly increase China’s fundamental technological capabilities in a way that could easily help military research and operations."
"Angela Merkel has expressed concern about a territorial dispute between the Chinese and US navies in the South China Sea, and suggested China go to international courts to resolve the row. • On a two-day visit to China, the German chancellor said it was essential that sea trade routes remained open despite the friction, which flared up after a US warship challenged China’s territorial claims in the disputed waters this week. • 'The territorial dispute in the South China Sea is a serious conflict. I am always a bit surprised why in this case multinational courts should not be an option for a solution,' said Merkel, in Beijing. 'We wish that the sea trade routes stay free and safe, because they are important for all.' • Beijing rebuked Washington for sending a guided-missile destroyer within 12 nautical miles of one of China’s manmade islands in the Spratly archipelago on Tuesday, saying it had tracked and warned the USS Lassen and called in the US ambassador to protest. • Merkel and Li Keqiang, the Chinese premier, earlier addressed the situation in Syria and agreed there must be a political solution to the crisis there."
"Last week, the US drew a line in South China Sea, containing China’s territorial ambitions, for now. In spite of strong words, China doesn’t seem to be prepared to challenge the US either militarily or diplomatically. • But things may change in the future. On the diplomatic front, at least. • Loaded with foreign reserves earned by its export-led industrialization, China has been expanding its influence around the globe, one continent, and one country at a time. • First came the acquisition of Africa, a supplier of resources for China’s factories. For decades, the continent remained on the sidelines of the global economy, and that made it an easy target. • Now, China is reaching for Europe and Asia, by gaining influence on America’s oldest European ally, Great Britain. • That’s an easy target, too. • Floundering in the swamp of stagnation under the shadow of America, EU’s capricious bride needs China’s investments and trade links to regain a piece of its glory. And China needs Britain’s support to align European countries behind its ambitious plans for Asia, like the creation of Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and territorial designs on its neighbors. And much more: a foothold in EU."
"Britain’s increasingly warm relationship with China is getting radioactive.On Wednesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister David Cameron shook hands on a $9 billion Chinese investment to help build the first nuclear power plant in the U.K. in a generation. It was the shiny centerpiece of a $46 billion investment package the two countries agreed to during Xi’s four-day, red-carpet visit to his new “best partner in the West.” • Britain hopes to ingratiate itself with the world’s second-largest economy, while China hopes the deals, especially the massive investment in the controversial and hugely expensive Hinkley Point nuclear power station, will serve as a bridgehead for more multibillion-dollar nuclear deals. • The two countries are talking about Chinese investment in two additional nuclear plants, including one that will use Chinese-built reactors.The energy-sector investments are part of a broader British shift toward China, led by George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, Britain’s top Treasury official. He touted London as Beijing’s potential “best partner” on a glad-handing trip through China last month. And Xi’s visit to London comes after months of explicit British government support for a growing Chinese economic role in the world, from joining the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, to supporting Beijing’s bid to transform the renminbi into a global reserve currency."
"BEIJING (AP) — A top Chinese general said Saturday that China's newly created islands in the disputed South China Sea are intended mainly to aid shipping and dismissed concerns that Beijing is seeking to strengthen its control over the strategically vital region. • General Fan Changlong's remarks came as expectations grow that the U.S. might directly challenge Chinese claims in the South China Sea by sailing a Navy ship inside the 12-nautical mile (21-kilometer) territorial limit surrounding one of the man-made islands. • Concerns have been growing over the rapid appearance of islands created by piling sand atop reefs and atolls controlled by China, which is now adding, harbors, air strips and large buildings. The U.S. and others have called on Beijing to halt those projects, saying they are destabilizing an increasingly militarized region. • Fan said concerns that the island construction could affect freedom of navigation were unfounded."
Stephen S Roach warns that the US-China relationship is at risk of rupture, with the summit between Obama and Xi doing little to dispel this possibility.
"Thousands of troops stood arrayed at perfect, hushed attention around Tiananmen Square. Hundreds of Communist Party elders, foreign dignitaries and diplomats looked on. It was then, on live television, that President Xi Jinping stepped forward to announce that the Chinese military, on proud display to mark 70 years since the end of World War II, would lose more than a 10th of its personnel. • 'War is the sword of Damocles that still hangs over mankind,' Mr. Xi said in a speech at the start of a vast military parade on Thursday in central Beijing. Mr. Xi indicated that he wanted to show other countries — many of them wary of China’s growing military strength — that they had nothing to fear from the procession of tanks and missiles that rumbled down Chang’an Avenue while fighter jets roared overhead. • But the highly public manner of Mr. Xi’s announcement that 300,000 military personnel would be demobilized, China’s largest troop reduction in nearly two decades, carried another implicit message. He was demonstrating his grip on the military and on the party, amid economic squalls and a grinding anticorruption campaign that have left some wondering whether he and his agenda of change — including in the People’s Liberation Army — were faltering, several experts said."
"ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Without ever quite saying so explicitly, President Obama used his four-day trip to Africa to suggest that the United States offers an alternative to China’s aggressive courtship of the continent. • At a time when China has surpassed the United States as a trading partner and left its mark throughout Africa, Mr. Obama essentially made the argument that Washington offers a better, more empowering vision for Africa’s future. • Whether he succeeded in this mission remained to be seen. But at all of his stops, he laid out the case that Africa should be wary of China’s appetite for oil for its own use and instead embrace an American relationship that seeks to foster economic growth, democracy, health care, education and electrification. • 'The United States isn’t the only country that sees your growth as an opportunity, and that is a good thing,' Mr. Obama told African leaders in a speech here in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, before returning to Washington. He urged Africans to do business with everyone. • 'But economic relationships can’t simply be about building countries’ infrastructure with foreign labor or extracting Africa’s natural resources,' he said. 'Real economic partnerships have to be a good deal for Africa. They have to create jobs and capacity for Africans.”"
"China is pushing to rewrite the rules of the global Internet, aiming to control online discourse and reduce U.S. influence." "SHANGHAI—As social media helped topple regimes in the Middle East and northern Africa, a senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army publicly warned that an Internet dominated by the U.S. threatened to overthrow China’s Communist Party. • Ye Zheng and a Chinese researcher, writing in the state-run China Youth Daily, said the Internet represented a new form of global control, and the U.S. was a “shadow” present during some of those popular uprisings. Beijing had better pay attention. • Four years after they sounded that alarm, China is paying a lot of attention. Its government is pushing to rewrite the rules of the global Internet, aiming to draw the world’s largest group of Internet users away from an interconnected global commons and to increasingly run parts of the Internet on China’s terms."
"DUNHUANG, China — An oil-field worker in this Gobi Desert town posted poetry online memorializing the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. An artist in Shanghai uploaded satirical photographs of his wincing visage superimposed on a portrait of the Chinese president. A civil rights lawyer in Beijing wrote microblog posts criticizing the Communist Party’s handling of ethnic tensions. • In each case, the men were detained under a broad new interpretation of an established law that the Chinese authorities are using to carry out the biggest crackdown on Internet speech in many years. • Artists, essayists, lawyers, bloggers and others deemed to be online troublemakers have been hauled into police stations and investigated or imprisoned for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a charge that was once confined to physical activities like handing out fliers or organizing protests. • The increasing use of that law to police online speech, which appears to have become more common in recent months, is a piece of President Xi Jinping’s strategy to deploy the legal code to silence dissent and clamp down on civil society."
|
"Given these trends, it will not be a surprise to find other up and coming space powers reconfiguring their institutional military missions. What would be a surprise with all this is if peace were still to prevail in the heavens." "Whether the explicit recognition of the counterspace race by all governments will make it possible for them to seek a way out of it remains to be seen. For every space power involved, the counterspace race is serious, growing, foreign, and a threat. And so also an opportunity for forging a new order in the heavens."
To many, China’s announcement of better-than-expected 6.9% GDP growth for the third quarter confirmed a growing conviction. No, not that China’s economy was hardier than it seemed. Rather, that the Chinese government’s GDP data are more or less made up.
Of all of China’s official statistics, GDP is probably among best-known for being, shall we say, internally consistent. But the history of China’s lower-profile economic data is littered with disappearing data, mixed-up methodologies, and freak aberrations. Here’s a roundup of the most notorious examples:"
"China's naval commander last week told his U.S. counterpart that a minor incident could spark war in the South China Sea if the United States did not stop its 'provocative acts' in the disputed waterway. • The USS Lassen's patrol was the most significant U.S. challenge yet to the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit China claims around artificial islands it has built in the Spratly Islands archipelago. • China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of world trade transits every year. Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan all have rival claims. • [U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben] Rhodes said the goal in the dispute was to come to a diplomatic framework to resolve these issues."
‘We would urge the US not to continue down the wrong path,’ a Defense Ministry spokesman says, after USS Lassen passed near a manmade Chinese island." "China's military will take 'all necessary' measures in response to any future US navy incursions into what it considers its territorial waters around islands in the South China Sea, a Defense Ministry spokesman said Thursday. • The statement by colonel Yang Yujun came hours before naval senior US and Chinese were due to hold talks on the manouvres which have heightened tensions between Beijing and Washington. • China strenuously protested on Tuesday when the USS Lassen passed within a 12-nautical-mile (22km) limit around a manmade Chinese island in the South China Sea. Yang offered no details on how Beijing might respond differently in the future. • 'We would urge the US not to continue down the wrong path. But if the US side does continue, we will take all necessary measures according to the need,' Yang said. China’s resolve to safeguard its national sovereignty and security interests is 'rock-solid', he added. • His comments came hours before the US chief of naval operations and his Chinese counterpart were due to hold an hour-long video teleconference, a US official said."
"BEIJING (Reuters) - China and Germany signed a deal on Thursday that will see Chinese airlines buy 130 jets manufactured by Airbus Group SE (AIR.PA), sending shares in the European planemaker higher. • The order, valued at $17 billion, was announced after Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel met China's Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing. • Shares in Airbus, the world's second-largest aerospace company behind Boeing Co (BA.N), were up 2 percent at 60.87 euros by 0845 GMT. • Airbus is battling its U.S. rival for dominance of the Chinese market, which Boeing estimates is worth $1 trillion over the next two decades. • Air China Ltd (0753.HK) and other Chinese carriers are expanding fleets as the number of passengers traveling within China and overseas is set to triple over the next two decades."
"BEIJING — China on Tuesday accused the United States of committing a 'deliberate provocation' by sending a Navy destroyer into waters claimed by Beijing, adding that such actions would force China to speed up its building program in the South China Sea. • 'China will firmly react to this deliberate provocation,' Lu Kang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a regularly scheduled news conference. He added, 'China will not condone any action that undermines China’s security.' The American ambassador, Max Baucus, was called to the Foreign Ministry on Tuesday evening and told by the deputy foreign minister, Zhang Yesui, that the United States should stop 'threatening Chinese sovereignty and security interests,' the national broadcaster CCTV said. Mr. Zhang delivered a 'solemn representation and strong protest,' CCTV said."
"LONDON — The visit to Britain by President Xi Jinping of China is underscoring how European nations are de-emphasizing human rights and security concerns as they compete to benefit from China’s growing economic might. • Prime Minister David Cameron and his chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, have muted public criticism of Chinese political, military and human rights behavior since 2012, and during Mr. Xi’s visit here over the past several days, they have highlighted how increased trade and investment can create more British jobs. • But the shifting European calculations about the allure of doing business with China are hardly limited to Britain, and extend to Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse, among other countries. Berlin, too, has been assiduous in its courtship of Beijing and has been hardly strident in its comments on China’s domestic abuses of human rights or its growing military might in Asia."
"It is appropriate then that the first English edition of Colonel Liu’s “The China Dream” was released in May by CN Times Books, a publishing company based in New York that was founded by a former employee of the Beijing municipal propaganda bureau. The book cover has a line from Henry A. Kissinger’s “On China,” which has a section referring to Colonel Liu’s book: 'In Liu’s view, no matter how much China commits itself to a ‘peaceful rise,’ conflict is inherent in U.S.-China relations.' • SPEAKING to a reporter in a restaurant in central Beijing one afternoon, Colonel Liu laid out his vision of the biggest geopolitical rivalry of this century. • 'There are flames around Asia, and every place could be a battlefield in the future,' he said. “That’s all caused by the invisible hand of the United States. Without the black hand of the U.S., Asia would be more peaceful and stable.” • 'Washington’s policy in Asia is a ‘crab’ policy,' he added. 'There’s a big bamboo cage, and the U.S. wants all the countries to bite each other like crabs inside the cage.' • In the colonel’s eyes, China finally has a leader who is bold enough to resist the United States. • 'China was once called the sleeping lion in the East, but now we have been awakened, and Xi Jinping is the leading lion of the lion packs, who dare to fight anytime,' the colonel said. • 'Since President Xi took power, he has put in place stricter rules for the military,' he added. 'Now, soldiers are training every day and thinking about nothing but war. Some of my colleagues, including generals and colonels, used to be overweight and pale, but now they have become tan and slimmer after mandatory training.'"
Each picture and description is a terse domestic tragedy. * Zhang Xiaofang was found as an infant more than seven years ago in a long-distance bus station in southern China, wearing a white top and yellow pants. She has a round face. * Xu Bowen, now about 8, has an aquiline nose and heavy earlobes. He was rescued over six years ago after he was abandoned at a hospital in Dongguan, an industrial city in southern China, and then snatched from there. * Dang Jinzhi was found in a village in the central province of Henan in May 2013. She has a round, pale face and was wearing a red top when she was rescued around age 1. * These children are among the 284 shown on a new Chinese government website intended to increase their chances of being reunited with their biological parents after they were taken and sold to other families, and then rescued by the police. Each picture is accompanied by information such as where the children were found, their physical characteristics and what they were wearing when rescued."
"For the past couple of years, while everyone has been watching Vladimir Putin’s moves in Eastern Europe, China has been making increasing economic inroads on Russia's periphery." • "Beijing has multiple goals in this massive influx of investment. One is the extension of its New Silk Road economic belt to Europe, which is to facilitate the movement of Chinese exports to Europe. Another is to gain access to Western European technology and R & D through the EU’s back door, Central and Eastern Europe. China is also interested in energy resources, as well as in agricultural resources, given China’s lack of arable land. And given how deeply China is tied to the United States economy, and the sense of vulnerability this creates in Beijing, China sees its growing economic ties with Europe as a hedge against its over-dependence on Washington – hence the large purchases of European sovereign debt to balance Beijing’s massive holdings of US debt. • Chinese investment pledges are steadily transforming the economics and trade flows of the region, with China becoming an increasingly important trade partner. The EU has been China’s largest trade partner for some time. Research by both Chinese and American institutions estimate that investments from China globally will be somewhere between $1 and $2 trillion over the next decade (assuming that China does not experience a particularly hard landing in the meantime and remains capable of sustaining the level of investment it envisions). That number dwarfs investments from the US, Europe, or Western-led multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank and the IMF. China has already spent more than $2 billion in the small country of Serbia alone, mostly in infrastructure and energy.
"BEIJING (Reuters) - China said it conducted air and sea drills in the South China Sea on Tuesday as it stakes an increasingly assertive claim to virtually the whole sea despite rival claims by neighbors. • The live-ammunition drills involved more than 100 ships, dozens of aircraft, information warfare units as well as the nuclear force, the state-backed China Military Online said in a report posted on the defense ministry's website. • It did not specify where exactly the exercises took place. • China claims most of the potentially energy-rich South China Sea, through which $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year, and rejects the rival claims of Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Taiwan."
"The boxing drama “Southpaw” released over the weekend has a seemingly unlikely partner in its corner: Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda Corp. • Wanda financed the approximately $30 million production budget for the Jake Gyllenhaal movie. It was produced and is being released by Weinstein Co., which is paying for about $35 million of marketing expenses. The two companies will split any profits. • 'They were on the set and involved in production, postproduction, marketing, everything,' said Weinstein President David Glasser. 'They wanted to learn how we do what we do.'”
|
