Move is latest chapter in deteriorating relationship with Beijing and improvement under Joe Biden is unlikely
Foreign policy analysts believe Trump wants to leave a tough-on-China legacy while simultaneously conducting a ‘scorched earth’ policy on his way out of the White House. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump has banned US investment in a further 89 Chinese companies, and reportedly sent a navy admiral to Taiwan, as he seeks to secure a tough-on-China foreign policy legacy.
Multiple media outlets have reported plans by the Trump administration for a series of confrontations with China before Biden’s inauguration on 20 January, and the moves were largely expected. Foreign policy and political analysts believe Trump wants to leave a legacy of being tough on China, while simultaneously conducting a “scorched earth” policy on his way out of the White House.
Sunday, November 22, 2020, 14:51 GMT+7 tuoitrenews
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc (R) and United States National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien are pictured at their meeting in Hanoi on November 21, 2020. Photo: Vietnam Government Portal
Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and United States National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien discussed the two countries’ bilateral relationship in Hanoi on Saturday.
The meeting was convened within the framework of O’Brien’s visit to Vietnam on November 20-22, which is conducted on the occasion of the two nations’ 25th anniversary of diplomatic ties.
The relationship has seen comprehensive and practical development, which significantly contributes to regional and global security, peace, cooperation and development, PM Phuc said at the talk.
In this file photo released by Taiwan’s Military News Agency, Taiwan war planes are parked on a highway during an exercise to simulate a response to a Chinese attack on its airfields in Changhua in southern Taiwan. Taiwan said Tuesday, Oct 27, 2020, that recent proposed of U.S. sales of missiles and other arms systems will boost the island’s ability to credibly defend itself, amid rising threats from China. (Military News Agency via AP, File)
TAIPEI: The US and Taiwan are stepping up cooperation in a newly created economic dialogue, in another move from the outgoing Trump administration to increase official exchanges with the self-ruled island.
By Nguyen Quy November 19, 2020 | 11:46 am GMT+7 VNExpressNational security adviser Robert O’Brien speaks to the media outside the White House in Washington, U.S., November 17, 2020. Photo by Reuters/Leah Millis.U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien left Thursday for Vietnam and the Philippines to discuss regional security cooperation, the White House National Security Council said.
He would meet leaders in both countries “to reaffirm the strength of our bilateral relationships,” it tweeted on Thursday.
Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswomen Le Thi Thu Hang said at a press meet the same day that O’Brien will be in Vietnam from Friday to Sunday for high-level meetings to discuss bilateral relations and regional and international issues that concern both Vietnam and the U.S.
Until now, senior American officials had never spoken publicly with such candor and consistency about the challenge posed by China to our nation. Earlier this year, President Trump asked four of his most senior national security officials, myself [National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien], Christopher Wray, William Barr, and Michael Pompeo, to explain current U.S. policy on China to the American people. Over the summer of 2020, we did so in a series of speeches delivered around the country.
Collectively, the remarks contained in this book achieve several important objectives. They educate our citizens about the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party to their livelihoods, businesses, freedoms, and values.
These speeches also alert our allies and partners so that they, too, should stand up for their own people, and for our mutual interests and values.
The competition with which we are faced is not China versus the United States. It is the Chinese Communist Party, with its MarxistLeninist and mercantilist vision for the world, versus freedom-loving people everywhere.
Peter Martin November 16, 2020, 9:38 PM GMT+7 Bloomberg
World could slide into catastrophe like World War I: Kissinger
Says Biden, Xi should agree not to resort to military conflict
Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said the incoming Biden administration should move quickly to restore lines of communication with China that frayed during the Trump years or risk a crisis that could escalate into military conflict.
“Unless there is some basis for some cooperative action, the world will slide into a catastrophe comparable to World War I,” Kissinger said during the opening session of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum. He said military technologies available today would make such a crisis “even more difficult to control” than those of earlier eras.
“America and China are now drifting increasingly toward confrontation, and they’re conducting their diplomacy in a confrontational way,” the 97-year-old Kissinger said in an interview with Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. “The danger is that some crisis will occur that will go beyond rhetoric into actual military conflict.”
US President Donald Trump has issued an order banning American investments in Chinese firms the government determines have ties to the Chinese military.
In the order, Mr Trump accused China of “increasingly exploiting” US investors “to finance the development and modernisation of its military”.
The ban is to go into effect in January.
It could affect some of China’s biggest publicly-listed firms, including China Telecom and tech firm Hikvision.
Throughout his administration, Mr Trump has made efforts to disentangle the US from its close economic ties with China.
He has raised border taxes on billions of dollars worth of China goods and imposed sanctions on some of its tech companies.
Relations between the two superpowers have also soured over issues such as coronavirus, and China’s moves in Hong Kong.
Officials said the new order had been under review for months. It applies to shares owned directly or indirectly in 31 firms identified by the US earlier this year as backed by the Chinese military, a list that includes tech firms and large state-owned construction companies among others.
US investors have a year to comply with the rules.
Mr Trump, who recently lost to challenger Joe Biden in the US presidential election, is due to leave the presidency shortly after the order goes into effect.
Mr Biden has not outlined his China strategy, but during the campaign he promised to challenge the Chinese government on similar issues as Mr Trump, including trade abuses and cyber-theft.
Mr Trump’s stance on China is one of the rare areas in which he has sometimes received support from both Democrats and Republicans.
Several politicians in Congress have also proposed laws to block US investment in firms the White House designates as threats.
Earlier this year, Mr Trump ordered the pension fund for government employees to abandon a plan to invest in Chinese companies. The US has also said it is considering de-listing Chinese firms from US stock exchanges if they do not comply with US audit rules.
The efforts come as US exposure to companies listed on Chinese stock exchanges has grown.
But such investments remain a small fraction of overall US holdings. In a report earlier this year, researchers for financial regulators at the US Securities and Exchange Commission estimated that US mutual funds held about $43.5bn in Chinese stocks and bonds at the end of April.
A spokeswoman for the Investment Company Institute, a trade association for mutual funds and other money managers, said it was reviewing the order and had no further comment
After first visiting the capital at the height of the Vietnam War more than 50 years ago, Thomas Billhardt has kept returning to Hanoi to chronicle its changes.
However, he chose to do it not with graphic pictures of the violence, but by capturing normal, daily life that highlighted what was being destroyed.
Since October this year, the 83-year-old German photographer has been fielding numerous calls and messages from Vietnam, unable to attend an exhibition featuring 130 photos he’d taken in Hanoi during the Vietnam War.
“I am sad that I cannot be in Hanoi this time because of the pandemic, but the city is always in my heart,” he told VnExpress International from Berlin, Germany.
Billhardt has won worldwide recognition for his work in the late sixties and early seventies when the Vietnam War was at its peak. His photographs of daily life amidst the war were powerfully poignant.
Thomas Billhardt at an exhibition. Photo courtesy of Thomas Billhardt.
Billhardt loved photography as a child, being raised by a photographer mother. He graduated from the University of Graphics and Book Design in Leipzig in 1963. When he made the first of his 12 trips to Hanoi four years later, he never imagined that it would give birth to an association lasting more than five decades.
He first came to the capital city with a group of moviemakers from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1967 to film a documentary about American soldiers captured in Hanoi amidst the infamous Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing blitz unleashed by the U.S. against the north of Vietnam.
He remembers that at the Metropole, the fanciest hotel in town, “there were more mouses than guests and worms in the hotel’s water.”
Seeing the devastation of the war, the bomb craters, destroyed buildings, and the sounds of air raids and sirens calling for people to take cover, he was moved to tell the story of Hanoi and its people with a “photo chronicle.”
“I was angry on seeing the Americans destroy Hanoi… I wanted to show the world the photos I took in Vietnam so they would know exactly what was going on. Then they would understand and love Vietnam, just like me.”
He decided that his wartime photography would focus on people going about their daily lives, busy working and getting ready to fight at the same time.
A tram in 1975. The tram was a popular form of public transportation for Hanoians. Photo courtesy of Thomas Billhardt.
The photographs of crowds cycling under pouring rain, the happy faces of barefoot children attending an outdoor painting class, a stadium filled with people cheering and laughing as they watched a football match and many such scenes of love and care powerfully contrasted and resisted the extreme violence of war.
“I felt a connection with Vietnamese people when looking into their eyes as they suffered from the raging war,” Billhardt recalled, adding the bravery of Vietnamese was a lesson for him.
“Thomas’s photos hold up a mirror to the world while holding out hope at the same time. They tell of the world’s social inequalities, of poverty, of suffering, of war, but also of the life and laughter of the people who live in it,” said Wilfried Eckstein, director of the Goethe Institute in Hanoi.
The latest episode of POLITICO’s Global Translations podcast explores the new industrial policy emerging in America to counter China’s ascent.
Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks during fifth plenary session of the 19th Communist Party of China Central Committee in Beijing. | Ju Peng/Xinhua via AP
A historic shift in U.S. economic policy is taking shape regardless of who sits in the White House or controls Congress: an increasingly muscular role for state power to build up industries U.S. leaders deem critical to America’s national security and place in the world.
Being tough on China is what unifies a polarized United States right now, according to former top White House trade negotiator Clete Willems.
A day after Americans voted, the race between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden is still up in the air — several states remain uncalled.
Willems explained that if Biden wins, he would be constrained by the political environment and will unlikely be able to go back to some of the China positions he’s held in the past that were seen as relatively weak.
WATCH NOWVIDEO03:25Being tough on China unifies a polarized U.S., former trade negotiator says
Being tough on China is what unifies a polarized United States right now, according to former top White House trade negotiator Clete Willems.
A day after Americans voted, the race between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden is still up in the air — with six states yet to be called by NBC News.
Regardless of who takes the White House, the relationship with China will remain more or less status quo, said Willems, a partner at Akin Gump.
“The truth of the matter is that being tough on China is what unifies us in a polarized nation right now. We’re polarized in our politics but we are not polarized on China,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.
(CNN)Americans who go to the polls on Election Day don’t actually select the President directly.They are technically voting for 538 electors who, according to the system laid out by the Constitution, meet in their respective states and vote for President and Vice President. These people, the electors, comprise the Electoral College, and their votes are then counted by the President of the Senate in a joint session of Congress.Visit CNN’s Election Center for full coverage of the 2020 raceWhy did the framers choose this system? There are a few reasons: First, they feared factions and worried that voters wouldn’t make informed decisions. They didn’t want to tell states how to conduct their elections. There were also many who feared that the states with the largest voting populations would essentially end up choosing the President. Others preferred the idea of Congress choosing the President, and there were proposals at the time for a national popular vote. The Electoral College was a compromise.The stain of slavery is on the Electoral College as it is on all US history. The formula for apportioning congressmen, which is directly tied to the number of electors, relied at that time on the 3/5 Compromise, whereby each slave in a state counted as fraction of a person to apportion congressional seats. This gave states in the South with many slaves more power despite the fact that large portions of their populations could not vote and were not free. Tiếp tục đọc “The US Electoral College, explained”→
The unexpected visit by US Secretary of State Michael Richard Pompeo to Vietnam reflects the development of Vietnam – US relations. Pompeo’s visit to Vietnam took place after his visits to four Asian countries.
According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the invitation of Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh, US Secretary of State Michael Richard Pompeo officially visited Vietnam on October 29-30 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Vietnam-US diplomatic relations.
Hong Kong (CNN Business) China wants to counter the United States by boosting its technological capabilities and becoming more self sufficient. That’s easier said than done.Beijing outlined its goal for more economic independence this week as the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee put together its latest Five-Year Plan. The 14th iteration of the vast policy framework will cover 2021 to 2025, and is key to setting the country’s political and economic agenda.The full scope of the plan might not be known for months, but a statement published Thursday said that China wants to focus on economic self-reliance and technological independence. Doing so would help insulate the country from US attempts to restrict its access to critical technologies.”[We will] nurture a strong domestic market and establish a new development pattern,” the statement said. “Domestic consumption will be a strategic focus.”Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a speech in Shenzhen on October 14.
Light on detail
The statement did not yet outline any specific targets.But messages from Beijing are being closely watched right now.The world’s second largest economy is likely to be the only major world power to expand this year as the coronavirus pandemic prevents growth elsewhere. China’s future is also closely tied to its unfolding trade and technology war with the United States, and tensions between the two are getting worse.
“Economic globalization is facing headwinds now,” said Han Wenxiu, a senior finance official from the Communist Party’s Central Committee during a press conference Friday. The pandemic, coupled with rising protectionism, has weakened international economic cooperation, Han added.The need for innovation at home was underscored byWang Zhigang, China’s Minister of Science and Technology.”Technological self sufficiency is a strategic pillar of the nation’s development,” Wang said. “We must boost independent innovation and do our own job well. That’s because key technologies can’t be bought or asked for [from others].”
Easier said than done
China’s desire to achieve economic self-sufficiency isn’t a new one. Many of the country’s Five-Year Plans have prioritized sustainable growth and expanding domestic industry. And a recent, ambitious 10-year plan — “Made in China 2025″ — was created to push China’s manufacturing sector into more advanced technological fields.But achieving economic independence is easier said than done.”There is no guarantee that efforts to boost self-sufficiency in specific sectors will succeed,” wrote Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist for Capital Economics, in a research note late last week.Evans-Pritchard pointed out that unforeseen events can derail China’s plans, such as when an outbreak of African Swine Fever decimated the country’s pork industry last year. The disease wiped out a third of China’s pig population, causing a shortage that forced China to import massive amounts of meat.
For advanced sectors, shedding foreign independence is even more difficult. China is hugely reliant on other countries for the chipsets it needs to build the next generation of technology. The country imported more than $300 billion worth of chips last year, about $64 billion more than it spent on crude oil.”Made in China 2025″ was intended to help China reduce that reliance, and included goals for 40% of chips to be produced domestically by 2020. That share was supposed to increase to 70% by 2025.But the country doesn’t appear to be anywhere close to achieving those targets. Last year, less than 16% of the chips that China needed were produced within the country’s borders, according to an estimate published earlier this year by IC Insights.”Given the large gap between China and the US in the semiconductor industry, China will have to make gigantic investments over a long period in order to catch up with material progress,” according to Chaoping Zhu, global market strategist for JP Morgan Asset Management based in Shanghai.He wrote in a report Friday that it’s doubtful as to whether China will be able to achieve self-reliance in a variety of areas, with chips on top of that list.Economic self sufficiency is also not always good for economic development, according to Evans-Pritchard. He noted that companies are most productive when they can freely choose between domestic or imported inputs without political interference.”Pursuing self-sufficiency is (literally) a textbook way to depress productivity,” he wrote.
Beijing’s hands might be tied
China might not have a choice, though, when it comes to pursuing further economic independence.Washington and Beijing have been locked in an escalating battle over technology, trade and national security. Tensions have only increased this year as they blame each other for starting and mishandling the coronavirus pandemic and clash over Hong Kong and alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang.
The spat has led the United States to slap heavy sanctions on Chinese companies that rely on US technology to survive, including tech firm Huawei. Other tech champions, including China’s biggest chipmaker SMIC, have also entered Washington’s crosshairs.”Facing the risks of widening restrictions, it is increasingly critical for China to develop domestic capacity and reduce its dependence on foreign technology, ” wrote Zhufrom JP Morgan.Evans-Pritchard said that China still needs to figure out a way to address its biggest problems, including an over-reliance on infrastructure-focused investment as a means to protect growth and an aging population.”Without faster progress in addressing structural problems, we think growth could slow to just 2% by 2030,” he said.
Hong Kong (CNN) At the first meeting between Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, held over chocolate cake and sorbet at the US President’s vast Mar-a-Lago private club in Florida, the two leaders seemed on the brink of establishing an unlikely and potentially special relationship.Trump, less than three months into his first term, had spent his election campaign denouncing the Chinese government for undermining the United States, through a wide trade imbalance and cheap labor. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country,” Trump said in May 2016.But when Trump was standing alongside Xi at Mar-a-Lago the following April, his tone changed dramatically. The two leaders exchanged compliments during a news conference, with Trump describing their relationship as “outstanding.” Pictures from the meeting showed the two men sitting side-by-side, smiling broadly, on a golden couch.”It was a great honor to have President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan of China as our guests … Tremendous goodwill and friendship was formed,” Trump tweeted shortly after the visit.US President Donald Trump poses with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan upon their arrival at the Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, on April 6, 2017.
National security adviser Robert O’Brien speaks to the media outside the White House in Washington, U.S., November 17, 2020. Photo by Reuters/Leah Millis.U.S. national security adviser Robert O’Brien left Thursday for Vietnam and the Philippines to discuss regional security cooperation, the White House National Security Council said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a speech in Shenzhen on October 14.
US President Donald Trump poses with Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan upon their arrival at the Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, on April 6, 2017.
CVD 