A foreign ministry statement Thursday repeated heated condemnations of the laws and said China will counteract. It said all the people of Hong Kong and China oppose the move.

It´s still unclear, however, how China will respond exactly.

Trump signed the bills, which were approved by near-unanimous consent in the House and Senate, even as he expressed some concerns about complicating the effort to work out a trade deal with China´s President Xi Jinping.

“I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and the people of Hong Kong,” Trump said in a statement. “They are being enacted in the hope that Leaders and Representatives of China and Hong Kong will be able to amicably settle their differences leading to long term peace and prosperity for all.”

Congress approved the bills last week following months of unrest in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. Before Wednesday´s signing announcement, Trump would only commit to giving the measures a “hard look.”

Office workers and pro-democracy protesters hold up their hands to represent their five demands wanted from the government as protests continue in Central district of Hong Kong, Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2019. A major tunnel in Hong Kong reopened Wednesday as a weeklong police siege of a nearby university campus appeared to be winding down, closing one of the more violent chapters in the long-running anti-government protests in the Chinese territory. (AP Photo/Vincent Thian)

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China´s foreign ministry called the laws a “naked hegemonic action” that seriously interfered in Hong Kong and China´s internal affairs, violated international law and “fundamental norms of international relations.”

“The U.S. side ignored facts, turned black to white, and blatantly gave encouragement to violent criminals who smashed and burned, harmed innocent city residents, trampled on the rule of law and endangered social order,” the statement said.

The laws´ basic intent is to undermine Hong Kong´s prosperity and stability along with the “historical progress of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

It called the measures “extremely evil in nature and dangerous in motive.”

“We advise the U.S. not to act incautiously, otherwise China will be required to counteract resolutely and all the consequences created by this will have to be borne by the U.S. side,” the statement said.

The two countries are currently locked in a trade war and have deep differences over China´s claims to the South China Sea and Taiwan, human rights issues and accusations of Chinese industrial espionage.

The first bill Trump signed mandates sanctions on Chinese and Hong Kong officials who carry out human rights abuses and requires an annual review of the favorable trade status that Washington grants Hong Kong.

Another bill prohibits export to Hong Kong police of certain nonlethal munitions, including tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, water cannons, stun guns and tasers.

The munitions bill was passed unanimously, while Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky was the sole House member to oppose the human rights bill.

Trump acknowledged last week that he was weighing the ramifications of signing the bill.

“Look, we have to stand with Hong Kong,” Trump said in an interview on “Fox & Friends.” He continued: “But I´m also standing with President Xi. He´s a friend of mine. He´s an incredible guy.”

Democratic and Republican lawmakers applauded the signing of the bills. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., said it “finally sends a clear and unequivocal message to the people of Hong Kong: We are with you.”

Sen. Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said the bills are “an important step forward in holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its erosion of Hong Kong´s autonomy and its repression of fundamental human rights.”

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who sponsored the House human rights bill, said Xi “should understand that the U.S. is not kidding about human rights. Beating, torturing, and jailing of democracy activists is wrong and this historic legislation lets China know that respecting fundamental human rights is paramount.”

Activists hailed Trump´s action.

“I know that many people in Hong Kong are happy that the U.S. government has passed a new bill,” said Figo Chan, a 23-year-old Hong Kong protester who was honored with the John McCain Prize for Leadership at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada last weekend.

“No one wants to die and no one wants to be hurt,” Chan said. “I hope that citizens of many different countries can in their own way fight for democracy.”

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Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani in Washington and Rob Gillies in Toronto contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump gestures after speaking at a campaign rally Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2019, in Sunrise, Fla. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

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Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-7733807/Trump-signs-bills-support-Hong-Kong-protesters.html

[Disclaimer]

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(Bloomberg) — After three decades of unprecedented advances in incomes and living standards, the European Union’s eastern economies that abruptly swapped communism for capitalism after the Berlin Wall fell are facing new challenges.

Like much of the continent, shrinking populations pose a threat to future expansion — but the United Nations predicts the former Eastern Bloc will suffer more than most regions. Labor shortages are already widespread and record-low unemployment has left many posts vacant.

For now, the phenomenon is ramping up wages and boosting consumption — a welcome boost as U.S.-China trade tensions ripple through to Germany, a key export market.

But salary growth is outpacing productivity, eroding competitiveness. National governments, meanwhile, reject EU-mandated refugee quotas that would provide workers, only accepting immigrants from nearby countries such as Ukraine. Those arrivals can’t go on forever.

“At the moment, they’re muddling through,” said Beata Javorcik, the new chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which was set up in 1991 to assist the post-communist transition by investing billions of dollars in projects from infrastructure to banking.

“Ideally you’d like to stimulate population growth but that’s very hard to do,” she said in an interview at the EBRD’s headquarters in London.

EU membership that began in 2004 prompted millions of workers to head west, where pay is higher. Back in places like Poland, a reduction in the retirement age is further reducing the workforce. Critics say increases in child benefits aimed at boosting fertility rates are persuading some women to stay at home.

The latter trend comes amid progress in ending the male dominance in high-level positions: Javorcik is the first woman to take the EBRD’s top economic job. Bulgarian-born Kristalina Georgieva recently took the helm of the International Monetary Fund.

The region’s past may have actually helped here.

“One of the few positive legacies of communism was relative gender equality,” said Javorcik, 48. Women “were often treated as equals in the workplace.”

As well as demographics, Javorcik deems climate change and the burden on nations to emit less carbon as another test. Poland, her homeland and the EU’s biggest eastern economy, is the bloc’s largest coal producer and has seven of its most-polluted cities. Renewable energy accounts for less than 12% of the total.

The innovation required to shift away from fossil fuels could accelerate eastern Europe’s evolution from a center for cheap labor in industries such as carmaking.

“The easy sources of growth have been exploited over the past 20 years,” Javorcik said. “Now you need to move to the next phase, and that’s not trivial.”

But progress in recent decades — from joining NATO to lifting millions out of poverty — shows what’s possible. Javorcik rejects those who say the catch-up to western EU levels of wealth has been too slow since membership in the bloc.

“There’s a very downbeat commentary about 30 years of transition and I think in many ways it’s unfair,” she said. “These countries have made enormous progress.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Andrew Langley in London at alangley1@bloomberg.net;Aaron Eglitis in Riga at aeglitis@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrea Dudik at adudik@bloomberg.net, Rob Dawson

Source: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/europe-s-east-faces-economic-threat-from-falling-populations-1.1344957

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China’s tariffs targeting President Donald Trump’s rural base have boomeranged with farm income hitting a 5-year high of $88 billion and in the top 30 percent after inflation.

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BEIJING —  China extended an olive twig, rather than a branch, to the United States in their trade war Wednesday, announcing it would exempt 16 American-made products from tariffs as a sign of goodwill ahead of talks scheduled for next month.

But the gesture, which Beijing said was designed to ease the dispute’s impact on American companies, does not offer relief from tariffs on the big-ticket agricultural products that are causing the most hurt in the United States.

“China wants to claim the moral high ground before the October talks and to send a message of goodwill,” said Yao Xinchao, professor of international trade at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. “It’s all about molding public opinion” to portray the U.S. as the aggressor, Yao added.

China’s Ministry of Finance said that 16 types of U.S. products would be exempt from retaliatory tariffs for a year from next Tuesday. The list included varieties of animal feed such as alfalfa and fish meal, cancer drugs gefitinib and capecitabine, base oil for lubricants and lubricating grease, and some farm chemicals.

Further exemptions will be announced in the coming weeks, the ministry said, and tariffs that have already been imposed will be refunded.

But the list offers no respite for American farmers hit by Chinese tariffs on corn, soybeans, and pork.

“Pork and soybeans are two important bargaining chips that China won’t play easily,” said Yao.

[Markets soar as China, U.S. resume trade talks in Washington in October]

China and the United States have been involved in a tit-for-tat tariff battle, imposing rounds of duties on each other’s products for more than a year.

President Trump has hoped that the tariffs would convince China to cave into his demands to re-balance the trading relationship between the world’s two largest economies. But Beijing has retaliated as much as it can — China exports far more to the U.S. than it imports — and has insisted any deal must be “mutually beneficial.”

In the latest episode, the Trump administration declared it would add a 15 percent tax to consumer products from China, including clothing, footwear, pens, pencils, diapers, Bluetooth earbuds, televisions, golf clubs, and fishing line. Those tariffs took effect Sept. 1.

At one point, Trump even ordered American companies to prepare to leave China.

Beijing responded by slapping tariffs on $75 billion of American goods, which in turn led Trump to increase tariffs on $300 billion in Chinese products from the previously announced 10 percent to 15 percent.

Wednesday’s measures marked the first time in the dispute that tariffs have been removed, not added.

[New tariffs on shoes, televisions and other Chinese-made products take effect Sunday ]

The Commerce Ministry said last week that Liu He, the vice-premier who has been leading the trade negotiations from the Chinese side, would travel to Washington in early October for a new round of talks aimed at breaking the impasse.

This will be the 13th round of talks between Liu and his American counterpart, U.S. Trade Rep. Robert Lighthizer.

 A U.S. Chamber of Commerce delegation led by executive vice president Myron Brilliant has been in Beijing this week holding talks with senior Chinese leaders, including Premier Li Keqiang. The tariff dispute has dragged down economic growth and business confidence, Brilliant said after meeting with Li.

“The uncertainty produced by U.S.-China trade tensions is exerting significant downward pressure on both economies,” Brilliant said in a statement. “The time is now to strike a deal that addresses the U.S.’s legitimate concerns about market access, forced technology transfer, subsidies, and digital trade, while concurrently removing punitive and retaliatory tariffs.”

Li, for his part, said the two sides should seek common ground based on the principle of equality and mutual respect, according to a report from China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-to-remove-tariffs-on-some-us-products-but-not-pork-or-soybeans/2019/09/11/79d45fc0-d459-11e9-8924-1db7dac797fb_story.html?noredirect=on

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German Chancellor looks to start a new phase in EU ties with China at the summit next year

BEIJING • German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the start of a visit to Beijing yesterday that the US-China trade war was affecting the whole world, and she hoped it would be resolved soon.

Germany’s companies have been caught in the crossfire of the trade conflict and its economy – Europe’s largest – contracted on weaker exports in the second quarter.

Leading economists say that Germany is facing a recession, especially after weak industrial data published this week.

But while US President Donald Trump has pressed American companies to look at ways to close their Chinese operations and make more products at home, Dr. Merkel wants to start a new phase in the European Union’s relations with China.

“We hope that there will be a solution in the trade dispute with the United States since it affects everybody” in the world, Dr. Merkel told Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People during her two-day trip to China.

China and the US are due to resume trade talks this month, with more senior consultations next month in Washington.

Dr Merkel has pushed for a European investment deal with Beijing, even as Washington has resorted to waves of tariffs to counter what it says are China’s unfair trade practices. The US’ European allies, including Germany, largely share its criticisms of China, but not Mr. Trump’s choice of tariffs to resolve the issues.

Dr. Merkel said Germany is open for Chinese investment, and she welcomes all Chinese companies to invest in the country. However, she added that Germany checks investments in certain strategic sectors and critical infrastructure.

Mr. Li said that China hopes Germany will accept more Chinese companies and loosen export rules for certain goods.

Germany, which traded almost €100 billion (S$152 billion) in goods with China in the first half of this year, holds the rotating EU presidency next year when Dr. Merkel is planning an EU-China summit with a view to achieving a common European stance toward the world’s second-largest economy.

Referring to an EU-China investment agreement, Dr. Merkel said Germany was hoping “that we can perhaps finish this project” during the country’s EU presidency in the second half of next year.

That summit would aim to counter what Berlin sees as China’s divide-and-rule approach to dealing with the European bloc, as Beijing promotes global infrastructure projects under its Belt and Road development initiative that has made it an influential player in poorer eastern European countries such as Hungary and Greece.

Several companies signed agreements as Dr. Merkel and Mr. Li met, including Airbus – which came to an arrangement with China’s AVIC Aircraft Corporation on assembling A-320 planes in China – and German insurer Allianz, which wants to work more closely with the Bank of China.

German engineering group Voith and China’s CRRC said they wanted to cooperate on electric buses, and Siemens signed a memorandum of understanding with China’s State Power Investment Corporation on developing gas turbines and cooperating on the use of hydrogen.

REUTERS

A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on September 07, 2019, with the headline ‘Merkel hopes US-China trade war will be over soon’.

Source: https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/merkel-hopes-us-china-trade-war-will-be-over-soon

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