Corona disease: China extends Shanghai coronavirus lockdown as frustration mounts over strict "zero-COVID" policy

While most American cities are opening up and lifting COVID-19 restrictions, one of the biggest cities in the world has been shut back down. Shanghai, China's most populous city with some 25 million inhabitants, was largely at a standstill on Friday as China battles its worst wave of coronavirus infections since the start of the pandemic.

Read more at: China extends Shanghai coronavirus lockdown as frustration mounts over strict "zero-COVID" policy - CBS News

China - corona virus outbreak:Shanghai Covid: China announces largest city-wide lockdown

China has announced its biggest city-wide lockdown since the Covid outbreak began more than two years ago.

The city of Shanghai will be locked down in two stages over nine days while authorities carry out Covid-19 testing.

The important financial hub has battled a new wave of infections for nearly a month, although case numbers are not high by some international standards.

Read more at: Shanghai Covid: China announces largest city-wide lockdown - BBC News

Covid-19 origin: Covid-19 origins may never be known, US intelligence agencies say

In an updated assessment of where the virus began, the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) said an animal-to-human transmission and a lab leak were both plausible hypotheses for how it spread.

But there was not enough information to reach a definitive conclusion.

China has criticised the report.

Read more at: Covid-19 origins may never be known, US intelligence agencies say - BBC News

Digital Nationalism: We’re entering the age of ‘digital nationalism’ — and this will only benefit big tech

The massive digital platform market has until recently been dominated by a handful of US-based companies such as Facebook and Google. However, as foreign governments and competing platforms try to erode this domination, platforms are becoming a new sphere of geopolitical manoeuvring.

The European Union wants to gain more control over international tech companies and achieve more independence in the digital arena. India has banned 177 Chinese apps on the grounds they are “prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India”.

And in 2020, the then US President Donald Trump spent months attempting to ban the Chinese-made video-sharing platform TikTok or force its sale to an American owner. While some claimed Trump was piqued by a supposed prank against him by teenage TikTok users, a look at statements from US government officials over the course of the year shows geopolitical concerns were the main driver.

Read more at: We’re entering the age of ‘digital nationalism’ — and this will only benefit big tech

China - EU Relations: EU slams China’s ‘authoritarian shift’ and broken economic promises

The European Union's stance on China is hardening, and that should go down well in Washington.

Only four months after Beijing and Brussels concluded the principles of a landmark investment agreement, a high-level internal report seen by POLITICO shows the EU is now increasingly pessimistic about keeping business interests separate from political concerns over what it calls President Xi Jinping's "authoritarian shift." This tougher language reflects a new approach in the EU's official communications on China.

The EU's "progress report" on China also slams Beijing for "little progress" on economic promises made by the Communist leadership, particularly in regard to opening up digital and agricultural markets, addressing steel overcapacity and reining in industrial subsidies. It calls for "further, robust" measures to deal with the new challenges posed by China, whose economy is recovering from the coronavirus pandemic at a blistering pace.

Read more at: EU slams China’s ‘authoritarian shift’ and broken economic promises – POLITICO

China’s Economy: Consumers Boost Its Economic Recovery -- by J. Cheng

China’s economic recovery picked up a surprising amount of steam in March, boosted by strong domestic consumption and unquenchable foreign demand for Chinese-made goods.

The country’s official manufacturing purchasing managers index, a gauge of factory activity, hit a three-month high of 51.9 in March, topping February’s reading of 50.6 with the 50 mark separating expansion from contraction, according to data released Wednesday by the National Bureau of Statistics. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had forecast a reading of 51.2.

Read more at: China’s Consumers Boost Its Economic Recovery - WSJ

CHINA: Wealthy Chinese outnumber wealthy Americans for the first time

A new report from Credit Suisse (CS) shows that wealth in China is ticking up, and the country now accounts for 100 million of the richest 10% of people in the world. There are 99 million Americans in the same category.

The United States still has many more millionaires — 18.6 million, or 40% of the world's total, versus 4.4 million in China. It's also adding to the millionaire count at a faster clip. The report credits low interest rates and Republican tax cuts for the country's 11th consecutive year of rising wealth.

Tech billionaires dominate China's rich list. Some pig farmers also had a good year Tech billionaires dominate China's rich list. Some pig farmers also had a good year

Read more at: Wealthy Chinese outnumber wealthy Americans for the first time - CNN

EU: In Europe Union, vaccines from Russia and China are now under study - by Loveday Morris

As the European Union's vaccination program stumbles, Russia and China are poised to fill the gap — with Moscow opening talks to produce vaccines in the heart of Europe and both building political cachet as they supply those scrambling for shots on the bloc's fringes.

Vaccines produced in Russia and China are already on the program in parts of the Balkans and Eastern Europe outside the European Union.

Speaking to the Atlantic Council on Thursday, Macron called China’s vaccine efforts a “clear diplomatic success” which is “a little bit humiliating for us.” He and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have expressed their openness to using vaccines from Moscow and Beijing if E.U. regulatory approval is granted.

Read more at: In Europe Union, vaccines from Russia and China are now under study - The Washington Post

Covid-19 Vaccine: Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia and Hungary Put Trust in Russian, Chinese Vaccines - by Hamdi Firat Buyuk, Danijel Kovacevic, and Milica Stojanovic

While the majority of countries in Central and Southeast Europe have brokered deals to obtain Western-manufactured COVID-19 vaccines, Turkey, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia are keeping their options open and also obtaining Chinese and Russian vaccines – despite concerns about their reliability.

Some health experts have warned that the effectiveness of these vaccines is still not fully researched, and note that their delivery dates are also still uncertain.

“Unfortunately, Turkey could not purchase a vaccine in which all three phases of research had been completed. Furthermore, there are no plans to bring [Western] Moderna or AstraZeneca vaccines [to Turkey],” Emrah Altindis, a Turkish professor of Biology at Boston College, wrote on Twitter.

Turkey said earlier that it would purchase 50 million doses of China’s CoronaVac vaccine, which is still in third of phase of research. After various delays, only 3 million doses arrived on December 31. So far, Turkey has vaccinated 1.2 million of its more than 82 million citizens.

Note EU-Digest: At a press conference in Beijing a state taskforce announced the vaccine had exceeded World Health Organization standards and would help establish effective immunity in China.

Health officials said vulnerable groups would be prioritised ahead of the general population. Key groups have already been receiving vaccines under emergency approvals, including about a million receiving the Sinopharm vaccine.

Read more at: Turkey, Serbia, Bosnia and Hungary Put Trust in Russian, Chinese Vaccines | Balkan Insight

Global Economy: China Is the Only Major Economy to Report Economic Growth for 2020 - by Grace Zhu and Bingyan Wang

China’s economy expanded by 2.3% in 2020, roaring back from a historic contraction in the early months of the year to become the only major world economy to grow in what was a pandemic-ravaged year.

China’s ability to expand, even as the world struggled to control a deadly virus that has killed more than two million people, underscores the country’s success in largely taming the coronavirus within its borders and further cements its place as the dominant economy in Asia.

Note EU-Digest: On Monday, China reported a year-on-year increase of 6.5% for the fourth quarter of 2020 and a 2.3% increase for all of 2020, surpassing analysts' forecasts and making China the the only major economy to log positive growth in 2020.Fortune magazine predicts that financial experts believe that China's economy will overtake that of the US somewhere between 2026 and 2029.

Read more at: China Is the Only Major Economy to Report Economic Growth for 2020 - WSJ

EU-China Deal: How should Biden respond to the EU-China deal? - by Jeff Rathke,

The United States has been transfixed by President Trump’s efforts since Nov. 3 to overturn the results of the presidential election, but America’s friends and adversaries alike are moving to position themselves for the Biden administration.

This will constrain the 46th president's room for maneuver — an example is the agreement in principle between the European Union (EU) and China on a Comprehensive Agreement on Investment (CAI), concluded in the last days of 2020. The successful push to conclude the CAI (largely led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel) took many by surprise, because just a few months earlier it was foundering on concerns about China’s international assertiveness and doubts in Europe about the wisdom of tying the EU’s fate more closely to Beijing. Washington should resist the temptation to try to scupper the deal by exploiting divisions in Europe; instead, it should develop a positive agenda with the EU that focuses on achievable priorities in an effective China approach.

Read more at How should Biden respond to the EU-China deal? | TheHill

China-EU trade relations: China-EU investment agreement to inject new life into global economic recovery

China and the European Union (EU) on Wednesday announced they have completed investment agreement negotiations as scheduled.

The long-awaited result, which came after 35 rounds of negotiations in the course of seven years, is a milestone in EU-China relations and is expected to inject new vitality into the pandemic-battered global economy, European experts, officials and business leaders have said.

Read more at: Xinhua Headlines: China-EU investment agreement to inject new life into global economic recovery - China.org.cn

EU-China Relations: EU edges closer to China investment deal, irking US

The EU and China are edging closer to a long-sought investment deal which would give European firms better access and protection in the Chinese market, but is bound to irk the new US administration.

The EU Commission, on Monday (28 December), briefed the 27 EU ambassadors in Brussels on the latest progress in talks, which have been going on since 2014.

And none of the envoys raised any objections to going ahead, which meant an announcement on the deal could come as early as this week.

Read more at: EU edges closer to China investment deal, irking US

China-US Relations: Biden Very Weak President: Chinese Advisor Says Joe Biden Could Start Wars

China must drop its illusion that its relations with the United States will automatically improve under President-elect Joe Biden's administration, a Chinese government adviser has said, adding that Beijing should be prepared for a tough stance from Washington.

Zheng Yongnian, the Dean of the Advanced Institute of Global and Contemporary China Studies, a Shenzhen-based think tank, has said that the Chinese government should utilise every opportunity to mend ties with the US, South China Morning Post has reported.

Read more at: Very Weak President: Chinese Advisor Says Joe Biden Could Start Wars

The Origins of the EU: How the CIA Created the EU - by Eric Zuesse

The details are supplied in an exhaustive 1,000-page biography of Jean Monnet by Éric Roussel, which was published only in France in 1996, and which seems to have been successfully suppressed. It has never been translated, and has no reviews even at Amazon. However, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of UK’s Telegraph newspaper has provided some of the core information from it. Furthermore, Richard J. Aldrich’s 2003 The Hidden Hand also provides key details, such as by Aldrich’s saying, on page 366, about the American Committee for a United Europe: ACUE, more than any other American front organization of the Cold War, was a direct creature of the leading lights of the CIA. Indeed, it was so replete with famous CIA figures that its ‘front’ was very thin. Its early years seemed to have formed something of a laboratory for figures such as [Bill] Donovan, [Allen] Dulles, [Walter] Bedell Smith and [Tom] Braden, before they moved on to other projects in the mid-1950s. Over its first three years of operations, 1949-51, ACUE received $384,650, the majority being dispersed to Europe. This was a large sum, but from 1952 ACUE began to spend such sums annually. The total budget for the period 1949-60 amounted to approximately $4 million. As the quantity of money flowing across the Atlantic began to increase, ACUE opened a local Paris office to monitor more closely groups that had received grants. By 1956, the flood of increased funding was prompting fears among the Directors of ACUE that its work would be publicly exposed.

The emerging European Economic Community (EEC) and the growing Western intelligence community overlapped to a considerable degree. This is underlined by the creation of the Bilderberg Group, an informal and secretive transatlantic council of key decision-makers [representatives of the billionaires who controlled U.S. and U.S.-allied international corporations]. Bilderberg was founded by Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952 in response to the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe. … Retinger secured support from Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller and Walter Bedell Smith. The formation of the American wing of Bilderberg was entrusted to Eisenhower’s psychological warfare chief, C.D. Jackson, and the funding for the first meeting, held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland in 1954, was provided by the CIA.

Funds for these CIA operations came not only from the U.S. Treasury but from private sources, America’s super-rich, and, also from organized gangsters, as was revealed in the 1998 classic by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. This off-the-books funding comes from narcotics kingpins throughout the world, as protection-money, which is essential to keep them in business. So, the EU was financially fueled from all of these sources, and, basically, was a bribing-operation (to end up getting the ‘right’ people into the EU’s Parliament, etc.), in addition to be receiving funds from what might be considered idealistic philanthropic donors (because the dream of a united Europe had long preceded the grubby version of it that the CIA created for Europeans). The EU was a Cold War operation, from the very start. Though the Cold War was allegedly ideological, it was actually the result of a decision that U.S. President Harry S. Truman made on 26 July 1945, for the post-WW-II U.S. to achieve, ultimately, the world’s first all-encompassing global empire. The EU was designed to serve the political aspects of that, and NATO the military aspects, for America’s European ‘allies’ (America’s European vassal nations). The aim was for the Soviet Union (subsequently only Russia) to become surrounded by enemies, so that, in the final analysis, the U.S. and its ‘allies’ would be offering the U.S.S.R. “a deal they can’t refuse.” This deal (quite fitting to come from an international gangland operation such as America’s Deep State) would be inclusion in the U.S. empire, on terms that are set solely by the U.S. Government — either this, or else conquest. Then, the same thing would be done to China.

Pritchard issued two important articles about this, the first being his 19 September 2000 “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs”: DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement. … One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington’s main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA’s first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement’s funds.

The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington. The Belgian director, Baron Boel, received monthly payments into a special account. When the head of the European Movement, Polish-born Joseph Retinger, bridled at this degree of American control and tried to raise money in Europe, he was quickly reprimanded.

The leaders of the European Movement — Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak — were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE’s funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.

Read the complete report at: How the CIA Created the EU - Modern Diplomacy

Global Economy: China’s On Top Of The World, But Not For Long - by Sam Hill

China is feeling pretty good about itself. On November 1, President Ji Xinping said the economy will double by 2035. He has reason to be bullish. China has the most people. It produces the most Apples, Aluminum and Autos, and has the world’s biggest Army. And we’re not even out of the “A’s” yet. (Further down the alphabet, it also grows the most wheat.) Each year China files more patent applications than every other country in the world put together. It has $3.3 trillion in foreign reserves and is the world’s number one exporter. It’s not the largest economy in the world yet, but it should pass the U.S. as its domestic consumption takes off. They should enjoy it while they can, because China’s time at the top will be short. How short? 30 years or so, according to the analytics.

Read more: China’s On Top Of The World, But Not For Long

US Elections: Trump's Turkish Ally Erdogan and other populists/authoritarian leaders around the world Stay Mum on Biden Victory

Erdogan, along with the leaders of Russia, Israel, Iran, Hungary, Saudi Arabia and China, offered no initial congratulations to the president-elect.

Read more at: Trump's Turkish Ally Erdogan Stays Mum on Biden Victory | Greek Reporter Europe

Economics: China Has a Few Things to Teach the U.S. Economy - by Noah Smith

Ever since China’s spectacular economic growth became apparent in the 2000s, people have wondered whether that country’s brand of authoritarian state capitalism has proven superior to the more liberal American model. Until recently, it was possible to dismiss those concerns, but Chinese successes and U.S. failures keep piling up. If the U.S. wants to maintain both its relative power and its prestige as a model for the world, it needs to make some big adjustments.

Read more at: China Has a Few Things to Teach the U.S. Economy - Bloomberg

China-Netherlands Relations:: How China Made the Netherlands Question the Free Market - by Diederik Baazil

When the Dutch government invested in home-grown chipmaker Smart Photonics this summer, it was a departure for a country with a hands-off approach to business.

A small company with big plans, Smart Photonics was struggling to attract financing to scale up production of its next-generation chips, whose applications include self-driving cars and datacenters.

Smart’s chief technology officer, said in an interview at the company’s offices outside Eindhoven, in the southern Netherlands. “The most serious interest came from Asia,” specifically Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and from China, he said.

In late June, just as it looked like Smart Photonics was about to be lured to Asia, the Dutch government stepped in with 20 million euros ($23.7 million). A similar sum came from a consortium including a government-backed agency, PhotonDelta, whose chief executive, Ewit Roos, raised the alarm at the Ministry of Economic Affairs as soon as he learned of the company’s predicament. “The government acted swiftly and decisively,” Roos said by phone.

he Dutch government says that its decision was taken to retain key technology and wasn’t driven by concerns over China. Even so, its investment was just the latest example of a more defensive economic stance that has accompanied a hardening of the country’s attitude to Beijing.

The shift has “been very noticeable, because the Netherlands has always been that kind of small, open, free-market economy that wanted nothing to be touched and everything to be open,” said Agatha Kratz, an associate director at Rhodium Group in Paris.

Beijing still regards the Netherlands as an important trade partner and investment destination, even though the Netherlands is getting “harsher” toward China, said a researcher with the government-affiliated Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who asked not to be identified due to rules for speaking with media. One reason for that change is China is becoming more competitive economically with Europe, the researcher said.

On the political front, the Netherlands angered Beijing this year by changing the name of its representation in Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province. That prompted the Chinese embassy in The Hague to request clarification from the government. Taiwan’s president pointedly tweeted her gratitude to the representation’s outgoing head.

Read more at:
How China Made the Netherlands Question the Free Market - Bloomberg

China - Netherlands Relations: Free trade and cooperation top Chinese FM Wang Yi's Netherlands visit

Chinese State Council and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Tuesday called on the Netherlands to jointly defend multilateralism and free trade.Wang made the remarks during a meeting with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte in The Hague.

Wang said China and the Netherlands enjoy a mutual bilateral relationship on the basis of mutual respect, mutual understanding, openness and mutual trust.

As the coronavirus pandemic is normalized in both countries, China is willing to work with the Dutch government to resume the flow of goods and people so as to make their contribution to global economic recovery.

Faced with the rising challenge of unilateralism, China would like to work the Dutch side to defend multilateralism and free trade and build a community with a shared future for mankind, he added.

Rutte said the Netherlands values the ties with China and is willing to expand cooperation in different areas.

He praised China's efforts in fighting against COVID-19, saying the Dutch side is willing to work with China in respective areas.

Read more at: 
Free trade and cooperation top Chinese FM Wang Yi's Netherlands visit - CGTN