Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
President Milos Zeman says Beijing has not fulfilled its promises and he will not attend this year’s 17+1 summit
He had hoped the country would be an ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ for Chinese investment in Europe, but now Zeman has changed his tone
Czech Republic President Milos Zeman has voiced disappointment over China’s lack of investment in the country. Photo: AFP
Czech President Milos Zeman’s decision to skip China’s summit with European leaders in April shows the “honeymoon is over” between Prague and Beijing, analysts say, as it tries to shake up the relationship to push for more investment.
And China could face similar trouble with other nations looking for more at this year’s “17+1” summit with Central and Eastern European nations in Beijing.
Top leaders usually attend the gathering, but Zeman on Sunday said he would not be going, and that China had not “done what it promised” by failing to invest more in his country. He would instead send Deputy Prime Minister Jan Hamacek, which he said was “adequate to the level of cooperation”.
At last year’s summit in Croatia, Prague was represented by Prime Minister Andrej Babis, who was diplomatically on par with the Chinese representative,
But it is China’s turn this year, and President Xi Jinping will be the host – meaning heads of state are expected to attend. The 17+1 grouping was launched by Beijing in 2012.
Deputy Prime Minister Jan Hamacek will represent Prague at the 17+1 summit. Photo: Twitter
Zeman was a strong advocate for deepening economic ties with China and investments were on the rise, for a time. But Zeman and other Czech leaders have increasingly questioned the nature of the relationship, especially as the economic benefits have dwindled.
Relations with China grew after Zeman, who is in his second term as president, took office in 2013. The peak came in 2016, when Xi visited the country and promised more Chinese investment. That year, Zeman said he hoped his country would be an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for Chinese investment in Europe.
But since then, the investments have faltered, not just in the Czech Republic, but across Central and Eastern Europe, and Zeman has changed his tone. In April, he called the lack of investment in his nation a “stain on the Czech-China relationship”, in an interview with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.
Chinese President Xi Jinping meets his Czech counterpart Milos Zeman during a visit to Prague in 2016, when he promised more investment. Photo: AFP
“I suppose he feels that promises made to him personally were not fulfilled, since he has had personal contact with Xi Jinping on a number of occasions … he surely feels that his commitment to China has not been reciprocated,” said Jeremy Garlick, assistant professor of international relations at the University of Economics, Prague.
Zeman has visited China five times and was the only EU leader to attend a Chinese military parade in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.
I suppose he feels that promises made to him personally were not fulfilled, since he has had personal contact with Xi Jinping on a number of occasions Jeremy Garlick, University of Economics, Prague
Rudolf Furst, a senior researcher at Charles University in Prague, said Zeman had given up his unequivocal support for a pragmatic pro-Chinese agenda.
“Chinese investments flow in Czechia have remained low, and not matching the Czech structural needs for stimulating the GDP growth,” he said.
Most of the 17+1 member states, except for Hungary and Greece, were now “perceiving the Chinese investment promises as merely virtual”, Furst said. “The 2012 new wave of China’s honeymoon is over.”
Rhodium Group has tracked Chinese foreign direct investment data in Europe since 2000. Its data shows that while total Chinese investment in the Czech Republic had grown to about €1 billion (US$1.1 billion) by 2018, growth has been slow, while neighbouring countries like Italy and Germany had some 15 to 20 times more investment in their economies.
Cumulative Chinese foreign direct investment in the Czech Republic between 2000 and 2017 sat at about €600 million, and grew to €1 billion in 2018, while that in neighbour Germany grew from €20.6 billion to €22.2 billion over the same period.
The picture is much the same for Eastern Europe as a whole – Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia received just 2 per cent of China’s overall investment in Europe in 2018, according to the data.
Countries like France, Germany and Britain meanwhile received 9, 12 and 24 per cent, respectively.
Czech Republic becomes unlikely front line in China’s soft power war
14 Dec 2019
Other Czech politicians have also taken a tougher line on China. Babis warned of a “considerable” trade deficit with China in 2018. The country exported US$1.8 billion of goods to China in the first nine months of last year, down 4.3 per cent from a year earlier. But it imported US$11.7 billion of products from China – by far its largest source of imports.
And after Zeman’s announcement this week, the Green Party, which holds a handful of seats in the Czech Senate, called for Prague to pull out of the 17+1 platform altogether.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis warned of a “considerable” trade deficit with China in 2018. Photo: AFP
Richard Turcsanyi, director of the Central European Institute of Asian Studies at Palacky University in the Czech Republic, said both Prague and Beijing were expecting too much.
“I see the current sharp downturn of Czech-China relations being related to very high and unrealistic expectations which existed perhaps on both sides, driven to a large extent by the ignorance of each other,” he said.
“Due to the impressive economic growth of China and also its international economic expansion, many expected that China could quickly become a significant economic actor in the Czech Republic,” he said.
“In reality, the Czech Republic and China are not natural trading or investment partners. They are more of competitors when it comes to moving up the value chain, rather than complementary economic partners – contrary to what has been claimed for years as part of the diplomatic exchanges.”
Political tensions with China have also increased, including over security allegations about Huawei Technologies, and sensitive issues like Taiwan and Tibet.
This week, Shanghai suspended official contact with the Czech capital Prague after it signed a sister city agreement with Taipei – following Prague cancelling its deal with Beijing in October over a “one China” pledge. Shanghai was also a sister city with Prague.
And although Zeman has been critical of the US-led campaign against Huawei, Babis ordered Czech government institutions to stop using products from the Chinese tech giant last year.
“There has been a breakdown of trust in China, at the level of the public, the media, and now even the president,” Garlick said.
World’s largest coal consumer shows little sign of ending its dependency even though it is also the biggest market for renewable energy sources
UN climate summit is meeting to discuss ways to limit future warming, but hopes are fading that China will commit to further curbs on emissions
China now accounts for around 30 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. Photo: AP
As world leaders gather in Spain to discuss how to slow the warming of the planet, the spotlight has fallen on China – the top emitter of greenhouse gases.
China burns about half the coal used globally each year. Between 2000 and 2018, its annual carbon emissions nearly tripled, and it now accounts for about 30 per cent of the world’s total.
Yet it is also the leading market for solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles, and it manufactures about two-thirds of solar cells installed worldwide.
“We are witnessing many contradictions in China’s energy development,” said Kevin Tu, a Beijing-based fellow with the Centre on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It’s the largest coal market and the largest clean energy market in the world.”
That apparent paradox is possible because of the sheer scale of China’s energy demands.
Pollution alarm as tourism businesses contaminate home of China’s hairy crab
But as China’s economy slows to the lowest level in a quarter century – around 6 per cent growth, according to government statistics – policymakers are doubling down on support for coal and other heavy industries, the traditional backbones of China’s energy system and economy. At the same time, the country is reducing subsidies for renewable energy.
At the annual United Nations climate summit, this year in Madrid, government representatives will put the finishing touches on implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement, which set a goal to limit future warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Nations may decide for themselves how to achieve it.
China had previously committed to shifting its energy mix to 20 per cent renewables, including nuclear and hydroelectric energy.
Climate experts generally agree that the initial targets pledged in Paris will not be enough to reach the goal, and next year nations are required to articulate more ambitious targets.
Hopes that China would offer to do much more are fading.
Recent media reports and satellite images suggest that China is building or planning to complete new coal power plants with total capacity of 148 gigawatts – nearly equal to the entire coal-power capacity of the European Union within the next few years, according to an analysis by Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based non-profit.
China is the world’s leading market for wind turbines and other renewables – but is still a major source of emissions. Photo: Chinatopix via AP
Meanwhile, investment in China’s renewable energy dropped almost 40 per cent in the first half of 2019 compared with the same period last year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research organisation. The government slashed subsidies for solar energy.
Last week in Beijing, China’s vice-minister of ecology and environment told reporters that non-fossil-fuel sources already account for 14.3 per cent of the country’s energy mix. He did not indicate that China would embrace more stringent targets soon.
“We are still faced with challenges of developing our economy, improving people’s livelihood,” Zhao Yingmin said.
As a fast-growing economy, it was always inevitable that China’s energy demands would climb steeply. The only question was whether the country could power a sufficiently large portion of its economy with renewables to curb emissions growth.
Many observers took hope from a brief dip in China’s carbon emissions between 2014 and 2016. Today the country’s renewed focus on coal comes as a disappointment.
“Now there’s a sense that rather than being a leader, China is the one that is out of step,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Helsinki.
He notes that several developed countries – including Germany, South Korea and the United States – are rapidly reducing their reliance on coal power.
After climbing sharply for two decades, China’s emissions stalled around 2013 and then declined slightly in 2015 and 2016, according to Global Carbon Budget, which tracks emissions worldwide.
This dip came as Chinese leaders declared a “war on pollution” and suspended the construction of dozens of planned coal power plants, including some in Shanxi.
Pollution scandal near China nature reserve at Tengger desert’s edge
At the same time, the government required many existing coal operators to install new equipment in chimneys to remove sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide and other hazardous substances. About 80 per cent of coal plants now have scrubbers, said Alvin Lin, Beijing-based China climate and energy policy director for the Natural Resources Defence Council, a non-profit.
As a result, the air quality in many Chinese cities, including Beijing, improved significantly between 2013 and 2017. Residents long accustomed to wearing face masks and running home air-filter machines enjoyed a reprieve of more “blue sky days,” as low-pollution days are known in China.
In the past three years, China’s carbon emissions have begun to rise again, according to Global Carbon Budget.
The coming winter in Beijing may see a return of prolonged smog, as authorities loosen environmental controls on heavy industry – in part to compensate for other slowing sectors in the economy.
The UN Climate Change Conference is taking place in Madrid this month. Photo: AFP
Permits for new coal plants proliferated after regulatory authority was briefly devolved from Beijing to provincial governments, which see construction projects and coal operations as boosts to local economies and tax bases, said Ted Nace, executive director of Global Energy Monitor.
“It’s as though a boa constrictor swallowed a giraffe, and now we’re watching that bulge move through the system,” said Nace. In China, it takes about three years to build a coal plant.
The world has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius. All scenarios envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for holding planetary warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius involve steep worldwide reductions in coal-power generation.
In that effort, other countries rely on Chinese manufacturing to hold down prices on solar panels. wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries.
“China has a really mixed record. On the one hand, it’s seen rapidly rising emissions over the past two decades,” said Jonas Nahm, an energy expert at Johns Hopkins University.
“On the other hand, it’s shown it’s able to innovate around manufacturing – and make new energy technologies available at scale, faster and cheaper.”
(Reuters) – Asian companies dominate the market for electric vehicle (EV) batteries and they are expanding their production capacity in Europe, China and the United States in a fight to win lucrative contracts from global automakers.
Some carmakers worry, however, there won’t be enough batteries for all the EVs they plan to launch in the coming years and a bitter row between South Korea’s SK Innovation and LG Chem risks exacerbating the potential shortfall.
Below are details of the world’s leading EV battery makers with details of their customers and expansion plans:
CATL
China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), the world’s biggest EV battery maker, counts BMW (BMWG.DE), Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), Daimler (DAIGn.DE) – which makes Mercedes cars – Volvo, Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) and Honda Motor Co (7267.T) among its customers.
The company emerged as a major force partly thanks to Beijing’s policy of only subsidising vehicles equipped with Chinese batteries in the world’s biggest EV market. Beijing is phasing out EV subsidies next year.
CATL, which operates factories in China, is building its first overseas plant in Germany and is considering a U.S. factory.
Japan’s Panasonic, a supplier of U.S. EV pioneer Tesla (TSLA.O), said it has installed equipment to ramp up production at Tesla’s Nevada plant to 35 GWh from its current production of around 30 GWh as of late October. Panasonic has said it is investing about $1.6 billion in the factory.
Panasonic also produces EV batteries in Japan, China and plans to shift some of its plants to a new joint venture with Toyota. Panasonic’s clients also include Honda and Ford Motor Company (F.N).
China’s BYD, which is backed by U.S. investor Warren Buffett, is also one of the world’s biggest EV battery makers. It mainly uses them in-house for its own cars and buses. BYD said last year it is was considering cell production in Europe.
The South Korean firm was an early industry mover, winning a contract to supply General Motor’s (GM.N) Volt in 2008. It also supplies Ford, Renault (RENA.PA), Hyundai Motor (005380.KS), Tesla, Volkswagen and Volvo.
It is investing 3.3 trillion won ($2.8 billion) to build and expand production facilities near Tesla’s plant in Shanghai. It has a joint venture (JV) in China with Geely Automobile Holdings (0175.HK), which makes Volvos, and is in talks with other carmakers about JVs in major markets.
The firm is considering building a second U.S. factory in addition to its facility in Michigan and is expanding its plant in Poland.
SAMSUNG SDI CO LTD (006400.KS) Samsung SDI an affiliate of South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics (005930.KS), has EV battery plants in South Korea, China and Hungary, which supply customers such as BMW (BMWG.DE), Volvo and Volkswagen. Samsung SDI is investing about 1.2 billion euros ($1.3 billion) to expand its factory in Hungary though the EU is investigating whether Budapest’s financial support complies with the bloc’s state aid rules.
Samsung started production last year on the Hungary plant, which will produce batteries for 50,000 EVs a year.
SK INNOVATION CO LTD (096770.KS) LG Chem’s cross-town rival SK Innovation supplies batteries to Volkswagen, Daimler and Kia Motors (000270.KS), as well as Jaguar Land Rover [TAMOJL.UL] and Ferrari (RACE.MI).
An oil refiner that came to the battery industry late, SKI is investing about $3.9 billion to build three plants in the United States, China and Hungary, with a goal of expanding its annual production capacity to 33 GWh by 2022.
SKI currently operates one battery factory in South Korea, with a capacity of 4.7 GWh annually.
It set up a joint venture with Beijing Automotive Industry Corporation (BAIC) of China in August 2018 and another Chinese partner. It is in talks with Volkswagen about another battery JV and is building a $1.7 billion factory in the U.S. state of Georgia, not far from Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant.
NEW DELHI (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi signed wide-ranging agreements in New Delhi on Friday to deepen strategic cooperation and exchanged notes on ways to boost bilateral trade.
Merkel, accompanied by several cabinet colleagues and a business delegation, is in India on a three-day visit that began on Thursday.
“We’re encouraging our private sectors to give an impetus to our growing bilateral trade and Chancellor Merkel and I will meet some of the top business and industry leaders,” Modi told a joint news conference with the German leader.
“We’re encouraging our private sectors to give an impetus to our growing bilateral trade and Chancellor Merkel and I will meet some of the top business and industry leaders,” Modi said.
Bilateral trade between the two countries rose to $24.06 billion (18.5 billion pounds) in the 2018/19 fiscal year ending in March from $22 billion the previous year, while German companies have invested nearly $12 billion in India since 2000.
Germany is India’s largest trading partner in Europe and more than 1,700 German companies are operating in India.
The agreements struck on strategic cooperation, included agriculture, cyber security and artificial intelligence. Modi said the two countries would also bolster ties to combat “terrorism and extremism”.
Germany and India also agreed to join hands in the area of education.
“As many as 20,000 Indian nationals are studying in Germany and we would like to see more,” Merkel said.
Although Merkel and Modi didn’t mention anything about restarting talks on finalising a free trade agreement between India and the European Union, sources earlier said the two leaders could take up the trade deal.
Eric Schweitzer, president of the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry (DIHK), earlier said India had enormous potential but there has been uncertainty among companies after an investment protection agreement between the two countries ended in 2016.
“Small and medium-sized German companies stand in a labyrinth of regulations and shy away from larger investment. Negotiations should restart and Merkel’s visit could help,” he said.
VDA, Germany’s car industry association that counts automakers like Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), Daimler, BMW and Audi as members, also wanted India to restart the FTA talks.
Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi dominate India’s luxury car market.
International rules on seabed mining set for approval in 2020, with China most likely to lead the race, UN body says
Governments, research institutions and commercial entities have already signed contracts for the exploration phase to extract minerals from the seabed, with China holding the most. Photo: Shutterstock
China is in pole position for the global race to start deep sea mining operations to extract valuable minerals used in smartphones and electric car batteries from the seabed.
The head of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) said China was likely to become the first country in the world to start mining seabed minerals if the international rules for exploitation were approved next year.
The ISA has already signed 30 contracts with governments, research institutions and commercial entities for exploration phase, with China holding the most, five contracts.
The body, which was established to manage the seabed resources by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), is aiming to adopt seabed mineral exploitation rules by July 2020.
As China leads the hunt for deep-sea minerals, environmental concerns surface
“I do believe that China could easily be among the first (to start exploitation),” said Michael Lodge, ISA general secretary, who visited China last week.
“The demand for minerals is enormous and increasing, there is no doubt about the market.”
There is also interest from European countries including Belgium, Britain, Germany and Poland, as well as from the Middle East.
The quest to exploit seabed minerals – such as polymetallic nodules containing nickel, copper, cobalt and manganese – is driven by demand for smartphones and electric car batteries, and the need to diversify supply.
However, no one has yet shown that deep sea mining can be cost effective and some non-governmental organisations have questioned whether it would be possible to reach a deal on exploitation rules next year.
“I think, it’s pretty good. I think the current draft is largely complete,” Lodge said, when asked about prospects of adopting the rules by next July.
One of the issues yet to be agreed is proportionate financial payments to the Jamaica-based ISA for subsea mineral exploitation outside national waters.
“We are looking at ad valorem royalty that would be based on the value of the ore at a point of extraction … The middle range is 4 per cent to 6 per cent ad valorem royalty, potentially increasing over time,” Lodge said.
New iPhone models to use recycled rare earths, Apple says
If the rules are approved, it could take about two to three years to obtain permits to start deep sea mining under the current draft, Lodge said.
Canadian Nautilus Minerals had tried to mine underwater mounds for copper and gold in the national waters off Papua New Guinea, but ran out of money and had to file for creditor protection earlier this year.
This has not deterred others, such as Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR), a unit of Belgian group DEME, and Canada’s DeepGreen, to continue technology tests and research.
In July, Greenpeace called for an immediate moratorium on deep sea mining to learn more about its potential impact on deep sea ecosystems, but the ISA has rejected such a proposal.
It took China less than 70 years to emerge from isolation and become one of the world’s greatest economic powers.
As the country celebrates the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, we look back on how its transformation spread unprecedented wealth – and deepened inequality – across the Asian giant.
“When the Communist Party came into control of China it was very, very poor,” says DBS chief China economist Chris Leung.
“There were no trading partners, no diplomatic relationships, they were relying on self-sufficiency.”
Over the past 40 years, China has introduced a series of landmark market reforms to open up trade routes and investment flows, ultimately pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
The 1950s had seen one of the biggest human disasters of the 20th Century. The Great Leap Forward was Mao Zedong’s attempt to rapidly industrialise China’s peasant economy, but it failed and 10-40 million people died between 1959-1961 – the most costly famine in human history.
This was followed by the economic disruption of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, a campaign which Mao launched to rid the Communist party of his rivals, but which ended up destroying much of the country’s social fabric.
‘Workshop of the world’
Yet after Mao’s death in 1976, reforms spearheaded by Deng Xiaoping began to reshape the economy. Peasants were granted rights to farm their own plots, improving living standards and easing food shortages.
The door was opened to foreign investment as the US and China re-established diplomatic ties in 1979. Eager to take advantage of cheap labour and low rent costs, money poured in.
“From the end of the 1970s onwards we’ve seen what is easily the most impressive economic miracle of any economy in history,” says David Mann, global chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank.
Through the 1990s, China began to clock rapid growth rates and joining the World Trade Organization in 2001 gave it another jolt. Trade barriers and tariffs with other countries were lowered and soon Chinese goods were everywhere.
“It became the workshop of the world,” Mr Mann says.
Take these figures from the London School of Economics: in 1978, exports were $10bn (£8.1bn), less than 1% of world trade.
By 1985, they hit $25bn and a little under two decades later exports valued $4.3trn, making China the world’s largest trading nation in goods.
Poverty rates tumble
The economic reforms improved the fortunes of hundreds of millions of Chinese people.
The World Bank says more than 850 million people been lifted out of poverty, and the country is on track to eliminate absolute poverty by 2020.
At the same time, education rates have surged. Standard Chartered projects that by 2030, around 27% of China’s workforce will have a university education – that’s about the same as Germany today.
Rising inequality
Still, the fruits of economic success haven’t spread evenly across China’s population of 1.3 billion people.
Examples of extreme wealth and a rising middle class exist alongside poor rural communities, and a low skilled, ageing workforce. Inequality has deepened, largely along rural and urban divides.
“The entire economy is not advanced, there’s huge divergences between the different parts,” Mr Mann says.
The World Bank says China’s income per person is still that of a developing country, and less than one quarter of the average of advanced economies.
China’s average annual income is nearly $10,000, according to DBS, compared to around $62,000 in the US.
Slower growth
Now, China is shifting to an era of slower growth.
For years it has pushed to wean its dependence off exports and toward consumption-led growth. New challenges have emerged including softer global demand for its goods and a long-running trade war with the US. The pressures of demographic shifts and an ageing population also cloud the country’s economic outlook.
Still, even if the rate of growth in China eases to between 5% and 6%, the country will still be the most powerful engine of world economic growth.
“At that pace China will still be 35% of global growth, which is the biggest single contributor of any country, three times more important to global growth than the US,” Mr Mann says.
The next economic frontier
China is also carving out a new front in global economic development. The country’s next chapter in nation-building is unfolding through a wave of funding in the massive global infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.
The so-called new Silk Road aims to connect almost half the world’s populations and one-fifth of global GDP, setting up trade and investment links that stretch across the world.
Legal process under way, Beijing says after Foreign Minister Wang Yi tells United Nations China is committed to defending multilateralism
Any unilateral move to leave weapons control pact will have a ‘negative impact in various areas’, minister says in thinly veiled swipe at United States
China, the world’s fifth-largest weapons supplier, has signed up to a global arms control treaty. Photo: Simon Song
China said it has begun preparations to join an international arms control treaty that the United States has threatened to abandon, while also warning Washington against deploying missiles in the Asia-Pacific region.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Friday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that signing up to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) was further evidence of Beijing’s commitment to defending multilateralism.
said in April that he intended to withdraw from the pact, which regulates the US$70 billion global trade in conventional arms.
The White House said at the time that the ATT “will only constrain responsible countries while allowing the irresponsible arms trade to continue”, as major arms exporters like Russia and China were not part of it.
Wang said on Friday that any unilateral move to leave the treaty would have a “negative impact in various areas”. He stopped short of naming the United States or its president.
China’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday that it had begun the legal process of joining the treaty, adding that it attached great importance to the issues caused by the illegal sale and misuse of arms, and supported the aims of the ATT in seeking to regulate the international weapons trade.
Wang also spoke out against the possible deployment of ground-launched missiles in the Asia-Pacific region.
After withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in August, the US said it was planning to deploy such weapons in Asia to counter any possible threat from China or Russia.
“[We] urge the country with the largest nuclear weapons to fulfil its special and prior responsibilities on nuclear disarmament,” Wang said, adding that “China will continue to participate in the international arms control process”.
Wang Yi spoke out against the possible deployment of ground-launched missiles in the Asia-Pacific region at the UN General Assembly in New York on Friday. Photo: AFP
According to figures released in May by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States is the world’s largest arms exporter, supplying weapons worth 58 per cent more than those of its nearest competitor, Russia.
Together with France, Germany and China, the five nations accounted for 75 per cent of all weapons sold around the world between 2014 and last year, the institute said.
Although China is among the world’s big five arms suppliers, its sales – most of which go to Asia and Oceania – are dwarfed by those of the US, accounting for just 5.2 per cent of the 2014-18 total, compared to America’s 36 per cent.
Several major arms importers, including India, Australia, South Korea and Vietnam, refuse to buy arms from China for political reasons.
Beijing’s decision to join the ATT is in keeping with the image it has sought to present of China as a defender of multilateralism. The stance is also in sharp contrast to the US’ position under Trump, who has repeatedly scrapped multilateral trade agreements in favour of bilateral deals.
Since taking office in 2016, he has withdrawn the US from the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Military observers said Beijing might seek to pressure on Washington to stay in the deal to try to maintain the strategic and military balance in the region.
Song Zhongping, a Hong Kong-based military affairs commentator, said Beijing might be trying to avoid misuse of conventional weapons.
“Beijing may want to press big exporters, such as the US and Russia, to join the deal because without proper regulations, the risk of illegal trade and misuse of conventional weapons could be running high,” he said.
“This could also threaten regional stability or even trigger unnecessary arms races.”
Adam Ni, a China specialist at Sydney’s Macquarie University, said the treaty would put some limits on the arms trade “but it would not mean that China would not be able to do deals. It will still be able to do [most deals]”.
Retired PLA colonel Yue Gang said the strategy could also improve China’s international reputation.
An increasing proportion of young people no longer willing to wait tables in China as restaurant owners look to new technology for answers
Catering robots developed by Pudu Tech, the three-year-old Shenzhen start-up, have been adopted by thousands of restaurants in China, as well as some foreign countries including Singapore, Korea, and Germany. Photo: Handout
Two years ago, Bao Xiangyi quit school and worked as a waiter in a restaurant for half a year to support himself, and the 19 year-old remembers the time vividly.
“It was crazy working in some Chinese restaurants. My WeChat steps number sometimes hit 20,000 in a day [just by delivering meals in the restaurant],” said Bao.
The WeChat steps fitness tracking function gauges how many steps you literally take and 20,000 steps per day can be compared with a whole day of outdoor activity, ranking you very high in a typical friends circle.
Bao, now a university student in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, quit the waiter job and went back to school.
“I couldn’t accept that for 365 days a year every day would be the same,” said Bao.
“Those days were filled with complete darkness and I felt like my whole life would be spent as an inferior and insignificant waiter.”
Olivia Niu, a 23-year-old Hong Kong resident, quit her waiter job on the first day. “It was too busy during peak meal times. I was so hungry myself but I needed to pack meals for customers,” said Niu.
Being a waiter has never been a top career choice but it remains a big source of employment in China. Yang Chunyan, a waitress at the Lanlifang Hotel in Wenzhou in southeastern China, has two children and says she chose the job because she needs to make a living.
Catering robots developed by Pudu Tech, the three-year-old Shenzhen start-up. Photo: Handout
Today’s young generation have their sights on other areas though. Of those born after 2000, 24.5 per cent want careers related to literature and art. This is followed by education and the IT industry in second and third place, according to a recent report by Tencent QQ and China Youth Daily.
Help may now be at hand though for restaurants struggling to find qualified table staff who are able to withstand the daily stress of juggling hundreds of orders of food. The answer comes in the form of robots.
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Shenzhen Pudu Technology, a three-year-old Shenzhen start-up, is among the tech companies offering catering robots to thousands of restaurant owners who are scrambling to try to plug a labour shortfall with new tech such as machines, artificial intelligence and online ordering systems. It has deployed robots in China, Singapore, Korea and Germany.
With Pudu’s robot, kitchen staff can put meals on the robot, enter the table number, and the robot will deliver it to the consumer. While an average human waiter can deliver 200 meals per day – the robots can manage 300 to 400 orders.
“Nearly every restaurant owner [in China] says it’s hard to recruit people to [work as a waiter],” Zhang Tao, the founder and CEO of Pudu tech said in an interview this week. “China’s food market is huge and delivering meals is a process with high demand and frequency.”
Pudu’s robots can be used for ten years and cost between 40,000 yuan (US$5,650) and 50,000 yuan. That’s less than the average yearly salary of restaurant and hotel workers in China’s southern Guangdong province, which is roughly 60,000 yuan, according to a report co-authored by the South China Market of Human Resources and other organisations.
As such, it is no surprise that more restaurants want to use catering robots.
According to research firm Verified Market Research, the global robotics services market was valued at US$11.62 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach US$35.67 billion by 2026.
Can robots and virtual fruit help the elderly get well in China?
China’s labour force advantage has also shrank in recent years. The working-age population, people between 16 and 59 years’ old, has reduced by 40 million since 2012 to 897 million, accounting for 64 per cent of China’s roughly 1.4 billion people in 2018, according to the national bureau of statistics.
By comparison, those of working age accounted for 69 per cent of the total population in 2012.
Other Chinese robotic companies are also entering the market. SIASUN Robot & Automation Co, a hi-tech listed enterprise belonging to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced their catering robots to China’s restaurants in 2017. Delivery robots developed by Shanghai-based Keenon Robotics Co., founded in 2010, are serving people in China and overseas markets such as the US, Italy and Spain.
Pudu projects it will turn a profit this year and it is in talks with venture capital firms to raise a new round of funding, which will be announced as early as October, according to Zhang. Last year it raised 50 million yuan in a round led by Shenzhen-based QC capital.
To be sure, the service industry is still the biggest employer in China, with 359 million workers and accounting for 46.3 per cent of a working population of 776 million people in 2018, according to the national bureau of statistics.
And new technology sometimes offers up new problems – in this case, service with a smile.
“When we go out for dinner, what we want is service. It is not as simple as just delivering meals,” said Wong Kam-Fai, a professor in engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a national expert appointed by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. “If they [robot makers] can add an emotional side in future, it might work better.”
Technology companies also face some practical issues like unusual restaurant layouts.
“Having a [catering robot] traffic jam on the way to the kitchen is normal. Some passageways are very narrow with many zigzags,” Zhang said. “But this can be improved in future with more standardised layouts.”
Multi-floor restaurants can also be a problem.
Dai Qi, a sales manager at the Lanlifang Hotel, said it is impossible for her restaurant to adopt the robot. “Our kitchen is on the third floor, and we have boxes on the second, third, and fourth floor. So the robots can’t work [to deliver meals tdownstairs/upstairs],” Dai said.
But Bao says he has no plans to return to being a waiter, so the robots may have the edge.
“Why are human beings doing something robots can do? Let’s do something they [robots] can’t,” Bao said.
SHANGHAI, Sept. 14 (Xinhua) — As the 2019 Shanghai Tourism Festival opened Saturday evening, the festival, which began in 1990, has been a witness to China’s development and citizens’ consumption upgrade over the past few decades.
Twenty-five floats, which represent China’s well-known tourist destinations such as Nanjing and Suzhou cities in Jiangsu Province, and 32 performance groups from 19 countries and regions, including Germany, Switzerland and France, participated in the dance and music show in downtown Shanghai, attracting some 300,000 spectators.
The festival, which will last until Oct. 6, will feature 100 activities including some for overseas travelers. A folk culture exhibition on Belt and Road countries will also be held. Dozens of tourist sites, museums and galleries in Shanghai will offer half-price admissions during the event.
The first tourism festival in Shanghai attracted half a million tourists from home and abroad. The 2018 festival attracted 12.7 million visitors. As people’s living standards have improved remarkably, tourism is not a luxury any more, but a necessity for many citizens.
“In 1995, the company rewarded me with a trip to Hainan. I was so proud and cherished it very much,” recalled a Shanghai taxi driver surnamed Guo, 54. “Now, our income has increased a lot, travel becomes a routine for most people who are willing to pay their own money to relax.”
Thirty years ago, ideal tourism resources were lacking, said Lu Guojun, a clerk with Shanghai Huangpu River Cruise Group Co., Ltd, citing the swaths of croplands along the eastern coast of the river which flows through the city center.
In recent years, with improved infrastructure and rapid development of service economy, more companies have joined the development of the river tourism, Lu said.
Dai Bin, president of the China Tourism Academy in Beijing, said people’s aspirations for a better life lead to their high expectations of tourism quality.
In August, China issued a guideline to unleash the cultural and tourism consumption potential, urging efforts to deepen supply-side reform in cultural and tourism industries.
On Friday, Shanghai signed agreements with six cities and regions including Budapest, Phnom Penh and Bangkok to boost culture and tourism exchange.
Culture and tourism promote mutual friendship and understanding, said Yu Xiufen, head of the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism.
In 2018, domestic tourists made 5.54 billion trips, up 10.8 percent year on year, and the total number of inbound and outbound tourists reached 291 million, up 7.8 percent. The total tourism revenue reached 5.97 trillion yuan (842.7 billion U.S. dollars) last year, up 10.5 percent, data of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism showed.
An increasing proportion of young people no longer willing to wait tables in China as restaurant owners look to new technology for answers
Catering robots developed by Pudu Tech, the three-year-old Shenzhen start-up, have been adopted by thousands of restaurants in China, as well as some foreign countries including Singapore, Korea, and Germany. Photo: Handout
Two years ago, Bao Xiangyi quit school and worked as a waiter in a restaurant for half a year to support himself, and the 19 year-old remembers the time vividly.
“It was crazy working in some Chinese restaurants. My WeChat steps number sometimes hit 20,000 in a day [just by delivering meals in the restaurant],” said Bao.
The WeChat steps fitness tracking function gauges how many steps you literally take and 20,000 steps per day can be compared with a whole day of outdoor activity, ranking you very high in a typical friends circle.
Bao, now a university student in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, quit the waiter job and went back to school.
“I couldn’t accept that for 365 days a year every day would be the same,” said Bao. “Those days were filled with complete darkness and I felt like my whole life would be spent as an inferior and insignificant waiter.”
Olivia Niu, a 23-year-old Hong Kong resident, quit her waiter job on the first day. “It was too busy during peak meal times. I was so hungry myself but I needed to pack meals for customers,” said Niu.
Being a waiter has never been a top career choice but it remains a big source of employment in China. Yang Chunyan, a waitress at the Lanlifang Hotel in Wenzhou in southeastern China, has two children and says she chose the job because she needs to make a living.
Catering robots developed by Pudu Tech, the three-year-old Shenzhen start-up. Photo: Handout
Today’s young generation have their sights on other areas though. Of those born after 2000, 24.5 per cent want careers related to literature and art. This is followed by education and the IT industry in second and third place, according to a recent report by Tencent QQ and China Youth Daily.
Help may now be at hand though for restaurants struggling to find qualified table staff who are able to withstand the daily stress of juggling hundreds of orders of food. The answer comes in the form of robots.
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Shenzhen Pudu Technology, a three-year-old Shenzhen start-up, is among the tech companies offering catering robots to thousands of restaurant owners who are scrambling to try to plug a labour shortfall with new tech such as machines, artificial intelligence and online ordering systems. It has deployed robots in China, Singapore, Korea and Germany.
With Pudu’s robot, kitchen staff can put meals on the robot, enter the table number, and the robot will deliver it to the consumer. While an average human waiter can deliver 200 meals per day – the robots can manage 300 to 400 orders.
“Nearly every restaurant owner [in China] says it’s hard to recruit people to [work as a waiter],” Zhang Tao, the founder and CEO of Pudu tech said in an interview this week. “China’s food market is huge and delivering meals is a process with high demand and frequency.”
Pudu’s robots can be used for ten years and cost between 40,000 yuan (US$5,650) and 50,000 yuan. That’s less than the average yearly salary of restaurant and hotel workers in China’s southern Guangdong province, which is roughly 60,000 yuan, according to a report co-authored by the South China Market of Human Resources and other organisations.
As such, it is no surprise that more restaurants want to use catering robots.
According to research firm Verified Market Research, the global robotics services market was valued at US$11.62 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach US$35.67 billion by 2026. Haidilao, China’s top hotpot restaurant, has not only adopted service robots but also introduced a smart restaurant with a mechanised kitchen in Beijing last year. And in China’s tech hub of Shenzhen, it is hard to pay without an app as most of the restaurants have deployed an online order service.
Can robots and virtual fruit help the elderly get well in China?
China’s labour force advantage has also shrank in recent years. The working-age population, people between 16 and 59 years’ old, has reduced by 40 million since 2012 to 897 million, accounting for 64 per cent of China’s roughly 1.4 billion people in 2018, according to the national bureau of statistics.
By comparison, those of working age accounted for 69 per cent of the total population in 2012.
Other Chinese robotic companies are also entering the market. SIASUN Robot & Automation Co, a hi-tech listed enterprise belonging to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, introduced their catering robots to China’s restaurants in 2017. Delivery robots developed by Shanghai-based Keenon Robotics Co., founded in 2010, are serving people in China and overseas markets such as the US, Italy and Spain.
Pudu projects it will turn a profit this year and it is in talks with venture capital firms to raise a new round of funding, which will be announced as early as October, according to Zhang. Last year it raised 50 million yuan in a round led by Shenzhen-based QC capital.
To be sure, the service industry is still the biggest employer in China, with 359 million workers and accounting for 46.3 per cent of a working population of 776 million people in 2018, according to the national bureau of statistics.
And new technology sometimes offers up new problems – in this case, service with a smile.
“When we go out for dinner, what we want is service. It is not as simple as just delivering meals,” said Wong Kam-Fai, a professor in engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a national expert appointed by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. “If they [robot makers] can add an emotional side in future, it might work better.”
Technology companies also face some practical issues like unusual restaurant layouts.
“Having a [catering robot] traffic jam on the way to the kitchen is normal. Some passageways are very narrow with many zigzags,” Zhang said. “But this can be improved in future with more standardised layouts.”
Multi-floor restaurants can also be a problem.
Dai Qi, a sales manager at the Lanlifang Hotel, said it is impossible for her restaurant to adopt the robot. “Our kitchen is on the third floor, and we have boxes on the second, third, and fourth floor. So the robots can’t work [to deliver meals to downstairs/upstairs],” Dai said.
But Bao says he has no plans to return to being a waiter, so the robots may have the edge.
“Why are human beings doing something robots can do? Let’s do something they [robots] can’t,” Bao said.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 
China set to join Arms Trade Treaty that Donald Trump threatened to abandon
China said it has begun preparations to join an international arms control treaty that the United States has threatened to abandon, while also warning Washington against deploying missiles in the Asia-Pacific region.
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Friday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that signing up to the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) was further evidence of Beijing’s commitment to defending multilateralism.
said in April that he intended to withdraw from the pact, which regulates the US$70 billion global trade in conventional arms.
The White House said at the time that the ATT “will only constrain responsible countries while allowing the irresponsible arms trade to continue”, as major arms exporters like Russia and China were not part of it.
Wang said on Friday that any unilateral move to leave the treaty would have a “negative impact in various areas”. He stopped short of naming the United States or its president.
China’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday that it had begun the legal process of joining the treaty, adding that it attached great importance to the issues caused by the illegal sale and misuse of arms, and supported the aims of the ATT in seeking to regulate the international weapons trade.
Wang also spoke out against the possible deployment of ground-launched missiles in the Asia-Pacific region.
According to figures released in May by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the United States is the world’s largest arms exporter, supplying weapons worth 58 per cent more than those of its nearest competitor, Russia.
Together with France, Germany and China, the five nations accounted for 75 per cent of all weapons sold around the world between 2014 and last year, the institute said.
Although China is among the world’s big five arms suppliers, its sales – most of which go to Asia and Oceania – are dwarfed by those of the US, accounting for just 5.2 per cent of the 2014-18 total, compared to America’s 36 per cent.
Several major arms importers, including India, Australia, South Korea and Vietnam, refuse to buy arms from China for political reasons.
Beijing’s decision to join the ATT is in keeping with the image it has sought to present of China as a defender of multilateralism. The stance is also in sharp contrast to the US’ position under Trump, who has repeatedly scrapped multilateral trade agreements in favour of bilateral deals.
Since taking office in 2016, he has withdrawn the US from the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
Military observers said Beijing might seek to pressure on Washington to stay in the deal to try to maintain the strategic and military balance in the region.
Song Zhongping, a Hong Kong-based military affairs commentator, said Beijing might be trying to avoid misuse of conventional weapons.
“Beijing may want to press big exporters, such as the US and Russia, to join the deal because without proper regulations, the risk of illegal trade and misuse of conventional weapons could be running high,” he said.
“This could also threaten regional stability or even trigger unnecessary arms races.”
Adam Ni, a China specialist at Sydney’s Macquarie University, said the treaty would put some limits on the arms trade “but it would not mean that China would not be able to do deals. It will still be able to do [most deals]”.
Retired PLA colonel Yue Gang said the strategy could also improve China’s international reputation.
Source: SCMP
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