Moscow’s strongman this week welcomed Mr Xi to the Kremlin for a three-day state visit to sign new trade deals and investment promises. After the Chinese President touched down in Russia on Wednesday, Mr Putin led him on a tour of Moscow Zoo, where two pandas loaned to Russia by the Chinese for a 15 year project are staying. The offer of Ru Yi, a male, and Ding Ding, a female, who will live at the zoo with the aim of reproducing, was a “gesture of particular respect and trust in Russia,” Mr Putin said.
But while it make take some time for the animals’ partnership to bear fruit - pandas are known to be reluctant breeders - the two leaders’ fellowship has hit “an unprecedented high level”.
Beijing is embroiled in a bitter trade war with Washington while Moscow is suffering the consequences of sanctions imposed by the West over the Ukraine conflict.
As their talks kicked off, Mr Putin
told Mr Xi : “Our strategic partnership, we believe, has reached an
unprecedented high level.
Mr Trump's hard stance against Russia and China has brought the two countries closer together (Image: GETTY)
Mr. Putin led Mr Xi on a tour of Moscow Zoo to see the two pandas (Image: GETTY)
“We are living in the best of days, in terms of our country’s relations… Our interests are very similar.”
The
fond words came at the start of the trip which will see the Chinese
leader attend Russia’s flagship economic forum in St Petersburg later
this week.
Mr Putin and Mr Xi vowed to deepen military technical
cooperation at the talks in Moscow, as businesses from both nations
signed off deals.
In a statement published by the Kremlin, Mr Xi
said: “Over the past six years we have met almost 30 times … Putin is my
best friend and a good colleague.”
The two pandas will stay in Moscow for 15 years (Image: GETTY)
The
two men displayed a relaxed demeanour as they toured the zoo to begin
the visit hailed as a “milestone” for the two countries’ alliance.
Last
week, China’s deputy foreign minister, Zhang Hanhui, said: “The close
and effective co-ordination of Russia and China on international
affairs… has been an anchor and stabilising force amid rapid changes in
the international situation.”
Beijing is Moscow’s top trading partner while Moscow is Beijing’s tenth-largest trading partner.
Later
this year, the Power of Siberia pipeline connecting Russia to China is
due to be complete, which is reportedly valued at £315bn ($400bn)
China on June 2 issued a white paper titled "China's Position on the
China-US Economic and Trade Consultations," triggering a heated debate
throughout international media and foreign entrepreneurs
Ren
Zhengfei, founder and chief executive officer of Huawei Technologies
Co., speaks during an interview at the company's headquarters in
Shenzhen, China, on Tuesday, Jan. 15, 2019. Ren, the billionaire telecom
mogul, broke a years-long silence as his technology empire faces its
biggest crisis over three decades of existence. Photographer: Qilai
Shen/Bloomberg
https://youtu.be/YNkfddyDEkk
https://youtu.be/TUqg4yrs-Po
Ren Zhengfei, the billionaire founder of Huawei Technologies, broke
years of silence on Tuesday as his business empire faces its biggest
crisis in more than three decades amid continued pressure from the US
that its networking gear may pose a security threat.
The telecoms mogul called Donald Trump “a great president” and said he
would take a wait-and-see approach to whether the US leader will
intervene in the case of his eldest daughter and Huawei finance chief Meng Wanzhou.
Meng is in Canada facing extradition to the US, where authorities have accused her of fraudulently representing Huawei
to evade US sanctions on Iran. She has denied any wrongdoing and said
that she will contest the allegations if surrendered to the US.
The emergence of the reclusive Ren, who last
spoke with foreign media in 2015, underscores the depth of the attacks
on Huawei, the largest symbol of China’s growing technological might.
“I love my country, I support the Communist
Party. But I will not do anything to harm the world,” the 74-year-old
Ren told a select round table briefing, only his third formal chat with
foreign reporters. “I don’t see a close connection between my personal
political beliefs and the businesses of Huawei.”
The US has banned government use of Huawei’s
technology products and services because of security concerns. US
security experts have warned of a range of potential security risks,
including but not limited to the capacity to control telecommunications
infrastructure and even conduct undetected espionage. It has pressed its
allies to follow suit.
Huawei has consistently denied any connections
with the military, saying that it is a private company part-owned by its
employees and that governments need to ensure there is an objective
basis for choosing technology vendors.
“Ren Zhengfei doesn’t give many
interviews, but his decision to speak publicly seems like a smart move,”
said Brock Silvers, Shanghai-based managing director of Kaiyuan
Capital. “The
threat to Huawei’s European business is real and it is understandably
responding to it. Ren’s public comments today show how seriously he
views the situation.”
Ren, who joined the Communist Party after
leaving the People’s Liberation Army, stressed the potential for
cooperation with the US. He played down Huawei’s role in current trade
tensions between Washington and Beijing, which have rattled investors
and corporations worldwide.
“Huawei is only a sesame seed in the trade
conflict between China and the US,” Ren said from the company’s newest
campus in the industrial city of Dongguan.
“Trump is a great president. He dares to
massively cut tax, which will benefit the business. But you have to
treat well the companies and countries so that they will be willing to
invest in the US and the government will be able to collect enough tax.”
Meanwhile, China's Foreign Ministry on Tuesday
urged Canada to release Meng immediately, saying the case was an abuse
of legal procedure. Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the comment
at a daily news briefing in Beijing.
Meng was released on bail five weeks ago and is
living under restrictions in her multimillion-dollar Vancouver home
while awaiting extradition proceedings.
Ren expressed hope that Huawei could find a way forward with the US.
“Huawei is not a public company, we don’t need a
beautiful earnings report,” Ren said. “If they don’t want Huawei to be
in some markets, we can scale down a bit. As long as we can survive and
feed our employees, there’s a future for us.”
Ren is a legendary figure in China’s business
world and moves in the highest government circles. The self-made
billionaire is the son of schoolteachers and grew up in a mountainous
town in China’s poorest province, Guizhou.
A survivor of China's great famine between 1958
and 1961, Ren graduated from the Chongqing Institute of Civil
Engineering and Architecture. He worked in the civil engineering
industry until 1974 when he joined the PLA as an engineer – a connection
that still provokes questions in the West about Huawei’s ties to the
Chinese army and government.
Professor Dr. Wang
Former Executive of Halliburton
DID HUAWEI VIOLATE IRAN SANCTIONS?
No, they didn’t.
CFO Meng was arrested supposedly for “violating Iran sanction”. This has to be the most grotesque distortion of justice since the US was the country who unilaterally pulled out IN VIOLATION of an agreement they had signed with multiple nations earlier !!! In other words, the guy who broke a solemn promise made, violated the agreement, then made sanction an American domestic law is now force feeding this law arbitrarily on the rest of the world by arresting someone who refuses to violate the agreement ! Is this making any sense to anybody?
Huawei created a subsidiary to do business with Iran, and the CFO is being charged with lying about the relationship between Huawei and the subsidiary.
This seems totally ridiculous to me since when I worked at Halliburton, we did EXACTLY the same thing ! Not only was our CEO never arrested, he was invited to join the government & became Vice President Dick Cheney !!!!!!!
The moral of this story is for normal businesses to be extremely vigilant & recognise the true faces of America & Saudi! One tosses you in jail for breaking twisted laws they make up as they go along & the other goes after you with a bone saw. Both are gangsters, far worse than the Mafia, because the Mafia at least have the decency to commit crimes secretively, while the thugs in American & Saudi governments commit their crimes blatantly in the open, with complete disregard to the laws & sovereignty of another country, bullying their way through, trying to justify their actions by smearing the victims... then run publicity campaigns to sway public opinions while accusing others of crimes against human rights.. ??!!
I am sure there are nice people in USA & in Saudi & i don’t want to generalise, but i have seen time & again in the States that if ever their oversized egos feel threatened, they can turn into totally evil, nefarious subhumans capable of the most despicable deeds.
The arrest of Meng is a case in point.
I went to the States starry eyed with high hopes & expectations, ready to learn a democratic system far superior than ours. Well, after my Ph.D and a few working years, I stand corrected.
Life in the States has taught me to be proud of my people and my country. Grass is definitely NOT greener on the other side. America is very strong in “hypes”, they talk big but deliver little. China does the opposite. American government spends on military, lives in “now”, supports the rich, & works for re-election. The Chinese government spends on infrastructure, works for the people, eradicated poverty & follows 5-30 year plans. These are facts, not propaganda, not campaign promises.
I can’t tell you how happy I am to be home again. Not only is the food much better, more importantly, I can finally stop worrying myself sick... about my elderly mom getting mucked, my attractive wife getting raped...my children getting bullied, drugged or shot in schools...Having to live in constant fear everyday is the ultimate violation of my human rights.
Huawei clash shows deeper US-China battle for global influence as power coming from high-tech sector
Bail hearings proceeded this week after Meng
Wanzhou(pic), the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co, was
arrested in Canada on Dec 1 because of alleged violations of US
sanctions against Iran. The case threatens to derail a trade truce
struck the same day between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
HONG KONG: The Trump administration has insisted the arrest of a top Huawei executive has nothing to do with trade talks. In Beijing, it’s just the latest US move to contain China’s rise as a global power.
Bail hearings proceeded this week after Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies Co, was arrested in Canada on Dec 1 because of alleged violations of US sanctions against Iran. The case threatens to derail a trade truce struck the same day between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
Even if the two leaders manage to strike a broader deal, the arrest shows that the US-China conflict goes far beyond trade. The world’s biggest economies are now engaged in a battle for global influence that will ultimately determine whether the US remains the globe’s predominant superpower, or China rises as a viable counterweight.
“The sentiment in Washington now is not just a Trumpian mercantilism – the desire to bring back factory jobs to Wisconsin or wherever,” said Nick Bisley, a professor of international relations at La Trobe University in Melbourne who has written books on great-power politics. “It is a desire to significantly cut ties with China because of that larger perception it presents a strategic risk.”
A bipartisan consensus has emerged in Washington that China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation hollowed out US manufacturing and allowed it to grow rich. That increased economic power is now at a point where it risks eroding key American military advantages around the globe.
China insists it plays by the rules, and doesn’t challenge US dominance. Even so, three areas in particular worry American strategic planners: Technology, the dollar and the ability to project military power overseas.
A year ago, the White House identified China’s growing technological prowess as a threat to US economic and military might. American companies have long argued that China forces them to transfer intellectual property and sometimes steals trade secrets – all of which Beijing denies.
In justifying tariffs, Trump’s team has cited Beijing’s “Made in China 2025” strategy to become a global leader in state-of-the-art technologies from aerospace to robotics. So far, China has resisted those demands, arguing that doing so would crush its economic potential.
Huawei in particular epitomises the threat. Earlier this year, Trump blocked Broadcom Inc’s US$117bil hostile takeover bid for Qualcomm Inc over concerns that Huawei would end up dominating the market for computer chips and wireless technologies.
The fear is that wireless carriers may be forced to turn to Huawei or other Chinese companies for 5G technology, potentially giving Beijing access to critical communications. Those concerns have prompted the US to ban Huawei’s products for government procurement, and Australia, Japan and New Zealand have reportedly followed.
China has fought back, with foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang saying this week that Huawei didn’t “force any enterprise to install forced backdoors.”
“The competition is really focused in the areas where future strategic and economic dominance come from,” said Michael Shoebridge, director of the defense and strategy programme at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
“The Huawei arrest is right in the middle of this because both America and China see their future global power as coming from the high-tech sector.”
The dominance of the dollar has allowed the US to effectively control the world’s financial system, underpinning its superpower status. Yet Trump’s increased use of sanctions to assert its foreign-policy goals has prompted a wide range of nations – from China to Russia to the European Union – to look for an alternative.
The Trump administration added nearly 1,000 entities and individuals to its sanctions list in its first year, almost 30% more than the Obama administration’s last year in office, according to law firm Gibson Dunn. The complete list now runs to more than 1,200 pages.
Sanctions are a key tool for the US to subdue potential adversaries like North Korea, but they also can affect friends and allies. The EU, which objected to reimposing sanctions on Iran, this month unveiled plans to mitigate the so-called “exorbitant privilege” of the dollar.
During a visit to China last month, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said the two nations were looking at ways to boost the use of their currencies through allowing the use of China’s UnionPay credit card in Russia and Russia’s Mir card in China. “No one currency should dominate the market,” he said.
“We are potentially at the beginning of a systemic shift that may take some time to play out,” said Gregory Chin, associate professor at York University in Toronto, and a political economy specialist. “The political will is building and coalescing.” — Bloomberg
'Leadership has always been about generosity to those who are less
well endowed and fortunate than you are. Often, it is not generosity of
kind, because that would be buying of votes, but generosity of spirit.' - Tan Sri Andrew Sheng
WHY is it that in the last days of September, 10 years after the failure of Lehman Brothers, the world feels as if it is a dangerous place?
The
filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by financial services firm
Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, remains the largest bankruptcy
filing in U.S. history, with Lehman holding over US$600,000,000,000 in
assets. Wikipedia
President Trump’s remarkable speech to the United Nations this week was supposed to re-state the New Order that America has envisioned for the world. And all he got was a laugh.
https://youtu.be/Dqao0PqMgnE
But it was an important speech, because it spelt out more clearly what everyone knew since January 2017 – his Administration is dismantling what America has stood for since the Second World War.
Out goes the vision of a liberal rule-based stable world under US leadership. What replaces it is a “no holds barred” reality show of bilateral “Art of the Deal” negotiations supposedly to solve what is paining America. Never mind the collateral damage on everyone else, even if they are ultimately American consumers. What everyone heard is that the White House does not care too much about allies or enemies, only what is good for America First, trumped by the speaker’s ego.
Speeches to the United Nations has never been about foreign policy. Speaking in front of 193 member countries, the national leader is actually addressing his home audience, a photo-opportunity to show that as a member of the United Nations, your voice is heard by the whole wide world. Accordingly, other than the famous 1960 case of Soviet Leader Khruschev making his point by banging his shoe at the podium, most national leader speeches to the United Nations are boring homilies. They tend to praise themselves, pay due respect to the UN, and expound what Miss Congeniality says in all beauty contests, “world peace!”
What we got instead from President Trump was raw and edged, “America’s policy of principled realism means we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies, and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again.” That statement made a powerful indictment of “experts”, because his supporters feel that it is the elite experts that have run the country for 70 years who have let them down.
If America is doing so well economically, militarily and technologically, why should her middle class feel so insecure? And it is lashing out at everyone else.
The answer lies in not what the speech said, but what it omitted. Everywhere in the world, not least in America, the greatest existential concerns are inequality and climate change. Almost nothing was said about both issues, which are stressing societies and pushing immigration from poorer neighbours across borders to richer nations with cooler climates.
Instead, what was decided was non-participation in the Global Compact on Migration, withdrawal from the Human Rights Council and non-recognition of the International Criminal Court. There was also a barrage against Opec, which contains some of the US’s strongest allies. If other bodies like the World Trade Organisation or even the United Nations do not do America’s bidding, then the cutting of funds or withdrawal is a matter of time. Does that imply that the US will now veto every World Bank or IMF loan to members that she does not like?
In short, it is all about anti-globalisation. In the same breath that “We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism,” Trump appeals to the passion and pride of nationalism. “The passion that burns in the hearts of patriots and the souls of nations has inspired reform and revolution, sacrifice and selflessness, scientific breakthroughs, and magnificent works of art.”
Never mind if a lot of that sacrifice and selflessness was by immigrants and new arrivals.
Outsiders who used to admire America as an open society founded by immigrants with new ideas on how to build a more just society and free economy find instead one that has an increasingly closed mind to global issues. It does seem strange that American innovation, entrepreneurship and dynamism which drew continuously on new talent initially from Europe and then the rest of the world is now walling up its borders, physically, legally and mentally.
There are 40 million immigrants in the US today, representing 13% of the US population. Immigrants founded nearly one-fifth of the Fortune 500 companies, such as Google, Procter & Gamble, Kraft, Colgate Palmolive, Pfizer, and eBay. Today, much of Silicon Valley talent feel like working in the United Nations, diverse, noisy and creative.
The irony of America drawing on global talent and resources is that she has no need to pay for it from exports, but can easily print more dollars. In other words, the Grand Bargain of global trade was the ability of the US to pay for real goods and services with something that can be printed at near zero marginal cost. Even the Europeans are now creating a separate payment system outside the US dollar dominated SWIFT system to avoid being punished for “trading with the enemy”.
When contracts of trust are being renegotiated, no one can feel at ease. One can never solve global problems unilaterally or even bilaterally, let alone calls for more national patriotism. And as the English writer Samuel Johnson scribbled in 1775, a year before US independence from Britain, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Leadership has always been about generosity to those who are less well endowed and fortunate than you are. Often, it is not generosity of kind, because that would be buying of votes, but generosity of spirit.
This side of the Pacific, there is awareness that the tensions will not go away with Trump or a change in the November elections. What has happened is that the US establishment has put political interests ahead of economic interests, which means that any settlement will have to go beyond economic considerations.
If trade and political tensions are in for the long haul, can the current US market enthusiasm have sufficient strategic patience?
Now we understand why no one is laughing.
Credit; Think Asian Andrew Sheng
Tan Sri Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective.
