Tag: Chinas

Iran worried over Chinas recent embrace of Saudi Arabia

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Tehran: Iran which is facing its lowest level of domestic legitimacy and international acceptance, seems to have lost China as well, reported The Jakarta Post.
Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia caused a shock for Iran. It has left Tehran wondering whether China is changing its priorities in the region, especially in the aftermath of declining American presence.
This visit is being seen as a turning point in Beijing’s foreign policy toward the Persian Gulf states, reported The Jakarta Post.
Although China maintains close relations with Iran and Saudi Arabia, the latter has emerged as one of Beijing’s leading strategic partners in the region.
Tehran is worried about China’s recent embrace of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nations as Iran believes that China has taken a neutral stand in Iran’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia in the Gulf region.
The Chinese leader published a joint statement with the government of Saudi Arabia in which he asked Iran to cooperate in the controversial nuclear case and avoid interfering in the affairs of neighbouring countries.
To make matters worse, Xi signed another statement with the governments of the Gulf Cooperation Council supporting the United Arab Emirates in its dispute with Iran over three islands, reported The Jakarta Post.
Notably, Iran and China have signed a 25-year comprehensive strategic partnership agreement. China is also due to discuss additional economic cooperation, but for the most part, the arrangements remain vague as geopolitical tensions rise, reported The Jakarta Post.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has been the largest crude oil supplier to China since 2020. China is dependent upon Saudi Arabia for its energy needs and Beijing is making all efforts to have a long-term relationship with Riyadh to address this need.
Iran is asking “compensation” for the joint statement signed between China and the GCC nations, reported The Jakarta Post.
China’s relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran are very complex. China has to carefully manage its relations with both countries to maintain neutrality to protect its trade interest in the region.
However, If China crosses its limit, it will have to face retaliation from the Islamic world, reported The Jakarta Post.
Most Muslim countries, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, are aware of the conditions of the Muslims in Xinjiang, but have refrained from joining the US crusade against China to militarize Xinjiang Muslims.
The reciprocity of the Arab world toward China on Xinjiang can be gauged by the recent visit by a delegation of Muslim scholars and clerics from developing nations who voiced support for China’s policies in the far-western region.
The group of more than 30 Islamic representatives from 14 countries — including the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Serbia, South Sudan, and Indonesia — arrived in Xinjiang to visit the cities of Urumqi, Turpan, Altay and Kashgar and to meet with government officials.
Al Nuaimi, chairman of the UAE-based World Muslim Communities Council, who was part of the delegation was quoted by state media as praising efforts by the Chinese government to eliminate terrorism and extremism in Xinjiang as the correct way to protect China’s national interests, reported The Jakarta Post.
China has detained more than one million Uyghurs against their will over the past few years in a large network of what the state calls “reeducation camps”.
In the aftermath of China taking sides in Gulf politics, the Xinjiang affair can be used against its interests. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and UAE have so far refrained from even mentioning the issue and respecting China’s national sovereignty over it. China is doing all it can to fix the UAE declaration against Tehran, reported The Jakarta Post.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has understood its mistake and is trying to do damage control. The gravity of the situation can be gauged from the reaction of the Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian who said, “The islands of Abu Musa, the Greater Tunb and the Lesser Tunb in the Persian Gulf are inseparable parts of the pure land of Iran and belong to this motherland forever”.
Beijing understands the complexity of the region and tries to walk a tightrope as long as it can sell its products and expand its influence within the Muslim world.
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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

January 30, 2023
China’s future to AI and jobs: five big questions from Davos

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A number of big themes emerged from the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort Davos. Here are five of most pressing questions that came to dominate this year’s gathering of the global elite.
Will China be forced to make friends with the west?
Donald Trump’s trade war with China – continued by his successor Joe Biden – has left relations between east and west at rock bottom. But with Covid and trade tensions halving Chinese growth last year to just 3% and western businesses such as Apple moving business out of the world’s second-biggest economy, Beijing has hinted it may adopt a less-hostile approach.
Vice-premier Liu He appeared on the main stage at Davos to assure foreign investors that after three years of Covid disruption, it was open for business. “We have to abandon the cold war mentality,” he said. “We must open up wider and make it work better.”
Whether the west is ready to believe that remains to be seen. Executives at several tech companies said they were approached by American intelligence officials at the summit who were keen to understand their operations in China. “They want to know which side you are on,” said a tech boss.
The FBI director Christopher Wray gave a speech arguing that China’s artificial intelligence (AI) programme would be weaponised by the country, telling attenders: “The Chinese government has a bigger hacking programme than any other nation in the world.”
Several economists also forecast that China’s rapid reopening could reignite rapid inflation by fuelling demand for commodities just as central bankers hoped they had got a grip on surging prices.

A slogan for the World Economic Forum on Davos’s promenade, the sentiment undermined by fears about AI’s impact on jobs. Photograph: Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters
Is artificial intelligence coming for your job?
Rapid advances being made in AI have prompted a wave of warnings, not only about what it means for the world of work, but also the risks that it might produce misinformation on a grand scale.
Mihir Shukla, chief executive of Automation Anywhere, said that as a result of AI it was now possible for a machine to process a mortgage application in three minutes that previously would have taken 30 days.
Erik Brynjolfsson, digital economy professor at Stanford University said in the past machines had not been a substitute for workers but complemented the activities of humans, enabling them to do things better and leading to higher pay.
Yet IBM’s chairman and chief executive Arvind Krishna predicted a wave of job cuts from AI. “You should worry more about the clerical, white-collar jobs than the physical [jobs]. A large number of them will get replaced. So the question is: ‘What jobs do you create to replace those?’”
Brynjolfsson identified another threat. The world risked being flooded with bot-generated emails, posts and tweets peddling disinformation on a massive scale and warned there was a need for a control mechanism to separate the true from the false.
The Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg (left) takes her environmental campaign to Davos where there were fears US and EU green economy plans could spark a trade dispute. Photograph: Laurent Gilliéron/EPA
Will Biden’s $369bn green subsidy scheme help or hinder?
The US and EU nations arrived at Davos with a $369bn row simmering in the background: Joe Biden’s vast green subsidy scheme, known as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). It provides extensive state aid for companies investing in green technologies crucial to the transition away from fossil fuels, including electric cars, batteries, and renewable energy technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines.
Jozef Síkela, the Czech Republic’s minister of industry and trade, equated it with “doping in sport” and said it was luring companies away from Europe to the US. But Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said the IRA is the “most important climate action after the Paris 2015 agreement”.
Some have speculated it could lead to a trade war between the US and EU, akin to the decades-long Boeing v Airbus dispute over subsidies. The EU is responding with its own Net Zero Industry Act which will simplify and fast-track clean tech production sites.
Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, said she hoped the subsidy race “is not going to be a race to the bottom”. While leader of the UK’s Labour party, Sir Keir Starmer, embraced the idea of a more activist state, the UK business secretary, Grant Shapps, was distinctly cooler on the idea, describing it as “dangerous”.
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Kristalina Georgieva, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director. Photograph: Gian Ehrenzeller/EPA
Is a new debt crisis looming?
About a quarter of the countries in the world are in debt distress or on the brink of it. In Davos every one of the multilateral organisations that keep tabs on the financial fragility of poor countries – the UN, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – expressed concern.
Achim Steiner, administrator of the UN Development Programme said there was an urgent need for a comprehensive solution but was unsure whether there was the bandwidth or leadership required.
“Nothing is happening commensurate with the problem,” Steiner said. “There is a growing recognition that there has been a year of inactivity by the institutions created to deal with this – the G20 and the Bretton Woods institutions [the IMF and the World Bank].”
Countries are having trouble paying their debts amid slower global growth and rising interest rates. Many also borrowed in US dollars, which have appreciated on currency markets. Steiner said there needed to be an urgent injection of financial support through a fresh issuance of IMF special drawing rights – a form of money creation that boosts a country’s reserves – with debt restructuring. That will require more flexibility by two important creditors: China and the private sector.
Saudi Arabia promotes it Neom $500bn megacity plan in Davos, part of a strong Middle East presence. Photograph: Getty Images
Can the Gulf states modernise and wean off hydrocarbons?
The corporate logos that plaster shopfronts on the Davos promenade are a good barometer of changing economic fortunes. With Russia blacklisted after its invasion of Ukraine and China keeping a low profile, the Gulf states – flush with petrodollars – took over the Swiss ski resort en-masse.
The long road that winds towards the conference centre was dominated by Middle Eastern brands: from the United Arab Emirates’ logistics company DP World, to Neom, the $500bn megacity that is the cornerstone of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan to modernise Saudi Arabia.
The Gulf states need to prove to the world that they can modernise as companies and businesses switch away from oil and gas. The Saudis used the World Economic Forum to promote the kingdom’s modernisation plan, called Vision 2030, and the increasing role of women in the economy, while hoping the west would ignore atrocities such as the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist whose death in October 2018 has been linked to Crown Prince Mohammed.
Several senior Saudi ministers were joined on a panel by Jane Fraser, boss of US banking giant Citi, and Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, to discuss more women joining the workforce and economic change.
“When one turns up in Saudi looking at what are the opportunities from a business perspective … it’s quite breathtaking,” said Fraser. “As a banker, one gets frightfully excited.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 20, 2023
China’s population drop reflects pessimism about the future

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Washington: China’s population has decreased for the first time in over 60 years, signalling the start of long-term decline that will bring demographic challenges for the world’s second-largest economy as well as the world, media reports said.
It was the first decline since 1961, the final year of the famine brought on by failing economic policies during Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward”, the campaign to transform China from a mostly agrarian society into an industrial one that ended in disaster, RFA reported.
The long-term outlook for China, according to UN experts, is that the population will continue to decrease by about 109 million people to 1.3 billion by 2050.
The turning point puts China in a similar situation as regional neighbour Japan, whose population has been shrinking, and South Korea, where birth rates are declining after rapid economic growth, leaving fewer young people in the workforce to support a swelling number of retirees. That has put a larger tax burden on workers and could lead to economic stagnation.
Already, China’s economy is slowing. From a peak of 14.2 per cent growth in 2007, its 2022 figure was a mere 3 per cent, less than half the growth rate of 2021 and the lowest in almost 40 years.
The demographic shift reflects both the results of China’s one-child policy and a pessimism about the future, experts said, RFA reported.
An unintended consequence of the one-child policy, which lasted from 1980 to 2015, combined with a cultural preference for boys, has led to a major gender imbalance, resulting in fewer possible families being formed, especially in rural areas.
This policy “broke the normal ecological balance of China’s population”, said Chen Guangcheng, a civil rights activist.

But there is also an economic and psychological element contributing to this trend. Combined with skyrocketing housing and education prices that come with robust economic growth, many young Chinese today simply do not envision children in their future, RFA reported.
“A decline in the willingness to have children reflects the hardships of Chinese people’s daily lives,” Wu Qiang, a Beijing-based scholar who focuses on population, said. “This is a reflection of their pessimism about the future.”
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( Disclaimer: With inputs from www.siasat.com )

January 18, 2023
India’s Population overtakes China’s as China mistakenly reports real Covid deaths

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In a significant development, India has reportedly surpassed China as the world’s most populous country. According to projections from the World Population Review (WPR), India’s population was 141.7 crore as of the end of 2022. That’s a little more than 50 lakh more than the 141.2 crore declared by China on January 17.
India’s population momentarily surpassed China’s population as China mistakenly reported right number of Covid deaths in the country. However, China regained its position after rectifying the Covid death reports.
China called WPR report misleading and claimed there are a very few deaths in China due to Covid.
Speaking to The New York Times, Elon Musk said “I assure the world that increasing population isn’t a threat as I am already building houses in Mars and exploring lives in Uranus.
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[ Disclaimer: With inputs from The Fauxy, an entertainment portal. The content is purely for entertainment purpose and readers are advised not to confuse the articles as genuine and true, these Articles are Fictitious meant only for entertainment purposes. ]

January 18, 2023