Preview Newsletter
Project Dory Monitoring 10 August 2017
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Obama warned Trump on North Korea. But Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ strategy wasn’t what Obama aides expected.
Aug 9, 2017 | The Washington Post
By David Nakamura and Anne Gearan
In their first and only meeting, President Obama explicitly warned Donald Trump days after the election about the urgency of North Korea’s nuclear weapons threat. -
Gaps in records cloak China’s North Korean ‘slave labourers’ in mystery
Aug 10, 2017 | South China Morning Post
By Sylvia Yu
It is an open secret that a significant number of North Korean labourers work in China and Russia in border cities, especially in Siberia. But owing to minimal record-keeping, little is known about the workers’ presence or activities -
Bay areas expected to boom
Aug 9, 2017 | Global Times
By Chen Qingqing
The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao integration initiative sets a precedent for other Chinese regions to follow suit and boost their economic growth -
Foreign waste import ban leaves Western nations, Chinese manufacturers in a dilemma
Aug 10, 2017 | Global Times
By Zhang Yu Source
For nearly three decades, China has been the world's biggest importer of waste. Each year, Chinese manufacturers and recyclers import 8 million tons of foreign waste to China to be reused as raw materials for new products. -
Trump’s ‘Fire and Fury’ Threat Raises Alarm in Asia
Aug 9, 2017 | The New York Times
By Steven Lee Myers and Choe Sang-Hun
President Trump’s threat to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea sent a shudder through Asia on Wednesday, raising alarm among allies and adversaries and, to some observers, making the possibility of military conflict over the North’s nuclear program seem more real. -
China urges U.S. to act 'prudently' in aluminum foil dispute
Aug 10, 2017 | Reuters
By Tom Daly
China urged the U.S. government on Thursday to act "prudently" to avoid damaging economic relations between the two countries, in a strongly worded response to Washington's preliminary decision to slap anti-dumping duties on Chinese aluminum foil. -
Exclusive: U.S. destroyer challenges China's claims in South China Sea
Aug 10, 2017 | Reuters
By Idrees Ali
A U.S. Navy destroyer carried out a "freedom of navigation operation" on Thursday, coming within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island built up by China in the South China Sea, U.S. officials told Reuters.
Port Mentions - There are no relevant clips to report at this time.
City/Province Mentions
Competitor Mentions
US - China Relations
Industry News - There are no relevant clips to report at this time.
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Aug 9, 2017 | The Washington Post
By David Nakamura and Anne Gearan
In their first and only meeting, President Obama explicitly warned Donald Trump days after the election about the urgency of North Korea’s nuclear weapons threat.
A few weeks later, it was clear that Obama had made an impression: Trump raised the matter out of the blue in a telephone conversation with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, according to an Asia expert at the State Department who reviewed a transcript.
“What Tsai Ing-wen knows about North Korea could fill a thimble. It’s not the focus of her world,” said the official, who spoke Wednesday on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private call. “But that brought home to me that it really got through to Trump that this was a real problem.”
To a degree that even Obama might not have anticipated, the early warning in the Oval Office last November motivated Trump to elevate North Korea to his chief foreign policy concern — after rarely talking about it during the campaign. Trump’s administration has used diplomacy, economic sanctions and displays of military power in a bid to alter Pyongyang’s calculus over its pursuit of nuclear weapons capable of reaching the continental United States.
Yet it is the increasingly bellicose, often contradictory, rhetoric from Trump himself that has marked the sharpest shift in U.S. policy toward North Korea from previous administrations. Having declared an end to the Obama era of “strategic patience” that focused on isolating Pyongyang, Trump has failed to articulate a clear alternative. He has vacillated between courting China’s help and giving up on Beijing — and between suggesting he is opening to meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and threatening to obliterate his regime.
On Tuesday, Trump vowed in spontaneous remarks not vetted by aides that Pyongyang would be met with unprecedented “fire and fury” if it did not stop its threats — a pledge that some outside the White House interpreted as an allusion to nuclear war.
“That wasn’t what we had in mind,” Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for Obama, said in an interview. “It’s clear that they got the message that this was the principal challenge for them, but they keep making statements that don’t feel like they have been informed by some deliberative process.”
Trump aides sought to tamp down talk of war, saying the president was intent on delivering a stern message “in terms Kim Jong Un would understand,” according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. They emphasized that while the White House remains committed to resolving the matter through diplomatic means, Trump has sent clear directives that the United States must be prepared to defend itself if necessary.
“President Trump was informed of the growing threat last December and on taking office his first orders to me emphasized the readiness of our ballistic missile defense and nuclear deterrent forces,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a statement.
Even as advisers sought to portray a commander in chief with a laserlike focus on North Korea, Trump, who took office with virtually no foreign policy experience, has given the impression of a president who is learning on the job and experimenting with policy through trial and error.
Daniel Russel, who served as Obama’s senior Asian affairs director on the National Security Council, said the U.N. Security Council’s move last week to ban some North Korean exports is a potentially meaningful step that comports with efforts of previous U.S.> administrations.
But Russel added that Trump’s rhetoric is “a departure from the temperate, consistent and balanced statements of past presidents that combined expressions of firm resolve with an openness to peaceful resolution through negotiations. Nobody is going to beat the North Koreans in a hyperbole contest.”
Obama highlighted North Korea in his meeting with Trump two days after the election. Aides who traveled with Obama to an Asia-Pacific economic forum in Peru in late November recalled him saying that Trump seemed to “sit up and take notice.”
The Obama team expected Trump to undertake the sort of deep-dive review and interagency decision-making process that it had employed, Rhodes said. Obama was frequently criticized by Republicans as being too deliberative, or, as Trump called him on the campaign trail, weak and indecisive. But Rhodes said the goal was to produce unity and clarity across the administration, rather than the kind of whipsaw tone and message that has marked the North Korea issue under Trump.
Initially, Trump appeared to think he could outsource the problem to China, a strategy deemed simplistic and naive by foreign policy experts who say Beijing has limited influence with the North and strategic interests that diverge from the United States’.
Leading up to a summit in early April with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in Palm Beach, Fla., Trump bashed Beijing as not doing enough to rein in Kim’s government. But after his conversations with Xi, “I realized it’s not so easy,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think.”
Later that month, Trump continued to try to enlist regional partners in phone calls to Southeast Asian leaders.
In a conversation with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, Trump called Kim “a madman with nuclear weapons,” and he asked Duterte whether Kim was “stable or not stable,” according to a transcript obtained by The Washington Post.
The United States has “a lot of firepower over there,” Trump boasted, including two nuclear submarines ordered to the region by the Pentagon.
But three days later, Trump told Bloomberg News that he would be “honored” to meet Kim “under the right circumstances,” opening the possibility of bilateral or multilateral talks. No sitting U.S. president has met with a North Korean leader.
In another interview with CBS News, Trump called Kim “a pretty smart cookie” and expressed admiration for the North Korean leader’s having assumed power “at a very young age” after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.
“What is alarming to allies and probably confusing to China is that the statements are all over the map,” Rhodes said. “One day we’re conciliatory; the next day we’re threatening ‘fire and fury.’ ”
Trump told Duterte that he hoped “China solves the problem” and encouraged the Philippines leader to talk directly to Xi and “tell him I am counting on him.”
Two months later, however, Trump appeared to lose faith in Beijing. The turning point came after Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was detained in North Korea for 17 months, died days after his release due to injuries suffered in captivity.
“While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out,” Trump wrote in a tweet.
Nine days later, the Treasury Department announced sanctions on the Bank of Dandong, a Chinese entity near the border with North Korea, cutting off its access to U.S. financial markets.
White House aides said Trump’s focus on the issue has already paid dividends, pointing out that China, contrary to its past opposition to broad economic sanctions, voted in support of last week’s U.N. sanctions on North Korea
But Jim Walsh, a nuclear and Asia security expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was skeptical about Trump’s strategy.
“It seems to me that an impromptu nuclear doctrine without having consulted staff or allies is not really a great idea,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-warned-trump-on-north-korea-but-trumps-fire-and-fury-strategy-wasnt-what-obama-aides-expected/2017/08/09/f3f02e0e-7d19-11e7-9d08-b79f191668ed_story.html?utm_term=.37165979838d
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Gaps in records cloak China’s North Korean ‘slave labourers’ in mystery
Aug 10, 2017 | South China Morning Post
By Sylvia Yu
Beijing has almost no public record of the North Korean workers’ presence and activities in China, even as their use sparks UN and US criticism
It is an open secret that a significant number of North Korean labourers work in China and Russia in border cities, especially in Siberia. But owing to minimal record-keeping, little is known about the workers’ presence or activities
The Chinese government has almost no public record of the workers and what they do, even though the use of North Korean labourers in China and Russia has been publicly criticised by the United Nations and US officials, including US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
Go Myong-hyun, a leading researcher with the Asan Institute for Policy Studies who has examined the issue of state-sanctioned North Korean labour, estimates that northeast China has around 20,000 North Korean labourers working mainly in joint ventures for labour-intensive businesses such as clothing manufacturing.
These are low-paying, highly intensive high-turnover rate jobs among the Chinese. But the turnover rate for North Korean labourers is zero,” Go said. “Therefore, it’s more convenient to hire North Koreans over Chinese workers. North Korean labourers generate between US$100 and US$200 million in annual revenue for leader Kim Jong-un’s regime, the researcher said.
On Saturday, the UN imposed new sanctions against North Korea to disrupt crucial sources of hard currency for the North Korean regime, including banning the export of new North Korean workers to countries such as China and Russia and in US-allied Gulf nations such as Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman.
The sanctions, following North Korea’s test-launches of two intercontinental ballistic missiles in recent days, are a hard-line measure aimed at pressuring the isolated regime to end its nuclear weapons development programme. Seafood, coal and iron are among North Korean exports affected by the sanctions. The measures also include bans on new joint ventures with North Korea and on the funding of existing joint ventures upon which the country relies heavily.
Go cited a report he co-wrote in 2014, “Beyond the UN COI Report on Human Rights in DPRK”, which found that 16 countries have made use of North Korean labourers.
Pyongyang cooperates with North Korean businessmen who have pre-existing relationships with business people in China and then works out an agreement for sending North Korean workers there. In China, the workers are controlled and constantly watched by North Korean security agents.
“North Korea does not like to send individual workers. They want to send workers in a bigger group,” Go said. “I suspect it’s more economically efficient to send more workers per security worker.” For instance, they may send a 50-person construction crew to Russia, he said.
Brian Moore, a Pacific Forum CSIS Fellow who has analysed the issue of North Korean illicit funds, said the main function of security personnel dispatched by Pyongyang to watch over North Koreans abroad is to keep an eye out for suspicious behaviour.
“As with any other North Korean who is given permission to go abroad, they have good family backgrounds and have gone through their own security assessments,” he said. “They have the added importance of holding the passports of the labourers.”
In response to the UN sanctions, Go said, one scenario that could play out is that China could send sub-contract manufacturing work to state-owned factories in North Korea. “It’s already happening. That’s one way to evade the sanctions and [sending work to North Korean factories] is not banned,” he said.
In China, some overseas reports said these workers typically work in provinces such as Liaoning and Heilongjiang. But no public record exists that could identify the employers and shed light on how China allows the labourers to enter the country.
There are restaurants in Beijing, Shanghai and some Chinese border cities that are staffed with North Korean waitresses, but information about their operation and the lives of these workers are sketchy.
In addition to labourers, China also has North Koreans studying in its scientific research institutes, raising concerns they could be learning sensitive military technology.
Zhang Huizhi, deputy director at Jilin University’s northeast Asian studies college, said the ban is not likely to pertain to the use of North Koreans currently working in China, but would increase costs for companies that wanted to employ new ones.
“The salary difference between employing a Chinese and a North Korean worker could go up 1,000 yuan (HK$1,167) a month for people who are earning a few thousand yuan every month, which would make a big difference to companies,” Zhang said.
However, she disputed the estimates of overseas researchers. Only small- and medium-sized processing factories near the border would be willing to employ North Koreans, she said, since big corporations in China generally would avoid trouble that could be caused by employing North Koreans.
In China, the government typically sets a quota and then allows some factories to have a certain number of North Korean workers. Some factories only have a few North Koreans working for them.
Zhang said that even without the ban on new workers, the number of North Korean labourers in China is shrinking as many state-run North Korean restaurants – where a number of the labourers are sent to work – shut down across China due to poor business tied to regional tensions.
“North Korea actually is not that keen to send many more of its people out, because the money they earn will not be able to cover the cost of developing the [nation’s] nuclear [weapons] programme anyway,” she said.
International calls for supply chain transparency went out last year following the discovery that the company Rip Curl had ski jackets made in North Korean factories, even though the labels said “Made in China”.
North Korea’s exporting of its labour force extends the regime’s totalitarian control in that the activity is “organised, managed and overseen as a matter of state policy” and clearly violates human rights law, said Go, who interviewed North Korean defectors for his 2014 report on the issue.
“If you compare their working conditions to ILO (International Labour Organisation) standards, they are slaves,” he said.
The state takes the labourers’ earnings directly from the employers and transfers them back to Pyongyang as cash, in violation of past UN sanctions. The workers, who toil up to 20 hours a day with one or two rest days a month, are not allowed to bring along their families. Their wages – around US$120 to US$150 a month – are mostly withheld until the workers return to North Korea. However, some reportedly have asked for cash advances.
Once the labourers work abroad for three years, they are not allowed to leave the country ever again. “North Korean workers are happy to go abroad. Conditions back in North Korea are so horrendous,” Go said. “There are different degrees of human rights violations.”
The UN’s recent sanctions will hurt North Korea’s citizens the most, according to Tim Peters, a prominent advocate of Helping Hands Korea, an NGO that assists North Korean refugees.
“As noble in intent as the UN sanction on North Korean workers in China and Russia may be, one of the unintended consequences will probably be pulling the rug out from beneath the livelihoods of the workers themselves who wait in line and volunteer for these cross-border jobs even at virtual slave wages,” he said.
“It’s a damning commentary on the plight of DPRK citizens that even when 70 to 80 per cent of their foreign wages are skimmed off for the military whims of Kim Jong-un, the paltry remains are better than wages available to them inside the secret state.”
In a separate case, outreach workers in Russia who have spent several years helping North Korean labourers estimate that around 100,000 North Koreans work in eastern Russia. “This figure is going to be in a wide range,” Moore said, adding that labour statistics on North Koreans working abroad are neither published nor commented upon by North Korea, China, or Russia.
“All I know is that the figure is increasing as sanctions become more sophisticated,” he said. “Labour costs in these countries go up, and opportunities shrink in North Korea. Without intervention from the international community, I can definitely see this figure (of North Korean labourers abroad) going up.”
North Korea’s other revenue comes partly from trafficking in weapons, illicit goods and wildlife poaching. Various joint ventures with foreign entities also are sources of hard currency. Its illicit trading partners include Syria, Hezbollah, Libya, Pakistan and Iran.
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2105851/gaps-records-cloak-chinas-north-korean-slave-labourers
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Aug 9, 2017 | Global Times
By Chen Qingqing
The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao integration initiative sets a precedent for other Chinese regions to follow suit and boost their economic growth
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has urged further development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area Initiative highlighted in the 2017 Government Work Report. This reflects the central government's firm support of pushing forward this top-designed and ambitious plan. The initiative, which was first discussed in 2008, now intends to emphasize the region's role in global economic supply chains and is often compared to other bay areas such as those in San Francisco and Tokyo. Some experts have suggested that, after the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is established, more bay areas could also be considered in other Chinese regions. However, not every expert specializing in urbanization and city development agrees with the idea.
When the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area began to take shape, some experts looked beyond this region and suggested that China, like the US and Japan, could have more than one bay area serving as the engines of regional economic growth.
"The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area covers nine cities in the Chinese mainland and two special administrative regions [SARs]. If they can be integrated in spite of different systems, why not unite other regions in the mainland that have more in common [with regard to governance]?" Xu Hongcai, deputy chief economist at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges (CCIEE), asked recently.
This newly established bay area in South China is considered a pioneer, where adjacent metropolitan areas can share and exchange resources, Xu told the Global Times on Monday.
"The bay area's economic growth will outpace other regions, similar to how bay areas in the US and Japan have performed," he said.
The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area encompasses a total population of 100 million, with a GDP volume of over $1.34 trillion, equal roughly to the GDP of South Korea or that of Spain in 2016, China Central Television reported in April.
But bay areas in the US and Japan have different characteristics.
For example, the Tokyo Bay Area is a cluster of industries, which add up to only 3.5 percent of Japan's total land. Nonetheless, it generates one-third of the economy's total GDP, news site tokyodailynews.com reported in April.
Bay areas are growth linchpins and drivers of innovation and can contribute to up to 60 percent of the global economy, according to media reports citing data from the World Bank.
The economic growth of the bay areas in the US outpaced that of the rest of the states for the fifth consecutive year in 2015, San Francisco Chronicle reported in September 2016, citing data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Particularly, Silicon Valley, the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area, has attracted companies from around the world and become a hub of technological innovation.
As these two bay areas are the exemplars of the world, similar Chinese regions could follow suit, such as the Bohai Sea Rim - which encompasses provinces surrounding the Bohai Sea, including North China's Hebei, Northeast China's Liaoning and East China's Shandong provinces - and the Yangtze River Delta Region.
In fact, some related transportation projects, which are seen as first steps in improving connectivity in potential bay areas, have already taken place.
Mega-city cluster
The construction of a high-speed railway line connecting Beijing and Binhai New Area in North China's Tianjin is scheduled to kick off in September. Meanwhile, the feasibility report of another line linking Binhai to Weifang, a city in East China's Shandong Province, has been filed with the authorities, the Guangzhou-based 21st Century Business Herald newspaper reported on August 3.
Recently, local authorities also launched a study on a railway line between Weifang and Yantai, another city in Shandong. The rail transport planning is considered as significant progress in finalizing the Bohai Sea Rim railway, the report noted.
When the transportation network is completed, it will take less than two hours to travel from Tianjin to Qingdao, a port city in Shandong. Meanwhile, a tunnel more than twice the length of the Channel Tunnel underneath Bohai Bay is expected to connect Yantai and Dalian, another port city in Liaoning.
Moreover, another convenient transportation initiative will connect two major economic regions: Jing-Jin-Ji - which stands for "Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei" and is located along the coast of the Bohai Sea - and Shandong.
"It's not the first time that Bohai Sea Rim Bay Area has been pursued. Back in the 1980s, [former top politician] Li Ruihuan advocated for the building of a cooperative system among provinces along the Bohai Sea coast, but nothing ever came of it," Cong Yi, a professor at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Hard to unify
Unlike in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area - which is also the biggest Cantonese-speaking region and a place where Guangdong Province and the two SARs have fostered close business ties over the years - provinces in the Bohai Sea Rim have less in common and less of a relationship, Song Ding, a Shenzhen-based expert from the China Development Institute, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Besides Bohai, another possible bay area is located in the Yangtze Delta Region, also known as the Hangzhou Bay Area initiative, Song noted.
"However, how to distinguish the functions and positions of different cities involved [in the Hangzhou Bay Area initiative] is a tough question to tackle," he said.
Furthermore, East China's Zhejiang Province is piloting a bay area partnership with Shanghai in an aim to build an innovation hub, according to the 21st Century Business Herald. The sea bridge between Shanghai and Ningbo, a port city in Zhejiang, is already improving economic activities in this region.
"To further develop other bay areas in the country, top-designed guidelines are a must-have," Song said.
He also noted that bureaucratic administration, which is reportedly most commonly seen in northern China, would impede the further integration of different regions.
"In the Pearl River Delta region, industries are closely related to each other. For example, electronics manufacturing has a full supply chain in this region," he said, adding that regional integration should be more market-driven rather than an administrative order.
To foster a new bay area, industries should be complementary, Xu, the CCIEE economist, noted. "Some existing projects in Tianjin should not be promoted again in Caofeidian [an industrial zone in Tangshan, Hebei] to avoid wasting time and money," he said.http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1060453.shtml
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Foreign waste import ban leaves Western nations, Chinese manufacturers in a dilemma
Aug 10, 2017 | Global Times
By Zhang Yu Source
For nearly three decades, China has been the world's biggest importer of waste. Each year, Chinese manufacturers and recyclers import 8 million tons of foreign waste to China to be reused as raw materials for new products.
While the waste produces health and environmental problems, these issues have long been overshadowed by the economic interests of both China and the exporting nations, which are mostly in the West. While recycling raw materials has helped Chinese firms save money, it has also helped Western countries earn money and solve their garbage problem.
So when China recently told the WTO that it will ban 24 types of solid waste imports before the year's end in order to protect its citizens' health and safety, the global recycling industry was left wondering: If China will no longer accept the globe's garbage, where will it all go?
Western countries devastated
The West's plastic recycling is dependent on China. A total of 87 percent of Europe's waste plastic, for example, ends up in China. Globally, 56 percent of waste plastic is exported to China, according to a report by the International Solid Waste Association. Even developing countries, such as Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia, re-export reprocessed imports and domestically collected plastic scrap to China, the reports says.
Dependence on a single importer can be risky, and that risk is now looming as China plans to shut its doors to foreign waste.
The 24 types of waste that are banned this time include plastic waste from living sources, toxic vanadium slag, unsorted waste paper and waste textile materials which are environmentally hazardous.
"Most of them used to be on the 'restricted' list of China's import regulations, and this time they are banned," said Liu Jianguo, a professor specializing in solid waste management at Tsinghua University.
Apart from environmentally hazardous solid waste, China will also ban imports of solid waste that can be replaced by domestic resources by the end of 2019, according to the State Council.
For the recycling industry overseas, it's a nightmare scenario.
Robin Wiener, president of the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a Washington-based trade association, said in a statement that China's ban will be "catastrophic" to the US recycling industry, which transforms obsolete materials into secondary raw materials before they are exported to China.
"With more than $5.6 billion in scrap commodities exported from the United States to China last year alone, the trade in specification-grade commodities - metals, paper and plastics - between the United States and China is of critical importance to the health and success of the United States based recycling industry. If implemented, a ban on scrap imports will result in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs and closure of many recycling businesses throughout the United States," he said.
Arnaud Brunet, director general of the Bureau of International Recycling (BIR), a Belgium-based NGO, expressed a similar concern, saying the impact of the ban will be "devastating." In a letter to the WTO, BIR called for China to reconsider its decision.
"This ban, if implemented, will have a serious impact on the global recycling industry which has, in the last 25 years, supported China in its economic development and growth and met its manufacturing needs for secondary raw materials," Brunet said in a statement. The flow of international scrap to China amount to tens of billions US dollars' worth of goods, he said.
Chinese experts, however, say such a ban is inevitable as China's industries upgrade and environmental protection is made a priority.
"Western countries will have to think of ways to digest their waste themselves, including through landfill or incineration," Liu told the Global Times.
Liu said while part of the industry might move to countries in Southeast Asia, India and Pakistan following China's ban, the relatively small capacity of these countries won't be able to satisfy global demand.
Others think this is an opportunity, rather than disaster, for Western countries. Steve Wong, executive president of the China Scrap Plastic Association, said China's ban might be an "opportunity for recycling" in the US, according to industry website Resource Recycling. Wong, also the chairman of a Hong Kong recycling company, said at a recent conference that he is planning to open a plant in the US.The ban explained
China started to import solid waste in the 1980s, when its rapidly growing economy fueled gigantic demand for cheap raw materials.
"Solid waste is a resource and source of pollution at the same time. In the past, when China needed to develop the economy, it valued its economic value and ignored how it may also pollute the environment," Wang Wang, secretary general of the China Scrap Plastic Association, told the Global Times.
"A lot of people thought the majority of foreign waste was smuggled into China. But actually, most of it enters China legally and only a small amount is smuggled," Xu Haiyun, chief engineer of the China Urban Construction Design and Research Institute, told the Global Times.
But as China deepens its supply-side reforms, more attention is being paid to protecting the environment.
This is not the first time China has restricted waste imports. In 2013, China launched the "Green Fence" campaign, a 10-month long initiative to prevent the import of unsorted shipments of recyclable waste from abroad. During the campaign, China prevented about 58,800 tons of foreign waste from entering the country, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Domestic impact
While the latest move has dealt a blow to overseas waste exporters, it will also push China's domestic recycling industry to upgrade its technology and standards.
China launched a campaign to inspect all factories that hold import licenses for plastic waste recycling this July, when 420 officers from the Ministry of Environmental Protection conducted a special round of inspections in 22 regions involving 1,792 factories that deal with imported waste, checking their pollution controls and import permits. By July 29, the ministry had given suggestions or punishments to 1,074, or 60 percent, of these businesses.
The head of a chemical fiber factory in Jiaxing, East China's Zhejiang Province told the Beijing Youth Daily that previously around 50 percent of the raw materials the factory used were scrap plastic from countries including Indonesia, Bangladesh and Tanzania. The factory has now stopped importing scrap plastic and vows to use only primary domestic raw materials in the future. "It takes months to import these materials and sometimes when they enter China, the price of domestic materials has dropped. This won't be a problem in the future," the factory head told Beijing Youth Daily.
But as the ban looms, this question is being posed - how to fill China's demand gap, when as much as a quarter of the raw materials in some industries come from foreign recyclable waste.
Experts say one way to bridge this gap is for China to recycle more of its own waste, much of which now ends up in landfills. "It's especially important to raise China's safe recycling rate. China recycles a lot of things, but most of it is done by small family businesses which pay no attention to pollution," Wang said.
One reason that Chinese businesses favor imported waste is that it is of better quality. A businessman in Shanghai who declined to be named told the Global Times that some imported plastic waste is both cheaper and of better quality than domestic waste.
The majority of Chinese recyclers which provide raw materials to manufacturers are small family-run affairs which use low-tech equipment and often ignore environmental protection rules.
The other way is to use more primary raw materials to replace foreign recycled waste, which may push up prices.
"I used to visit a fabric factory in Guangdong Province which manufactured fabric using imported second-hand clothes. The factory won many awards for its recycling efforts and even receives government subsidies. But it doesn't dare tell the public what its fabrics are made of. Why doesn't it use cotton from Xinjiang as its raw material?" Xu said.http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1060480.shtml
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Trump’s ‘Fire and Fury’ Threat Raises Alarm in Asia
Aug 9, 2017 | The New York Times
By Steven Lee Myers and Choe Sang-Hun
BEIJING — President Trump’s threat to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea sent a shudder through Asia on Wednesday, raising alarm among allies and adversaries and, to some observers, making the possibility of military conflict over the North’s nuclear program seem more real.
With North Korea responding that it would, if attacked, strike American military forces on Guam, analysts warned that the escalating statementsincreased the likelihood of war — perhaps one based on miscalculation, should one side’s fiery statements be misread by the other.
Some played down Mr. Trump’s remark on Tuesday as simply a warning not to attack the United States, albeit one whose tone was more typical of North Korean propagandists than it was of past American presidents. Officials in South Korea and Japan said that while the situation was tense, it had not reached a crisis point.
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson played down any imminent threat from North Korea, saying Wednesday, “I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days.”
Still, some in the region said the danger of war had not seemed as clear and present in decades. What was unthinkable just years ago no longer seems so, they said.Continue reading the main storyRELATED COVERAGEAnswers to 4 Crucial Questions About North Korea AUG. 9, 2017Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers U.S. AUG. 8, 2017North Korea’s Alarmed Neighbors Consider Deploying Deadlier Weapons AUG. 8, 2017NEWS ANALYSISIn North Korea, ‘Surgical Strike’ Could Spin Into ‘Worst Kind of Fighting’ JULY 5, 2017RECENT COMMENTSCaptain Freedom 5 hours ago
Let's hope whenever Trump asks for the nuclear football that someone hands him a nerf instead...andrew 5 hours ago
I don't know if anyone else has suggested this, but a simple solution that takes care of the Russian collusion allegations, pattern of lies...andrew 5 hours ago
How about impeachment? I don't know if anyone else has suggested this, but a simple solution that takes care of the Russian collusion...SEE ALL COMMENTS WRITE A COMMENT
“We’re going to see a confrontation between the United States and North Korea that will be ferocious and strong and bloody,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University of Chinain Beijing who called Mr. Trump’s language “explosive.”
Professor Cheng said he was puzzled by the timing of Mr. Trump’s remark, just days after the United Nations Security Council imposed the toughest economic penalties yet on North Korea for its nuclear and missile programs. That unanimous vote, which overcame China’s historical reluctance to punish its ally harshly, has been widely described as the Trump administration’s greatest diplomatic accomplishment so far.
“Usually, the U.S. government is willing to give more time for a resolution, to see how the resolutions bite,” Professor Cheng said.
Across the region on Wednesday, analysts reacted with concern and even foreboding about the tone of Mr. Trump’s comments, and about the unimpeded progress that North Korea appears to be making toward becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, able to strike the United States or other far-off adversaries.
While Mr. Trump’s warning that North Korea, if it kept threatening the United States, would “be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen” clearly reflected growing American frustration over the North’s advances, analysts said it was not clear that he had fully considered the implications of such strong language.
That, they said, raised questions about the administration’s strategy, and about whether Mr. Trump recognized the price that some staunch allies, especially Japan and South Korea, could pay for carrying out his threat.
“Trump doesn’t seem to understand what an alliance is, and doesn’t seem to consider his ally when he says those things,” said Lee Byong-chul, a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul, South Korea’s capital. “No American president has mentioned a military option so easily, so offhandedly as he has. He unnerves people in South Korea, few of whom want war in Korea.”
Mr. Trump’s warning followed a report that American intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has made a nuclear weapon that can fit on the tip of a ballistic missile. Such drastic advances have already led Japan and South Korea to consider deploying new, more powerful weapons to counter the threat, after decades of relying on American military might for strategic security.
Itsunori Onodera, Japan’s new defense minister, said Wednesday that Japan found it credible that North Korea had succeeded in miniaturizing a nuclear warhead, or that it would do so in the near future. “At the very least, whether they have them now or will have them soon, it’s reached a level where we have to monitor vigilantly,” he said.
Officials in Asia and beyond have grown used to provocative musings by Mr. Trump, particularly on Twitter, and they tend to treat them as inaccurate reflections of American policy. But analysts saw his “fire and fury” remark as dangerous and unlikely to deter North Korea’s leader.
“We are used to painting North Korea as ‘unpredictable,’ but increasingly it is the U.S. that is introducing strategic unpredictability into a volatile dynamic,” Euan Graham, an analyst at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia, wrote in an email.
Professor Cheng of Renmin University said that North Korea’s defiance in response to the Security Council’s latest sanctions indicated that it had no intention of slowing its program. He said that nations across the region, including his own, needed to prepare for the consequences of a conflict.
“We are in a very dangerous time, and China is going to need to take notice and prepare for the worst,” he said.
China’s Foreign Ministry, responding Wednesday to an inquiry about Mr. Trump’s threat, restated its position that the North Korean nuclear issue should be resolved by political means and that “all relevant parties” should avoid “remarks and acts that may escalate the conflict.”
The South Korean government sought on Wednesday to ease concern, saying that the North’s recent posturing, including its threat to attack Guam, appeared to be aimed at tightening solidarity among its own population and causing its neighbors anxiety.
“The situation has become more serious on the Korean Peninsula,” a senior official at the presidential Blue House told South Korean reporters, speaking in a briefing on the condition of anonymity. “But we don’t think it has reached a crisis stage yet.”
Also on Wednesday, Pyongyang released a Canadian pastor, the Rev. Lim Hyeon-Soo, who had been sentenced to a life of hard labor. Nearly two months ago another former prisoner, Otto F. Warmbier, an American college student, died after being freed.
“North Korea appears to signal that it could be flexible amid this standoff with the international community,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. He added that the freed pastor is Canadian, “so the North may find it easier to release him” than to be perceived as capitulating to a bellicose American president.
In Japan, a senior government official sought to frame Mr. Trump’s remark as an effort to warn the North’s government that military action remained a possibility, even as the new sanctions begin going into effect.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/world/asia/north-korea-trump-threat-fire-and-fury.html?_r=0
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China urges U.S. to act 'prudently' in aluminum foil dispute
Aug 10, 2017 | Reuters
By Tom Daly
BEIJING (Reuters) - China urged the U.S. government on Thursday to act "prudently" to avoid damaging economic relations between the two countries, in a strongly worded response to Washington's preliminary decision to slap anti-dumping duties on Chinese aluminum foil.
In a statement posted on its Wechat account, the Ministry of Commerce said the United States had ignored offers of cooperation from the government and Chinese companies in making its ruling this week.
The statement, attributed to Wang Hejun, head of the Commerce Ministry's trade remedy and investigation bureau, was more strongly worded than typical responses to trade disputes with the United States.
The statement said there were no grounds to accuse China's downstream aluminum companies of benefiting from subsidies.
Washington has previously made similar claims about China's banking sector, unreasonably labeling Chinese commercial banks as public institutions, the statement also said.
The Wechat post followed news on Wednesday that China's top foil producers are preparing to launch a legal challenge to a U.S. Commerce Department ruling that would slap antidumping duties of 16.56 percent to 80.97 percent on Chinese aluminum foil imports.
China's government said it is highly concerned about the action the United States is taking to provide relief to its aluminum industry.
Washington is also investigating whether to curb aluminum imports from China under the rarely used Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows restrictions on imports for reasons of national security.
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is conducting a separate investigation into steel imports from China.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-unilever-nv-stocks-idUKKBN1AP0KE
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Exclusive: U.S. destroyer challenges China's claims in South China Sea
Aug 10, 2017 | Reuters
By Idrees Ali
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. Navy destroyer carried out a "freedom of navigation operation" on Thursday, coming within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island built up by China in the South China Sea, U.S. officials told Reuters.
The operation came as President Donald Trump's administration seeks Chinese cooperation in dealing with North Korea's missile and nuclear programs and could complicate efforts to secure a common stance.
The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the USS John S. McCain traveled close to Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands, among a string of islets, reefs and shoals. China has territorial disputes with its neighbors over the area.
It was the third "freedom of navigation operation" or "fonop" conducted during Trump's presidency. Neither China's defense ministry nor its foreign ministry immediately responded to a request for comment.
The operation was the latest attempt to counter what Washington sees as Beijing's efforts to limit freedom of navigation in the strategic waters, and comes as Trump is seeking China's cooperation to rein in North Korea.
Tensions have risen recently after North Korea carried out two nuclear tests last year and two ICBM tests last month, prompting a strong round of U.N. sanctions which angered Pyongyang who threatened to teach the United States a "severe lesson".
Trump in turn responded by warning North Korea it would face "fire and fury" if it further threatened the United States.
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis issued a stark warning to North Korea on Wednesday, telling Pyongyang that it should stop any actions that would lead to the "end of its regime and the destruction of its people."
The United States has criticized China's construction of islands and build-up of military facilities in the sea, and is concerned they could be used to restrict free nautical movement.
The U.S. military has a long-standing position that its operations are carried out throughout the world, including in areas claimed by allies, and they are separate from political considerations.
The Trump administration has vowed to conduct more robust South China Sea operations.
In July, a U.S. warship sailed near a disputed island in the South China Sea claimed by China, Taiwan, Vietnam.
Experts and officials have criticized President Barack Obama for potentially reinforcing China's claims by sticking to innocent passage, in which a warship effectively recognized a territorial sea by crossing it speedily without stopping.
China's claims in the South China Sea, through which about $5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes each year are contested by Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-china-idUSKBN1AO011?il=0
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