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.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump signaled a further deterioration of his relationship with China over the coronavirus outbreak, saying he has no interest in speaking to President Xi Jinping right now and going so far as to suggest he could even cut ties with the world’s second largest economy.
In an interview with Fox Business Network broadcast on Thursday, Trump said he was very disappointed with China’s failure to contain the disease and that the pandemic had cast a pall over his January trade deal with Beijing, which he has previously hailed as a major achievement.
“They should have never let this happen,” Trump said. “So I make a great trade deal and now I say this doesn’t feel the same to me. The ink was barely dry and the plague came over. And it doesn’t feel the same to me.”
Trump’s pique extended to Xi, with whom the U.S. president has said repeatedly he has a good relationship.
“But I just – right now I don’t want to speak to him,” Trump said in the interview, which was taped on Wednesday.
Trump was asked about a Republican senator’s suggestion that U.S. visas be denied to Chinese students applying to study in fields related to national security, such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence.
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“There are many things we could do. We could do things. We could cut off the whole relationship,” he replied.
“Now, if you did, what would happen? You’d save $500 billion,” Trump said, referring to estimated U.S. annual imports from China, which he often refers to as lost money.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing on Friday that maintaining a steady bilateral relationship served the interests of both peoples and would be beneficial for world peace and stability.
“Both China and the U.S. should now be cooperating more on fighting the virus together, to cure patients and resume economic production, but this requires the U.S. to want to work with us on this,” Zhao said.
Trump’s remarks drew ridicule from Hu Xijin, editor in chief of China’s influential Global Times tabloid, who referred to the president’s much-criticized comments last month about how COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, might be treated.
“This president once suggested COVID-19 patients inject disinfectants,” Hu said on Twitter. “Remember this and you won’t be surprised when he said he could cut off the whole relationship with China.”
CONCERNED, REVIEWING OPTIONS
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Fox Business Network China needed to provide a lot more information about the coronavirus and Trump was reviewing his options.
“The president is concerned. He’s reviewing all his options. Obviously, we’re very concerned about the impact of this virus on the economy, on American jobs, the health of the American public and the president is going to do everything to protect the economy and protect American workers,” Mnuchin said.
“It’s a difficult and complex matter and the president has made very clear, he wants more information. They didn’t let us in, they didn’t let us understand what was going on.”
Trump and his Republican backers have accused Beijing of failing to alert the world to the severity and scope of the coronavirus outbreak and of withholding data about the earliest cases. The pandemic has sparked a sharp global recession and threatened Trump’s November re-election chances.
The United States has been hardest hit by the pandemic, according to official data.
China insists it has been transparent, and, amid increasingly bitter exchanges, both sides have questioned the future of the trade deal.
Opponents of Trump have said that while China has much to answer for over the outbreak, he appears to be seeking to deflect attention from criticism over his response to the crisis.
Scott Kennedy of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank called Trump’s remarks “dangerous bravado.”
“Avoiding communication is not an effective strategy for solving a crisis that requires global cooperation. And cutting off the economic relationship would badly damage the American economy,” he said.
Michael Pillsbury, a China analyst who has worked as an outside adviser to Trump, told Reuters he believed the president was concerned that China not only wanted to re-negotiate the Phase 1 deal, but also had not been meeting goals in purchasing from United States.
He said that according to figures cited by the China Daily, China’s purchases of U.S. products in the first four months of this year were 3% less than during the same period last year.
“It’s not good news for reducing the trade deficit or helping our economy recover from the coronavirus crisis,” he said.
China took some additional steps towards the Phase 1 goals on Thursday, buying U.S. soybean oil for the first time in nearly two years and issued customs notices allowing imports of U.S. barley and blueberries.
An executive from Chinese state agriculture trading house COFCO said China was set to speed up purchases of U.S. farm goods to implement the Phase 1 deal.
While U.S. intelligence agencies have said the coronavirus does not appear manmade or genetically modified, Trump said in his interview that China should have stopped it at its source.
“Whether it came from the lab or came from the bats, it all came from China, and they should have stopped it,” he said.
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s factory activity likely rose for a second straight month in April as more businesses re-opened from strict lockdowns implemented to contain the coronavirus outbreak, which has now paralysed the global economy.
The official manufacturing Purchasing Manager’s Index (PMI), due for release on Thursday, is forecast to fall to 51 in April, from 52 in March, according to the median forecast of 32 economists polled by Reuters. A reading above the 50-point mark indicates an expansion in activity.
While the forecast PMI would show a slight moderation in China’s factory activity growth, it would be a stark contrast to recent PMIs in other economies, which plummeted to previously unimaginable lows.
That global slump, caused by heavy government-ordered lockdowns, as well as the cautious resumption of business in China, suggests any recovery in the world’s second-largest economy is likely to be some way off.
“The recovery so far has been led by a bounce-back in production, however, the growth bottleneck has decisively shifted to the demand side, as global growth has weakened and consumption recovery has lagged amid continued social distancing,” Morgan Stanley said in a note.
“The expected slump in external demand has likely capped further recovery in industrial production.”
The latest official data showed 84% of mid-sized and small business had reopened as of April 15, compared with 71.7% on March 24.
Hobbled by the coronavirus, China’s economy shrank 6.8% in the first quarter from a year earlier, the first contraction since current quarterly records began.
That has left Chinese manufacturers with reduced export orders and a logistics logjam, as many exporters grapple with rising inventory, high costs and falling profits. Some have let workers go as part of the cost-cutting efforts.
A China-based brokerage Zhongtai Securities estimated that the country’s real unemployment rate, measured using international standards, could exceed 20%, equal to more than 70 million job losses and much higher than March’s official reading of 5.9%.
Sheng Laiyun, deputy head at the statistics bureau, said on Sunday migrant workers and college graduates are facing increasing pressures to secure jobs, while official jobless surveys show nearly 20% of employed workers not working in March.
Chinese authorities have rolled out more support to revive the economy. The People’s Bank of China earlier in April cut the amount of cash banks must hold as reserves and reduced the interest rate on lenders’ excess reserves.
Image copyright GETTY IMAGESImage caption The Chinese city of Wuhan recently lifted its strict quarantine measures
The Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus originated last year, has raised its official Covid-19 death toll by 50%, adding 1,290 fatalities.
Wuhan officials attributed the new figure to updated reporting and deaths outside hospitals. China has insisted there was no cover-up.
It has been accused of downplaying the severity of its virus outbreak.
Wuhan’s 11 million residents spent months in strict lockdown conditions, which have only recently been eased.
The latest official figures bring the death toll in the city in China’s central Hubei province to 3,869, increasing the national total to more than 4,600.
China has confirmed nearly 84,000 coronavirus infections, the seventh-highest globally, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
What’s China’s explanation for the rise in deaths?
In a statement released on Friday, officials in Wuhan said the revised figures were the result of new data received from multiple sources, including records kept by funeral homes and prisons.
Deaths linked to the virus outside hospitals, such as people who died at home, had not previously been recorded.
Media caption Learn how Wuhan dealt with the lockdown
The “statistical verification” followed efforts by authorities to “ensure that information on the city’s Covid-19 epidemic is open, transparent and the data [is] accurate”, the statement said.
It added that health systems were initially overwhelmed and cases were “mistakenly reported” – in some instances counted more than once and in others missed entirely.
A shortage of testing capacity in the early stages meant that many infected patients were not accounted for, it said.
A spokesman for China’s National Health Commission, Mi Feng, said the new death count came from a “comprehensive review” of epidemic data.
In its daily news conference, the foreign ministry said accusations of a cover-up, which have been made most stridently on the world stage by US President Donald Trump, were unsubstantiated. “We’ll never allow any concealment,” a spokesman said.
Why are there concerns over China’s figures?
Friday’s revised figures come amid growing international concern that deaths in China have been under-reported. Questions have also been raised about Beijing’s handling of the epidemic, particularly in its early stages.
In December 2019, Chinese authorities launched an investigation into a mysterious viral pneumonia after cases began circulating in Wuhan.
China reported the cases to the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN’s global health agency, on 31 December.
But WHO experts were only allowed to visit China and investigate the outbreak on 10 February, by which time the country had more than 40,000 cases.
The mayor of Wuhan has previously admitted there was a lack of action between the start of January – when about 100 cases had been confirmed – and 23 January, when city-wide restrictions were enacted.
Around that time, a doctor who tried to warn his colleagues about an outbreak of a Sars-like virus was silenced by the authorities. Dr Li Wenliang later died from Covid-19.
Wuhan’s death toll increase of almost exactly 50% has left some analysts wondering if this is all a bit too neat.
For months questions have been asked about the veracity of China’s official coronavirus statistics.
The inference has been that some Chinese officials may have deliberately under-reported deaths and infections to give the impression that cities and towns were successfully managing the emergency.
If that was the case, Chinese officials were not to know just how bad this crisis would get in other countries, making its own figures now seem implausibly small.
The authorities in Wuhan, where the first cluster of this disease was reported, said there had been no deliberate misrepresentation of data, rather that a stabilisation in the emergency had allowed them time to revisit the reported cases and to add any previously missed.
That the new death toll was released at the same time as a press conference announcing a total collapse in China’s economic growth figures has led some to wonder whether this was a deliberate attempt to bury one or other of these stories.
Then again, it could also be a complete coincidence.
China has been pushing back against US suggestions that the coronavirus came from a laboratory studying infectious diseases in Wuhan, the BBC’s Barbara Plett Usher in Washington DC reports.
US President Donald Trump and some of his officials have been flirting with the outlier theory in the midst of a propaganda war with China over the origin and handling of the pandemic, our correspondent says.
Mr Trump this week halted funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), accusing it of making deadly mistakes and overly trusting China.
“Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China, and that they have a certain number of cases and a certain number of deaths; does anybody really believe that?” Mr Trump said at the White House on Wednesday.
On Thursday, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said: “We’ll have to ask the hard questions about how [coronavirus] came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier.”
But China has also been praised for its handling of the crisis and the unprecedented restrictions that it instituted to slow the spread of the virus.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 