01/05/2020
SYDNEY (Reuters) – The Australian government said on Friday it would meet a week ahead of schedule to decide whether to ease social distancing restrictions, as the numbers of new coronavirus infections dwindle and pressure mounts for business and schools to reopen.
Australia has reported about 6,700 cases of the new coronavirus and 93 deaths, well below the levels reported in the United States and Europe. Growth in new infections has slowed to less 0.5% a day, compared to 25% a month ago.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said it was imperative to lift social distancing restrictions as early as possible as 1.5 million people were now on unemployment benefits and the government forecast the unemployment rate to top 10% within months.
“We need to restart our economy, we need to restart our society. We can’t keep Australia under the doona,” Morrison said, using an Australian word for quilt.
Morrison’s government has pledged spending of more than 10% of GDP to boost the economy but the central bank still warns the country is heading for its worst contraction since the 1930s.
With less than 20 new coronavirus cases discovered each day, Morrison said state and territory lawmakers would meet on May 8 – a week earlier than expected – to determine whether to lift restrictions.
“Australians deserve an early mark for the work that they have done,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra.
Australia attributes its success in slowing the spread of COVID-19 to social distancing restrictions imposed in April, including the forced closures of pubs, restaurants and limiting the size of indoor and outdoor gatherings.
Morrison said 3.5 million people had downloaded an app on their smartphones designed to help medics trace people potentially exposed to the virus, though the government is hoping for about 40% of the country’s 25.7 million population to sign up to ensure it is effective.
Cabinet will also decide next week how to restart sport across the country, the prime minister said.
The government says any resumption of sport should not compromise the public health, and recommends a staggered start beginning with small groups that play non-contact contact sport outdoors.
The recommendations suggests Australia’s National Rugby League (NRL) competition may not get permission to restart its competition as soon as many in the sports-mad country would like.
Source: Reuters
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20/02/2020
- Eyeing large profits, Indian manufacturers are scrambling to meet the demand from countries such as China and Malaysia
- But this new focus on exports means the domestic market is being underserved, and substandard masks are hitting shelves
A vendor shows an N95 face mask at medical store in Bhopal, India. Photo: EPA
manufacturers and distributors of surgical face masks are currently in overdrive to meet a surge in global demand for protective gear amid the coronavirus outbreak.
With an eye on enormous profits, these suppliers have turned their focus to exports,
– causing a chronic local shortage of masks due to the relatively lower margins in the domestic market.
Indian manufacturers produce 240 million disposable masks every year, primarily for domestic use, as per the estimates of the Association of Indian Medical Device Industry.
There are no large-scale manufacturers of surgical masks in the country; the landscape is dominated by more than a dozen medium-sized companies with a production capacity of between 20,000 and 100,000 masks a day.
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The production cost of a mask is estimated to be 1 rupee (less than 2 US cents), and masks were sold for 2-4 rupees at retail outlets a month ago. As of this week, the price of a surgical mask has skyrocketed to 15 rupees.
In some regions where there is a shortfall, retail stores are reportedly demanding as much as 50 rupees. Some experts, meanwhile, say exporting masks to coronavirus-threatened Asian countries where masks are in high demand could fetch firms up to US$15 per mask.
China has so far imported over 1.2 billion masks to meet soaring demand, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
Manoj Rajawat – director of Orthosut Biomedical and Engineering Company, which distributed about 500,000 masks every month before the surge in demand – estimates that nearly 90 per cent of masks manufactured in India in recent weeks have been exported to countries such as China,
Malaysia and
Singapore.
“The value of the exported masks could [easily be more than 50] times what it was before the virus outbreak in China,” Rajawat said.
More than 75,000 people have been infected with the coronavirus, the vast majority of them on mainland China, and more than 2,000 patients have died with more than 16,000 staging a full recovery. This includes India’s three cases of infection, which were discovered in Kerala and have since been cured.
To allay fears of a domestic shortage, the Indian government briefly banned exports of masks and protective gear earlier this month, when the country’s first case of coronavirus infection was confirmed. A week later, however, the ban was partially lifted for two- and three-ply masks as the demand for such protective equipment kept rising overseas.
Multiple Indian ministries are closely monitoring the situation, but are reluctant to comment on specific issues beyond releasing official notifications.
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“Indian manufacturers have exponentially increased their production of masks. With the government lifting the restrictions on exports, [these firms] are also catering to international demand, somewhat focusing more on exports as it seems more beneficial,” said Vivek Tiwari, chief executive of Medikabazaar, a business-to-business online platform for medical supplies and equipment.
However, experts and observers such as Prasad Danave, president of the Retail and Dispensing Chemist Association, say Indian manufacturers are not equipped to deal with the sudden demand for such large quantities.
“I talked to one of the manufacturers and his capacity to produce disposable masks is 20,000 pieces per day. Suddenly, two purchasers approached him asking for 2 million masks and 5 million masks respectively. It is impossible to cater to such a need immediately,” Danave said.
A police officer in Kochi, India wears a face mask amid fears of the coronavirus outbreak. Photo: EPA
The N95 respirator, an industrial-purpose face mask, is in huge demand as people seek to protect themselves from the coronavirus. Alcohol-based hand sanitisers are also flying off shelves, while there are also concerns of panic buying and shopkeepers hyping up demand for their products to capitalise on the situation.
Abhay Pandey is the national president of the All Food and Drug Licence Holder Foundation, an industry organisation which represents about 7,000 pharmaceutical suppliers across India. He said vendors are distributing substandard face masks to domestic consumers due to a shortage of production time given the increased demand, as well as the lack of a credible mechanism to ensure standards.
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“There’s a micro-filter which is usually fitted between two layers in the three-ply face masks used by doctors during surgical procedures. Now, the suppliers are preparing substandard face masks without this filter for the Indian market, and for exports they’re sending the good quality ones,” Pandey said.
Mask makers in China, the world’s largest producer of face masks, are currently operating at 76 per cent capacity, National Development and Reform Commission official Cong Liang said at a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday.
This means they are producing about 15.2 million masks daily but demand is estimated to be between 50 and 60 million units, according to Chinese media reports citing mainland mask manufacturers.
Source: SCMP
Posted in Alcohol-based hand sanitisers, All Food and Drug Licence Holder Foundation, ASEAN, Asian demand, Association of Indian Medical Device Industry, Bhopal, China, coronavirus outbreak, Cruise Ship, foreign ministers, India’s, Japan, Makers, Malaysia, Medikabazaar, meet, Ministry of Commerce, National Development and Reform Commission, Orthosut Biomedical and Engineering Company, Police officer, quarantine, scientist, Singapore, surgical mask, Uncategorized |
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22/12/2019
BEIJING (Reuters) – The spectre of new confrontation between Pyongyang and Washington hangs over meetings between China, Japan and South Korea this week, with growing risks North Korean actions could end an uneasy detente and upend recent diplomatic efforts.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe are expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping separately on Monday. They will then travel to the southwestern city of Chengdu for a trilateral meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. Though they are expected to discuss various economic matters, North Korea appears likely to dominate the agenda.
Pyongyang has grown increasingly frustrated that its halt of nuclear and long-range missile tests has not ended the crippling economic sanctions against it. It set a Dec. 31 deadline for the United States to make concessions, but Washington has been unmoved.
Some experts believe North Korea may be readying to test an intercontinental ballistic missile launch soon, which would likely end the 2018 agreement struck by its leader, Kim Jong Un, and U.S. President Donald Trump.
“Safeguarding the stability and peace of the Korean Peninsula and pushing for a political solution to the Korean Peninsula issue are in the interests of China, Japan and South Korea,” Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Luo Zhaohui told reporters on Thursday at a briefing on the trilateral meetings.
U.S. special envoy for North Korea Stephen Biegun met with two senior Chinese diplomats during his two-day visit to Beijing this week, following similar meeting in South Korea and Japan days earlier, as diplomats make last-ditch attempts to prevent new confrontation.
North Korea has not responded to his public call to resume dialogue, however.
“The silence, even after Biegun’s speech in Seoul, makes me concerned,” Jenny Town, managing editor at the North Korea monitoring website 38 North, said on Twitter.
Beijing, jointly with Russia, proposed on Monday that the United Nations Security Council lift some sanctions in what it calls an attempt to break the current deadlock and seeks to build support. But it’s unclear whether Beijing can convince Seoul and Tokyo to break ranks from Washington, which has made its opposition clear and can veto any resolution.
Though South Korea sees China as instrumental in reviving negotiations, it has so far sidestepped questions on whether it supports the new proposal by Beijing and Moscow. Japan, which has historically been a staunch supporter of sanctions against North Korea, has also refrained from commenting on the proposal.
“With the (2020 Tokyo) Olympics coming up, North Korea going wild would pose a problem for Japan,” said Narushige Michishita, professor at Japan’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
“But bilateral talks with North Korea, for example, will probably be a better approach for Japan than easing UN sanctions.”
Source: Reuters
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02/11/2019
- Chinese academics and young scientists join global scientific elite to explore frontiers of research
- International joint laboratory announced at Shanghai forum
More than three dozen Nobel Prize winners for science were among the gathering in Shanghai for the second annual forum of the World Laureates Association. Photo: Xinhua
Shanghai hosted one of the largest gatherings of Nobel laureates in the world last week, with 44 Nobel Prize-winning scientists in the city for a government-sponsored forum with the lofty goal of discussing science and technology for the “common destiny of mankind”.
The four-day forum, which brought together young Chinese scientists and the cream of the international scientific crop, was a signal of China’s ambitions for its own researchers to take their place at the forefront of development and bring home their own prizes.
Experts agreed the event – the second in an annual “World Laureates Forum” – was hardly a public relations stunt, but a testament to China’s deep-seated, steadfast desire to learn from the world’s top scientists and join them, and their home countries, as leaders on the frontier of science and produce regular home-grown contenders for top prizes.
“The Nobel Prize is the holy grail for China, and it is still quite elusive for Chinese indigenous scientists to be awarded this prestigious recognition,” said Chengxin Pan, an associate professor of international relations at Australia’s Deakin University. “You could say China has a Nobel Prize complex.”
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Becoming a leader in the sciences was more than just an issue of driving economic expansion through technology and innovation, it was a matter of national preservation with deep roots in Chinese history, Pan said.
“China sees the lack of power, lack of scientific achievements and modern technology as largely responsible for the backwardness and humiliation it suffered during much of the 19th century and early 20th century,” he said.
“They need to make up for lagging behind by engaging with the top leading scientists in the world, wherever they are from.”
To that end, celebrated theoretical physicists, organic chemists, neuroscientists and biologists joined Chinese academics and youth scientists for the conference organised by the Shanghai city government and an association of top global scientists known as the World Laureates Association.
Among them were 2019 Nobel Prize for physics laureates Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, as well as winners of other top prizes including the Wolf Prize, Lasker Award, and Fields Medal for mathematics. Discussions included the latest breakthroughs in disease prevention and drug development, sustainability and new energy, aerospace and black holes, as well as what drives their scientific curiosity.
Swiss professor Michel Mayor, astrophysicist and director of the Geneva Observatory, was one of the co-winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in physics and among the attendees at the forum in Shanghai. Photo: EPA-EFE
The event, which culminated with the announcement of an international joint research laboratory for the world’s top scientists, to be established in Shanghai, was lauded by President Xi Jinping in an open letter to the attendees.
“China attaches great importance to the development of the frontier fields of science and technology,” Xi said, stressing China’s willingness to “work with all countries of the world” to “address the challenges of our age”.
The high calibre meeting was a rare opportunity for China to broadcast its message of commitment to scientific advancement, at a time when the reputation of its universities, academics and hi-tech companies have been taking a broad hit as part of a blowback from the US-China trade and tech wars, as well as suspicion among Western countries of China’s geopolitical aims.
In the past year, a number of major global Chinese tech companies, including Huawei and Hikvision, have been blacklisted in the US, while US tech giants like Google and Apple noticeably skipped out on China’s annual state-run World Internet Conference last month. Academic ties between Chinese and Western universities have also been called into question over suspicions of espionage, fraud, and intellectual property theft.
“China is saying we are still open for business and, at this juncture, we more warmly welcome foreign scientists and collaboration between countries in science and technology,” said Zhu Tian, an economics professor at the Chinese Europe International Business School in Shanghai.
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The past decade has seen China advance rapidly in the sciences. A surge in government funding, along with successive top level strategies to build up science and tech – including the Made in China 2025 innovation blueprint – and a significant uptick in international collaborations, have propelled the nation on to the global scientific stage.
Recent developments, like the first successful landing of a probe on the far side of the moon earlier this year, the dominance of the 5G network technology created by China’s Huawei, and the opening of the world’s largest radio telescope in Guizhou in 2017, have also raised the country’s profile in emerging tech and science.
But, so far, China’s rising visibility as a scientific powerhouse has been largely driven by scale. A June report by the journal Nature found researchers affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences contributed the greatest number of “high-quality natural sciences research” to international journals compared with their peers at other institutions, while last month the journal found the top four “fastest rising” new universities for research output were all from mainland China.
“To some in the outside world, China is already a powerhouse in innovation … but in terms of the quality of innovations or scientific research, China still lags behind developed countries like the US, UK or Switzerland,” Zhu said.
Despite “making the fastest progress among all countries”, and significant leaps as a developing nation, “China is not at the frontier of technology or science yet,” he said, which is why international engagement, like the recent summit, is key to China’s growth.
“In order to catch up you have to know what is the frontier, you have to learn from those who are at the frontier.”
It is a point further underlined by the numerous blog posts and widely circulated articles in Chinese media about China’s meagre Nobel track record. Apart from one celebrated exception – 2015 Nobel laureate for medicine Tu Youyou – Chinese-born scientists who have won the prize did so for their work in overseas laboratories, or after changing citizenship.
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Tu was the People’s Republic of China’s first Nobel Prize winner in the sciences and the country’s first woman to win the prize in any category.
Among China’s other Nobel laureates in the sciences are 1957 physics prizewinners Li Zhengdao and Yang Chen-ning, who won their award while in the US, having left China before the Communist Party takeover in 1949. Both later became US citizens. In 2017,
relinquishing his US citizenship to become a Chinese citizen.
China has worked hard to reverse the damage of brain drain, for example with its flagship “Thousand Talents” programme, a high-profile, state-backed recruitment drive set up in 2008 to attract overseas Chinese students and academics back to China with generous funding.
But reaching the frontiers of science, and making Nobel-worthy advancements, will also require China to do some reshuffling of its domestic priorities, which have been heavy on producing innovations in applied sciences and tech, but lighter on the basics – like physics, chemistry, and biology – whose mysteries are probed by the leading labs around the developed world.
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“China in the past has been known as a place for incremental innovation, and not the place where really radical innovation and big breakthroughs have come from, but they don’t want to be tinkering at the margins, they want to be a major innovation powerhouse,” said Andrew Kennedy, an associate professor in the policy and governance programme at the Australian National University.
To change this, China has begun to raise investment in basic sciences, Kennedy said, pointing to National Bureau of Statistics figures which indicate an average spending increase of more than 20 per cent each year between 1995 to 2016. Even so, spending at the end of that period – some US$11.9 billion at market rates – still lagged well below the figure cited for the US in 2015, which rang up US$83.5 billion, he said.
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The gathering of science laureates itself was further indication of that shift to place more emphasis on basic sciences, the kinds of disciplines the laureates lead, and could be a major boost to that agenda, according to Naubahar Sharif, associate professor of social science and public policy at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
“This [event] is a rocket-propelled, massive injection of scientific power into one place, and China has ambitions to gear up their own scientists to this level,” Sharif said, “and I’m sure the local Chinese scientists have been prepped to take advantage of it.”
While China has work to do in pushing back on criticism of questionable practices in intellectual property transfer, or the extent to which they share their own advances with others, collaboration with leading scientists is a crucial part of China’s “long-haul” vision in the sciences, Sharif said.
“If you rub shoulders with the most prestigious scientists of your era, your local scientists will learn something, and there’s going to be knowledge exchange and making linkages and a start to partnerships,” he said.
“This is the way that getting to that frontier can be achieved.”
Source: SCMP
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02/10/2019
- The trip comes amid growing resistance from European leaders over what they see as China’s failure to change long-term practices unfair to foreign investors
- French President’s trip to Beijing follows Chinese leader’s visit to France in March
President Emmanuel Macron of France speaks to the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly on Tuesday. Photo: AFP
French President Emmanuel Macron will visit China next month as Europe’s most diplomatically active leader focuses on climate change cooperation and trade promotion with Asia’s leading power, a source briefed on the Elysee Palace’s discussions said.
This will be the second Chinese tour for Macron since he took office in 2017, and it will come amid escalating resistance from European politicians and business communities over what they see as China’s failure to change long-standing practices unfair to foreign investors.
His visit also comes at a time when France – as well as the European Union as a whole – is bracing for Washington’s potential levies of tariffs on European products, and the lack of progress on climate change policies with US President Donald Trump’s administration.
“President Macron will meet President Xi [Jinping], while France strives for better cooperation with China on climate and trade,” the source said. “His itinerary is still in the pipeline, but he is expected to visit Beijing and Shanghai.”
Macron, 41, who is widely seen as emerging as Europe’s most aggressive leader filling the political vacuum left by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s political twilight, has cast himself as an honest broker between Russia and Ukraine, and between the US and Iran.
He has also been critical of China’s influence in Europe, joining forces with Merkel to push for a tougher EU stance on the world’s second biggest economy.
In March, when Xi claimed a major diplomatic victory by clinching a memorandum of understanding with Italy on the Belt and Road Initiative, Macron declared: “The time of European naivety is ended. For many years we had an uncoordinated approach and China took advantage of our divisions.”
Macron also backed investment screening mechanisms for Chinese business moves in Europe, while endorsing plans to change the EU’s notoriously strict antitrust rules in order to facilitate mergers between large European groups and companies to counter Chinese companies’ global ambitions.
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The EU is also wary of China’s effort to “divide and rule” the European Union. Greece and Hungary – both recipients of large amounts of Chinese investments – have repeatedly wanted to water down EU’s stance on issues deemed sensitive to Beijing, including the South China Sea and China’s human rights violations.
“It would be good [for Macron] to stress that 17+1 is irritating,” said Joerg Wuttke, president of EU Chamber of Commerce in China, in reference to China’s engagement with a group of EU and non-EU member states in eastern and southeastern Europe.
“After all, the EU has a ‘one China’ policy, [so] EU could expect this position from China too.”
Macron’s domestic call for EU unity has translated into diplomatic appeals, with China being one of the targets.
(From left) Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission; Xi Jinping, China’s leader; Emmanuel Macron, France’s president; and Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, ahead of a meeting in Paris on March 26. Photo: Christophe Morin/Bloomberg
When Xi visited France in March, Macron hosted him at the Elysee Palace in the presence of Merkel and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, showcasing European solidarity when it comes to EU-China policies.
In terms of French-Chinese bilateral ties, trade imbalances have persisted after Macron called for a “rebalancing” during his last visit.
France has a 1.4 per cent market share in China, compared with China’s 9 per cent market share in France. China represents France’s largest bilateral trade deficit, totalling €US$29.2 billion (US$31.9 billion) last year, ahead of Germany.
The EU has been calling for reciprocal investment treatment with China, a call that European business leaders in China expect Macron to make.
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“We [Europe] need … a solid investment agreement to allow EU business to conduct their affairs in a similar manner as Chinese companies can operate in Europe. The agreement should be finalised in 2020, but not at all cost,” said Wuttke.
“The last thing EU business needs in China is a weak agreement that institutionalises imbalances,” he added.
Part of that involves building “more efficient defensive tools to prevent abusive technology transfers and to address the deep asymmetry in EU-China relations when it comes to access to public procurement markets,” said Mathieu Duchâtel, director of Asia programme at the Paris-based think tank Institut Montaigne.
Duchâtel added that it was also important to convey the message to Beijing that there are areas for cooperation even amid a more defensive China policy from France.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and French leader Emmanuel Macron toast raise a toast during a state dinner in Paris on March 25. Photo: EPA-EFE
One such area is the climate and environment, where China is “an important partner” for France to reach its goal of global carbon neutrality by 2050, he said.
“The energy/environment agenda is a political priority in Paris and one of very few issues on which cooperation with China remains promising and will continue to create business opportunities,” he said.
China is the world’s biggest carbon polluter, producing around 30 per cent of the planet’s man-made carbon dioxide. It remains committed to the 2015 Paris accord on climate change, even after Trump pulled the US out of the deal.
Under the agreement, the long-term temperature goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C.
Source: SCMP
Posted in Angela Merkel, Beijing, Belt and Road Initiative, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), building peace, Carbon dioxide, carbon polluter, China alert, climate change, Council of Europe, courage, deep asymmetry, divide and rule, energy/environment agenda, EU, EU Chamber of Commerce in China, European Commission, European Commission President, European Union, focus, France, German Chancellor, Greece, human rights violations, Hungary, imbalances, institutionalises, INVESTMENTS, iran, Italy, Jacques Chirac, Jean-Claude Juncker, meet, Memorandum of understanding, Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), month, one-China policy, Paris, Planet, political twilight, recipients, South China Sea, technology transfers, Trade, Uncategorized, US, US President Donald Trump, Xi JinPing |
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12/05/2019
KIEV, May 11 (Xinhua) — Ukraine’s president-elect Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday met with Chinese Ambassador to Ukraine Du Wei in Kiev to discuss bilateral cooperation.
During the talks, Zelensky said that he attaches particular importance to Ukraine’s relations with China and wants to learn from China’s success of development.
Zelensky said cooperation between the two countries has great prospects, since Ukraine has a number of advantages — a favorable geographical position, rich resources and a large number of highly qualified personnel.
After assuming the office, the president-elect pledged to take all necessary measures to protect the legitimate rights and interests of all foreign investors including the Chinese investors.
Zelensky called on Chinese businessmen to invest more actively in the construction of factories in Ukraine and develop cooperation in such areas as deep processing of agricultural products, information technology, green energy, digitalization and others.
For his part, Du said that China and Ukraine have been developing friendly relations and cooperating with each other under the Belt and Road Initiative.
Du hopes that cooperation between the two countries would achieve new breakthroughs and tremendous success during the presidential tenure of Zelensky.
Zelensky was elected as the sixth president of Ukraine on April 21, and he is expected to take office no later than June 3.
Source: Xinhua
Posted in Chinese ambassador, cooperation, Du Wei, Kiev, meet, president-elect, Ukraine, Uncategorized, Volodymyr Zelensky |
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CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 