China

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      The forgotten faces of Christmas in China | Letter

      by

      Reading “made in China” on his toys for the first time, my young Chinese nephew asked me innocently whether Santa was Chinese. Oddly, like Santa’s elves, toy assembly workers in China remain remote and faceless to most of us in the west. In Britain, most Asian migrants work backstage, too, kept in kitchens or workshops, taking the first and last train, earning low wages and hidden from our eyes. In many countries this Christmas, instead of being acknowledged for alleviating our cost of living crisis, those foreign workers will be vilified for stealing our jobs and threatened with tariffs whose consequences economists are still not certain about.It is always easier to blame people who remain invisible and voiceless. Although our world has never been so interconnected, and hence our nations so reliant on each other’s labour, Chinese society remains poorly understood. In the west, Chinese people remain enigmatic, the ever-silent and under-represented minority. When scrutinised, it is often with a political lens as well, maybe showing some cognitive bias.The question today should be how much value the free movement of products and people has brought to our nations and how to ensure that it keeps doing so in the future. As evidenced by world history, curiosity and interest towards foreign societies has often been an engine of progress. Christmas is a time to reach out and be thankful to one another: it is hoped that this spirit will continue to animate our politicians and societies in this coming year.Hugo WongAuthor of America’s Lost Chinese; London More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      China Pledges More Stimulus to Shore Up Flagging Economy

      by

      At a meeting to set the party’s economic policy agenda, China’s leadership said it would borrow more and cut interest rates in a bid to bolster growth.China’s top leaders on Thursday pledged more stimulus measures to shore up the country’s economy, building on steps they have taken in recent months to bolster growth.At an annual gathering of the Chinese Communist Party and the cabinet, led by the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, officials agreed that the government should allow a bigger budget deficit, borrow more and cut interest rates, the state television broadcaster said on Thursday.The statements suggest a willingness by Beijing to take more aggressive steps to increase spending, part of a shift that began in September to turn around years of weak consumer demand, lackluster growth and declining prices.China “will need to maintain economic growth and maintain overall stability of employment and prices next year,” the state broadcaster said at the conclusion of the two-day Central Economic Work Conference, which sets the economic agenda for the upcoming year.The Chinese government typically uses the conference to signal priorities that could translate into policy action in the next year, and to agree on budget details that will be announced at the spring legislative session.Earlier this week, the ruling Politburo gave a rare public acknowledgment that Beijing needed to take a stronger approach on the economy, when it indicated it would be more willing to lower interest rates. It was the first time that China’s leaders had eased their stance on monetary policy since the aftermath of the global financial crisis 14 years ago.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      The Guardian view on the EU-Mercosur trade deal: another farmer flashpoint approaches | Letters

      by

      Anticipating the strong protectionist winds that will blow from Donald Trump’s White House, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has been responding by making her own economic weather. Last week, Ms von der Leyen flew to Montevideo, 5,000 miles south of Washington DC, to controversially conclude negotiations in one of the biggest free trade agreements in history. Twenty-five years in the making, the Mercosur trade deal opens up trade between the EU and a Latin American bloc of partners comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.In theory, the agreement promises a more open market of 700 million people for products ranging from Argentine beef to German cars. For European manufacturers, it would eliminate tariffs on a majority of goods. As Mr Trump threatens to impose heavy tariffs on Chinese and European exports, here was evidence, asserted Ms von der Leyen, “that openness and cooperation are the true engines of progress and prosperity”.This sunny analysis does not, however, tell the whole story. From an economic perspective, the Mercosur deal makes sense for Europe, offering an alternative market in the event of US tariffs and amid the continuing Chinese slowdown. It also deepens European connections with the global south, at a time when Beijing is doing the same in systematic fashion. But the political realities are treacherous: opposing Mercosur is a common cause celebre among European farmers, who fear being undercut by Latin American producers who are not subject to the same environmental standards.At the end of a year in which farmers’ protests have made headlines across the continent, and far-right parties have exploited rural resentment to attack the EU’s green transition, this is territory to be navigated with extreme care. The deal has yet to be ratified, and EU member states are split. Germany, desperate to shore up its export industry, is strongly in favour. France, whose farmers famously carry immense political clout, is implacably opposed. Serious reservations have been expressed by the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, Italy and Ireland.Less than a month after officially beginning her second term in office, Ms von der Leyen is taking a risk by pushing ahead at pace when such divisions exist. Approval of the trade part of the overall deal may be subject to a qualified majority vote, meaning that France would not be able to exercise its veto. That would be grist to Marine Le Pen’s mill, given that, in one recent poll, almost two-thirds of French citizens said they no longer had confidence in the EU. Meanwhile, the prospect of a disunited European front – with France and Germany at loggerheads – as Mr Trump enters the White House, is not an uplifting one.In the quarter of a century since the Mercosur negotiations began, the negative impacts of globalisation on particular European regions and economic sectors have driven a backlash that has benefited the far right. Trade deals are about politics as well as economics. To avoid the fallout of this deal overshadowing the economic gains, Brussels should make it a priority that losers from it are adequately compensated. Bypassing a necessary battle for hearts and minds, as the EU confronts new geopolitical challenges without and the rise of Eurosceptic nationalism within, is not a viable option.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      Commerce Dept. Is on the Front Lines of China Policy

      by

      The department has confronted the challenge of China by restricting key exports, a policy that is likely to continue in the Trump administration.The Commerce Department has traditionally focused on promoting the interests of American business and increasing U.S. exports abroad. But in recent years, it has taken on a national security role, working to defend the country by restricting exports of America’s most powerful computer chips.While the Trump administration is likely to remake much of the Biden administration’s economic policy, with a renewed focus on broad tariffs, it is unlikely to roll back the Commerce Department’s evolution.“I’m truthfully not terribly worried that the Trump administration will undo all the great work we’ve done,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, said in an interview. “Number one, it’s at its core national security, which I hope we can all agree on. But two, it is the direction that they were going in.”It was the first Trump administration that took the initial steps toward the Commerce Department’s evolution, Ms. Raimondo noted, with its decision to put the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei on the “entity list.” Companies on the list are deemed a national security concern, and transfers of technology to them are restricted.Ms. Raimondo came into the commerce job focused on confronting the challenge of China by building upon the Trump administration’s actions.She has overseen a significant expansion of U.S. economic and technology restrictions against China. The Biden administration transformed the tough but sometimes erratic actions the Trump administration had taken toward Beijing into more sweeping and systematic limits on shipping advanced technology to China.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      A Space Lawyer on the Global Quest to Conquer the Moon

      by

      Lunar exploration in the 21st century offers a unique opportunity to unite us.This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.Turning Point: In February, Intuitive Machines became the first private, nongovernmental entity to achieve a soft landing on the moon.I believe we really can achieve peace on Earth — and even beyond our planet. Perhaps that’s naïve, but I was lucky enough to be born into a universe of rich diversity that continues to inspire me.My mother is from a town near Shanghai and my father is of Polish descent. They were married, incidentally, on the same day the Soviet Union’s Luna-2 spacecraft crash-landed on the moon, marking humanity’s first impact on another celestial body. My father joined the United States Foreign Service soon after, and I spent my childhood moving across Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, attending international schools and forging bonds with classmates from all parts of the planet. Though culturally tied to different nations, we were embraced by the commonality of our life on this beautiful Earth. It is a global bond that too many people fail to recognize.Today, as a space lawyer, I navigate the legal complexities of humanity’s journey beyond Earth, working through challenges with orbital debris, private property ownership in space, space resource utilization and more. During this pivotal moment in the history of space exploration, as humanity transitions from Earth to a multiplanetary existence, I am dedicated to ensuring that space remains a domain of peace and accessibility. It starts with our moon.Though several missions have targeted our natural satellite in this century, the pace of lunar exploration has significantly accelerated in the past decade, especially after India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft confirmed the presence of water on the lunar surface in 2008. In the years that followed, China, Russia, India and Japan have all landed or attempted to land on the moon. And in 2024, a new milestone was achieved: Intuitive Machines became the first private, nongovernmental entity to achieve a soft landing on the moon, the closest approach to the lunar south pole by humans to date. Later in the year, we witnessed China’s sixth robotic mission and the first-ever return of samples from the far side of the moon. Multiple future missions, including crewed ones by both China and the United States, are planned within this decade.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 200 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      If Trump’s tariffs start a trade war, it would be an economic disaster | Mark Weisbrot

      by

      “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word,” said Donald Trump last month. Pundits, politicians and financial markets are trying to figure out why, since he announced a week ago that he would impose tariffs on the United States’s three biggest trading partners: 25% for Mexico and Canada, and 10% for China.One theory is that tariffs can be a beautiful distraction. Trump, more than any previous US president, has fed on distractions for years, both to campaign and to govern. He can move seamlessly from one distraction to the next, like a magician preparing for the opportune moment to pull a coin from where it appears to have been hidden behind your ear.Although he still has seven weeks before he takes office, he could use a distraction that can start sooner. He has run into problems with cabinet and other appointments that require Senate confirmation. Of course he could easily find people who would do his bidding and be acceptable to a Senate with a Republican majority. But that would defeat the main purpose of nominating people who seem indefensible: to force Republican senators to display the abject subservience that Trump needs to be public, in order to ensure his unwavering dominance within his party.This is no small part of his governing strategy; it involves a big takeaway from the failures of his first term, from his point of view. The lesson is: loyalty to Trump first. Violators will be banished. And with small margins in the Senate and the House, things could begin to unravel if this core imperative goes unenforced.But the days before Trump actually takes office could also be the best time for him to use the threat of tariffs to begin bullying foreign governments for things that might benefit his allies, donors or himself. Other governments besides the three that he named are trying to figure out what they can offer Trump to avoid the economic disruption of tariffs. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, who does not see Trump as a friend, has urged the EU to negotiate with him, rather than adopt a retaliatory, eg tariff, response.Trump’s two offered pretexts for the tariff threat – migration and drugs, in this case fentanyl – are not credible. About 18% of the undocumented people encountered by border patrol over the past year have been from Venezuela and Cuba, two countries that have been devastated economically by sanctions imposed by the US government. If reducing immigration were really Trump’s concern, he would not have deployed sanctions that have driven millions of people from their homes to the US border; and he could end these sanctions in January by himself.Broad economic sanctions are a form of economic violence which targets civilians in order to achieve political ends, including regime change. US congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, made this clear in a letter that he wrote to Joe Biden asking for the sanctions on Venezuela to be dropped. The Trump sanctions in Venezuela in 2017 killed tens of thousands of civilians during the first year, and many more in the years that followed, including under Biden.As for fentanyl, about 75,000 people died from overdoses of this drug in 2023. But it’s difficult to see how Trump’s tariffs could help solve this problem. It’s a glaring example of how more than four decades of a failed “war on drugs”, based on criminalization of use and supply-side intervention, have made things worse. In this case the drug war has led to an innovation – fentanyl – that is vastly more powerful than heroin, much cheaper to produce, more addictive and easier to transport, distribute and produce.There is general agreement in the economic research on the effects of Trump’s trade and tariff wars in his first term as president, in which he placed tariffs on about $380bn of US imports. The overall impact on living standards for US workers and most Americans is found to be negative, with the cost of the tariffs being absorbed by US consumers. Employment overall did not increase, and may have fallen due to the negative impact of retaliatory tariffs.The economic research looking at the expected impacts of tariffs that Trump has talked about going forward also finds the impact on the US economy to be negative. And there is potential for much more damage if other countries respond with more retaliatory tariffs than they did in 2018-2020.Meanwhile, the productivity of Trump’s tariff offensive in generating distractions remains high. On Sunday he took a shot at the so-called Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and other economic powers: “We require a commitment from these countries,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “that they will neither create a new Brics currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or they will face 100% tariffs and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US economy.”None of these things will happen while Trump is in office. Nor will threats like this deter the majority of the world, when it is ready, from replacing a system of global governance that is overwhelmingly run by one country with help from the richest people in other rich countries. Our current system is one in which the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar-based financial system bestows upon the US government gives the president the power to destroy whole economies with the stroke of a pen.But this is a longer story; for Trump it’s just another threat and another distraction in the post-truth world that he, as much as anyone, helped create. But he will need more than distractions to take this country further down the road toward de-democratization, which is what brought to him and his party the power that they now have.

      Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is the author of Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Can Rahm Emanuel Flip the Script Again?

      by

      There’s a buzz around Rahm Emanuel — the former Bill Clinton adviser, former Illinois congressman, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, former mayor of Chicago — possibly becoming the next head of the Democratic National Committee. The progressive left despises his pragmatism and liberal centrism. He has a reputation for abrasiveness. And his current job, as ambassador to Japan, has traditionally served as a posting for high-level political has-beens like Walter Mondale and Howard Baker.But he also has a gift for constructing winning coalitions with difficult, unexpected partners.More on that in a moment. When I meet him for breakfast this week at a New York City hotel, what he wants to talk about is a looming crisis in Asia. “What started as two wars in two theaters is now one war in two separate theaters,” he says of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. “We need to ensure that it does not expand into a third theater.”How soon might that happen? I mention 2027, a year that’s often seen as China’s target date for reunification with Taiwan, if necessary by force.“I think it’s actually 2025,” he answers.What Emanuel has in mind are Asia’s other flashpoints, including along the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, where Russia is “poking” Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, “to do something” and where South Korea’s president briefly declared martial law, and also in the South China Sea, where China and the Philippines are coming to blows over Beijing’s illegal maritime claims. Unlike with Taipei, to which America’s obligations are deliberately ambiguous, with Manila and Seoul our defense commitments are ironclad.That could mean war for the United States on multiple unexpected fronts. Emanuel’s tenure as ambassador was distinguished by his role in engineering two historic rapprochements — last year between Japan and South Korea and this year between Japan and the Philippines — that, along with the AUKUS defense pact with Britain and Australia, form part of a broad diplomatic effort by the Biden administration to contain China.The Chinese, Emanuel says, “have a theory of the case in the Indo-Pacific. We have a theory of the case. Their attempt is to isolate Australia, isolate the Philippines and put all the pressure on that country,” often through abusive trade practices. “Our job is to flip the script and isolate China through their actions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      U.S. Condemns China’s Harsh Sentence for a Prominent Journalist

      by

      The sentencing of Dong Yuyu, a former Harvard Nieman fellow, signals that officials consider some exchanges between Chinese citizens and foreigners to be espionage.The State Department has denounced a Chinese court’s sentencing of a prominent journalist, Dong Yuyu, to seven years in prison and said it stood with his family in calling for his “immediate and unconditional release.”A court in Beijing announced the sentence on Friday for his conviction on charges of espionage. Mr. Dong, 62, a former Harvard Nieman fellow, has been held since February 2022, when officers from the Ministry of State Security, China’s main intelligence agency, detained him and a Japanese diplomat while they ate lunch in a restaurant.The officers released the diplomat after an interrogation, but prosecutors put Mr. Dong on trial behind closed doors in July 2023. He is the most prominent journalist imprisoned in mainland China.Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, said in a statement on Friday that Mr. Dong’s “arrest and today’s sentencing highlight the P.R.C.’s failure to live up to its commitments under international law and its own constitutional guarantees to all its citizens.” He used the initials of the formal name of the country, the People’s Republic of China.“We celebrate Dong’s work as a veteran journalist and editor, as well as his contributions to U.S.-P.R.C. people-to-people ties, including as a Harvard University Nieman fellow,” Mr. Miller added. “We stand by Dong and his family and call for his immediate and unconditional release.”R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. ambassador to China and a former Harvard professor, also issued a statement of condemnation, calling the sentencing “unjust.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More