Miscellaneous News

pmc said:

This map is misleading even for year 2020.
Almost 80% of Mexico and Canada trade is with US. It is like exclusive benefit system among the three countries. Mexico and Canada does not trade with US thinking that this trade will benefit them in trade outside USMCA. .
ASEAN, Japan or Korea trade with China because it enhance there trade position. They are like becoming middlemen. China can reduce dependence on Korea and Japan but it will not reduce ASEAN trading with Korea and Japan.
US is dominant in Vietnam export market in 2023.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Click to expand...

jwnz said:

You need to read the map again. Both the 2000 and 2020 maps clearly show that US is the larger trading parter with Canada and Mexico compared to China. Blue means a country trades more with the US over China, and Orange is the opposite. You know it's explained in the legend.

Click to expand...

pmc said:

The intended meaning of my post was that Mexico and Canada almost exclusively trade with US. while ASEAN, Japan and Korea do there best to trade with everyone.
in 2023 US is getting more of its imports from Vietnam than prior years. Vietnam is most probably getting dollar for this trade.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

View attachment 113476

Click to expand...

jwnz said:

The maps only compare the US and China as trading partners of countries around the world, nothing more nothing less.

BTW, the reason why Vietnam exports more to the US than to China is because a large volume of export to the US is assembled goods (often at Chinese owned factories in Vietnam) using parts made in China. Check out the huge import figure from China.

Click to expand...

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

The trade balance surplus with the United States amounted to US$1.32 billion (Rp20.4 trillion).
The trade surplus with India was recorded at US$1.081 billion (Rp16.7 trillion).
Furthermore, Indonesia posted a trade surplus with China of US$999.8 million (Rp15.4 trillion), with iron and steel; mineral fuels; as well as animal or vegetable fats and oils as being the most exported commodities.

Click to expand...

pmc said:

my point was how is Vietnam paid for these exports if it keep increasing. Canada and Mexico basically off limit for rest of the world.

Similar situation is developing in 2023 for Indonesia. It is getting larger trade surplus with US in Feb 2023.

Click to expand...

Argentina

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

at WTO​

From next year, with a few exceptions, students coming from overseas will be barred from

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

when they come to study in the UK. Last year, almost

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

visas were issued to international students – a category that now includes both EU and non-EU, though the vast majority are the latter – to study in the UK. Along with them came just over 135,000 immediate family members – a figure that the government sees as a nice, meaty number to hack at. What they don’t see are women with small children, families without child-supporting networks back home, and students who – reasonably – would not like to be separated from their partners for a long time. It is a mark of the government’s inability to be honest about the country’s

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

that it is scrambling around for some numbers to cut, and in so doing, targeting a cohort of people that brings in huge amounts of revenue, pay into the NHS, and prove in advance that they will not be a “burden” on the state.

Click to expand...

The reality is that international students, particularly non-EU ones, are playing a massive role in financing the country’s higher education system while being a net contributor to the economy.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

that just 10 non-EU students studying in the UK will generate £1m of economic impact during their studies in terms of fees, consumer spending and job creation.

Click to expand...

Non-EU student fees

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

of UK universities’ income in 2020-21 – in effect, cross-subsidising the education of domestic students. The fees they pay are astonishingly high, averaging

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

. So high, in fact, and scandalously divorced from the actual cost of delivery are these fees, that the director of Soas University of London

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

that such students are being exploited in a “morally problematic” higher education system that has become reliant on overseas students. That system, he said, would “collapse” if just China were to “close the taps”.

Click to expand...

It is difficult to remember now but all of America’s Five Eyes partners were for a time all yielding to the economic blandishments of China.

Malcolm Turnbull assumed office in Australia with the reputation of a “panda hugger”; David Cameron proclaimed a “Golden Era” in UK-China relations; and Trudeau did that China-Canada thing in 2016-2017 during the first two years of his administration.

Click to expand...

A pro-PRC politician, Sam Dastayari was hounded out of his leading parliamentary post by a campaign of political and media denunciation fueled by leaks from the Australian security service, ASIO; his sugar daddy, Huang Xiangmo had his permanent residency revoked on rather sketchy grounds since his real offense—giving money to Australian politicians—was at that time not illegal under Australian law.

The resulting furor was exploited to push through a draconian “anti-foreign influence” security law designed to exempt the biggest wielder of foreign influence in Australia—that’s the United States, of course—while targeting China.

The end result was not an Australia that was more secure or independent; it was an Australia whose pro-Chinese voices had been intimidated and marginalized virtually to the point of extinction.

Click to expand...

When you look at the Ukraine war as a once in a generation opportunity to forcibly transform the West's security architecture to America's liking, you can understand why US in no hurry to end this thing. Not just bleeding Russia or quarantining China.

Click to expand...

The Australian template of an anti-China campaign using security service leaks to friendly media outlets with the purpose of implementing US-friendly anti foreign influence laws was openly promoted by China hawks in the northern hemisphere and implemented with remarkable directness--or shall we say crudeness--in other Five Eyes jurisdictions.

In the UK, Barry Gardiner filled the Sam Dastyari role, with Christine Lee pilloried as the “influencer” a la Huang Xiangmo via security service leaks to friendly media, and the foreign influence law was

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

accordingly.

In Canada, the tainted pol is Han Dong and his influencers are Chinese diplomats, and the foreign influence law is, as they say, incoming, with

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

with the United States on its content.

2022 also saw the election of Bongbong Marcos in the Philippines and Yoon Suk Yeol in South Korea.

They replaced the viscerally anti-American Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines (Duterte I might add is viscerally anti-American

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

) and the philosophically engagement-minded Moon Jae-in in the ROK.

If an elected leadership comes in with different ideas, there are ample institutional, legal, and media cranks to turn to encourage them to stick to the pro-US and anti-China track.

Mission accomplished! As they say.

Click to expand...

Ratner touted 2023 as a year of “historic achievements”: “All alliances getting stronger at the same time for first time since the Cold War…a historic moment of strategic alignment”.

Beneath all this pleasing froth is the hard reality that the US security regime in Asia is inherently unstable.

Click to expand...

Asia's DoD initiatives are designed to be “sticky”, that is to say institutionalized and difficult and costly to overturn when there’s a change of political leadership.

Click to expand...

It’s China’s best bet--and the China hawk’s worst fear--that this is the high-water mark of US-led anti-China containment, and that further cracks appear in the EU as Ukraine war fatigue and economic issues push their way onto the agenda; and the Philippines and ROK will continue to play footsie with the PRC while playing lip service to the US.

As I pointed out, the current US-friendly balance of anti-China forces is inherently fragile. Hawks probably fear the Ukraine counteroffensive might not yield the spectacular gains that will quiet the doubters; and if peace should break out in Ukraine, and if China brokered it, heads would explode in Washington.

Click to expand...

BRUSSELS — China is ramping up efforts to influence policy and public opinion in the EU — but much of the bloc is blind to what’s happening, a special adviser to the European Commission told POLITICO.

Beijing has long aimed propaganda at the European Union, seeking to undermine transatlantic unity and promote Beijing’s outlook on world affairs, said Ivana Karásková, a Czech academic and foreign influence specialist who’s advising European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová.

But since 2019, China’s approach to the EU has been “hardening” as it ramps up direct propaganda via so-called wolf warrior diplomats; as well as covert funding of think tanks, academic institutions and nonprofit organizations, she said. And EU countries, particularly outside of eastern Europe, are oblivious to or unwilling to see the extent of these operations, Karásková added.

“In some countries, awareness of [Chinese influence operations] is high because they have a history of Russian-backed action. Elsewhere, it’s complete denial,” she said. “It’s very uneven in terms of awareness. There are some countries where the discussion isn’t happening at all.”

Asked what parts of the Continent were most in the dark about Chinese influence, she added: “The whole of Western Europe is not looking. And yet there are cases that are so blatant.”

As one of the most overt examples of Chinese attempts to sway European public opinion, Karásková cited the case of two commercial radio stations in the Czech Republic that had been regularly receiving content, including pre-written scripts, from China Radio International, a state broadcaster.

The content was used for 30-minute programs featuring seemingly innocuous content, which nonetheless echoed Chinese state talking points on subjects like Taiwan, the self-governing island which Beijing claims as its own.

More than a thousand episodes of the program aired without the stations ever disclosing their link to China Radio International. It was only when the radio stations’ directors were confronted in April following the publication of a research report, authored by Karásková, that they quietly stopped broadcasting the segment.

Asked about the partnership, Miroslav Pýcha, CEO of the HEY and COLOR radio stations, pushed back on the idea his stations were pumping out Chinese propaganda, saying they broadcast “completely non-political topics.”

The radio’s archive does not include any episodes of the program in question after early April. Pýcha declined to say whether the shows had been canceled, adding: “We are currently discussing when and how the show will continue, as we have in the past.” He also criticized Karásková’s report, saying she was proceeding on “erroneous assumptions.”

“Without being given any space to explain ourselves, we were scandalously labelled ‘tentacles of Chinese propaganda on the air,’ despite the fact that we are apolitical music radio,” he added.

Karásková didn’t agree. “It was not direct propaganda in the sense that they were saying [Chinese President] Xi Jinping is the best leader on the planet. But a huge number of episodes praised the CCP,” she said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.

‘Mushrooming’ influence
The warning from Karásková comes as the European Commission prepares to unveil a “defense of democracy” package of legislation that aims to combat foreign attempts to undermine EU democracy and interests.

In her State of the European Union speech in 2022, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen pointed to the example of the Free University of Amsterdam — which last year cut off a Chinese funding stream following an investigation — as an example of how China is working covertly to shape opinion.

As part of that package, the Commission is set to unveil a draft law that would force organizations across the EU to disclose which outside countries are funding them.

Although the United States has its Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and Australia its Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act (FITSA), Europe’s plan — which is tentatively called the Transparency Act — is more narrowly defined, according to several EU officials, as well as experts who have seen recent versions of the plan, who asked not to be named in order to freely discuss internal work.

Europe’s law would target organizations rather than individuals, foreseeing an undefined administrative fine on any that fails to report the source of its income.

But nonprofit groups have been sharply critical, saying the proposal would allow leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to crack down on pro-democracy organizations (many of which are U.S.-funded), while emboldening autocrats to use similar laws to clamp down on dissent abroad.

Georgia erupted in protest against its own foreign agents law earlier this year — a further example of how Europe should tread carefully on the subject of foreign interference, groups say.

But Karásková responded that autocratic countries won’t wait for Europe’s permission to crack down on foreign sources of funding — and that the EU faces a growing challenge with undetected influence operations.

“We have seen a mushrooming of NGOs and think tanks with Chinese funding,” she said.

In addition to pouring more resources into shaping EU discourse, Beijing has apparently increasingly been joining forces with Russian actors to promote talking points favorable to both Moscow and Beijing — for example by citing Chinese sources in Russian state media and vice versa.

Asked if the EU risked muzzling alternative viewpoints, Karásková said the public should be free to access different sources, but that they should also know how those viewpoints are being funded.

“Europe is really open. It is time not to close, but to shed light on where the financial flows are actually going and to which end,” she said.

Click to expand...

500 metric tons of U.S. corn

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Over 500,000 kilograms of corn from the United States were recently seized at Taiwan's border after they were found to have excessive concentrations of deoxynivalenol (DON), also known as vomitoxin, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Click to expand...

Samples of the 501,289 kg shipment of loose dried corn imported for processing purposes were shown to have vomitoxin concentrations of 2,437 micrograms per kg, higher than the legal limit of 1,750 µg/kg, FDA data showed.

Click to expand...

As the name suggests, concentrated levels of vomitoxin can cause gastrointestinal symptoms in both humans and animals. Contaminated corn most frequently sickens hogs and other livestock that consume it as feed.

Click to expand...