The next few months before the U.S. presidential election on November 3 will be a high-risk period for Sino-U.S. relations as Donald Trump will do anything to win his reelection. The possibility of the Trump administration resorting to military conflict against China can't be ruled out. Trump's China policy has no bottom line. He is likely to announce a diplomatic break-off with China because one of his election strategies is to constantly provoke China.
In the wake of the border conflict between China and India in the Galwan Valley, both the Indian government and a group of Indian individuals have clearly demonstrated their vehement ultra-nationalist zeal and extreme Sinophobia. This type of Sinophobic zealotry is attempting to exacerbate a simple border conflict into economic decoupling. After some Indian nationalists advocated boycotting Chinese goods, surprisingly, the Indian government was soon infected by their irrationality to and abused the concept of "national security" to ban 106 Chinese apps. New Delhi moved even further and irresponsibly disallowed Chinese companies to participate in road construction projects in India.
The US President Donald Trump recently announced his intention to ban the Chinese short-video platform TikTok in the US. He was about to give another "signature show" to the world, by signing an order to ban the app, and again reveling in condescending sentiment. The news has been making headlines across the world, but what's lurking behind his hatred of TikTok? The reasons are nothing new: they're all about his cliché concerns over national security. Trump accuses TikTok of posing a "national security" threat to the US, but without any proof.
Trump said on Monday that TikTok would be banned in the US unless it is bought by Microsoft or another company by September 15, and suggested the US Treasury should get a cut from the deal. Although it is unclear what amount Trump is referring to, his statement is a clear departure from market principles and a threat to the US business environment. According to US news outlets, Trump said on Monday that he is expecting "a very substantial portion" of the price of a potential deal as they are "making it possible for this deal to happen."
The Trump administration's crackdown on TikTok is another step in a new cold war against China. While US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that the US was targeting the Communist Party of China (CPC), the White House is actually going on the offensive against Chinese companies - especially private ones. Over the past few years, TikTok has become a US company. Its management team is made up entirely of Americans who would never risk breaking US laws for the benefit of the CPC.
The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee clearly pointed out that "since many problems we face are long- and medium-term, resolving such problems is like fighting a protracted war," during a meeting held on Thursday. It has been 82 years since Mao Zedong wrote On Protracted War in June 1938. At that time, China was at its worst time during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931-45) and almost subjugated by Japan.
Last Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he would invoke emergency powers to ban TikTok - the hottest social media app in the U.S. currently and known for being a major platform where Gen. Z posts popular online memes and lip-sync videos. The Trump administration said the app needs to be banned because its Chinese parent company ByteDance is in a position to surveil and steal American users' personal data. President Trump has since flip-flopped on the threat and has given the Chinese internet giant 45 days to negotiate a sale of the app to Microsoft, or face a shutdown of its U.S. operation, according to Reuters.
Microsoft on Sunday revealed that it is in talks to buy some operations of Chinese video app TikTok after US President Donald Trump said late last week that he plans to ban the app from the US. Such a ban would be an act of “economic gangsterism,” John Ross, a senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute, Renmin University of China, told Sputnik.
China will achieve the task of completely eradicating absolute poverty in 2020. China's achievements in poverty reduction have attracted worldwide attention. "China News" will focus on a number of measures on poverty reduction in Chinese characters and explore decisive strategies for poverty alleviation. The first episode “To tackle the ‘two worries and three guarantees’ together to make up the outstanding weak points” was launched on August 2, 2020. John Ross, a senior fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China (RDCY), said that China's poverty reduction is the greatest contribution to mankind worldwide.
The European Union (EU)'s sanctions on China over the Hong Kong affairs are a "symbolic gesture" to strike a balance between Washington and Beijing, as the measures will only have a limited impact on Hong Kong, observers noted. However, they warned that the EU should carefully watch its further steps, and avoid tilting to the US, especially as US elections are approaching, because any further provocation against China will only undermine the basis of China-EU relations, which are hailed as a model of pragmatic international relations, and sabotage the bloc's time-honored diplomatic independence.
Digital currency should substitute all currencies as much as possible to support profound monetary operation reforms, an influencer in China's financial sector said over the weekend. The push for digital currency might start with positioning it as a substitute for M0, or cash in circulation, but it shouldn't be confined to such substitution; otherwise, its market competitiveness could be problematic.
Color televisions became the latest victim of the Indian government's bid to remove Chinese business from Indian market, following restrictions on Chinese apps and contractors. But Chinese manufacturers said they have not felt any impact yet, and there have not been any disruptions to their delivery of color television sets.
The article is an excerpt of Martin Jacques's webinar lecture on July 25 titled "A new cold war against China is against the interests of humanity." Jacques is former senior fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum on July 23 ratcheted up the hostility of the Trump administration’s China policy, as he explicitly identified the Communist Party of China as the target of U.S. rhetoric. A day earlier, the U.S. abruptly ordered China to close its consulate in Houston, Texas, prompting the latter to retaliate by ordering the U.S. to close its consulate in Chengdu, Sichuan province. A very dangerous “spiral of confrontation” is evidently taking shape in China-U.S. relations, with some people talking about an unfolding “new cold war” between the countries. Others worry a hot one may occur.
Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Monday said that "non-alignment was a term of a particular era and geopolitical landscape" but New Delhi will never be part of an alliance. He said global shifts were opening spaces for middle powers including India. "But countries who depended more on the US are finding they have to take a call themselves on many issues," he noted.
Countries better prepared to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic from a healthcare perspective were less likely to need a strong economic response, which is a link that needed to be acknowledged, an Italian expert said. Antonio Villafranca, research coordinator and co-head of the Italian Institute for International Political Studies' Europe and Global Governance Centre, said when the coronavirus outbreak hit Europe he and his colleagues were asked by European governments to look at economic remedies.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is expected to engage in more areas beyond infrastructure investment, in order to leverage additional funds from the private sector globally and boost the post-pandemic recovery, analysts said. Green financing and the digital economy are expected to be listed in the development goals of the AIIB, experts told China Daily on Wednesday after the conclusion of the bank's fifth annual meeting.
On July 30, a number of people from many countries in CCTV News believed that the speech delivered by President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremony of the video conference of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was instructive to the development of the AIIB and expected the AIIB to become a new model of multilateral cooperation to promote common global development. John Ross, a senior fellow of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China (RDCY), spoke highly of the AIIB, saying that the AIIB has a very important mission and that the increasing membership of the AIIB is a reflection of the willingness and needs of all parties.
China's Ambassador to the US posed a very simple question: "Is the US ready or willing to live with another country with a very different culture, a very different political and economic system ... in peace?" The answer to this question must be that despite the intentions of the US rulers, the people must opt for peace. For the Black liberation and anti-imperialist movement in the US, we are clear - War is a class issue and we say not one drop of blood from the Black working class and poor to defend the capitalist oligarchy.
Imports from the US have made steady progress in recent months, yet joint efforts from firms on both sides are still needed for the phase one trade agreement to overcome the difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, said a Chinese official. In the first half of the year, China's trade with the US plunged in contrast to the overall upbeat trend in China's foreign trade. Bilateral trade denominated in the yuan dropped 6.6 percent in the first half year-on-year. China's imports from the US were down 1.5 percent to 395.62 billion yuan ($56.49 billion) in January-June, according to China's General Administration of Customs.