Will Australia Please U.S. By Taking Gitmo Uighurs–Or Please China By Not

U.S. President Barack Obama has dropped a hot potato in the lap of Australia’s pro-Beijing Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He has asked him to take at least six and as many as 10 of the remaining 17 Uighurs being held at Guantanamo Bay.
Beijing wants them all returned. The U.S. won’t do that because of fears in [...]

Timothy Geithner Goes To Beijing

The U.S. has needed China to buy its debt for some years. Now it needs it to buy its goods as well. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s first trip to Beijing in that role next week will see him pushing both lines, reassuring China about the Obama administration’s fiscal responsibility towards the $768 billion of [...]

Blowing Up Bridges To Nowhere

It would seem a 40-year old bridge in Sichuan sufficiently well-built to withstand last year’s devastating earthquake should be let well alone. Yet local officials with stimulus money to spend tried to blow it up so they could replace it with a newer bridge built with some of the 4 trillion yuan Beijing earmarked last [...]

Dollars, Coppers, Any Old Iron

A new twist in the saga of what China is doing with its still mostly dollars foreign exchange reserves: Brian Jackson, senior strategist at Royal Bank of Canada, reckons that it is using them to stockpile commodities such as copper and iron ore as the voices in Beijing fearing the ever rising cost of Washington’s [...]

China Expands Stealth Stimulus Package

This Bystander noted a couple of days back that there was a risk that the stimulus cash would run out before the underlying economy regained vigor–and that might mean the additional stimulus money Prime Minister Wen Jiabao says he has in his back pocket might be brought out. Now comes news, via Xinhua, that Beijing [...]

Top-Up Stimulus On The Way?

This Bystander has noted before that the signs of revival in the economy are more to do with stimulus spending and pressed lending by state banks than a revival of trade and industry: exports in April were still down 22.6% from the same month a year earlier, energy usage, which correlates closely to industrial production, declined [...]

Huntsman Reportedly Set To Be U.S. Envoy To Beijing

Jon Huntsman is set to be named as the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, according to the Associated Press. Huntsman is the moderate two-term Republican governor of Utah and was consider a potential presidential candidate in the U.S. elections due in 2012. He is also a Chinese speaker having been a Mormon missionary in Taiwan. He [...]

5/12 Quake One Year On

The first anniversary of the Sichuan quake that killed nearly 90,000 and displaced hundreds of thousands more is upon us.
It would be cheering to think the coverage would be about a mix of remembrance and rebuilding, physical, social and emotional. While there has been some of that, and that should not be underestimated: officials are [...]

China’s Automakers Likely To Cross Taiwan Strait For Parts

Taiwan’s three largest auto parts makers, Tong Yang Industry, TYC Brother Industrial and Depo Auto Parts Industrial, are open to investment from the mainland, Bloomberg reports. China’s car makers would get core design and manufacturing technologies they lack as assemblers and Taiwan’s parts makers would get access to on of the world’s still growing car [...]

Swine Flu Quarantine — Prudent or Discrimatory?

China knew SARS and the 2004 outbreak of avian flu in its pigs, made mistakes in dealing with both,  and is trying to make good on those in its reaction to the current outbreak of swine flu. Has it overreacted?
The World Health Organization has criticized Beijing for its quarantining — would forced detention and deportation [...]