EU and Chinese leaders are on Wednesday to steer clear of tough issues at a fence-mending summit focused on trade and the economic crisis after Beijing canceled their last meeting over the Dalai Lama.
The summit, to be held in Prague, was originally set for last December but China called it off in protest at a meeting between the Tibetan spiritual leader and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Poland.
France held the rotating presidency of the 27-nation EU at that time until Paris handed the baton over to the Czech Republic at the start of the year.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus will host Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) at Prague Castle along with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
“It’s certainly a fence-mending summit and the problem is that it is only a fence-mending summit,” said analyst John Fox with the European Council on Foreign Relations, lamenting that tough political issues and the environment are on the backburner.
“The best thing that can happen is that the summit goes ahead and that it won’t be prevented by the Chinese being angry at Czech politicians making statements on Taiwan, or Tibet or the Dalai Lama,” he said.
At talks in Brussels earlier this month, EU commissioners and a Chinese delegation headed by Vice Premier Wang Qishan (王岐山) agreed that trade and investment would lead the way to economic recovery.
Two-way trade has exploded in recent years making the EU the top destination for exports of Chinese goods while China is Europe’s biggest trade partner after the US.
Last year they traded 326 billion euros (US441 billion) in goods with Europe running a 169.4 billion euros deficit with China.
However, despite promises to broadly cooperate on trade, China and Europe have many differences on trade issues.
The Chinese government said on Friday it would urge the EU at the summit to relax limits on high-tech exports to China and review its anti-dumping policies.
Beijing is particularly eager to address the issue of gaining market economy status from the EU, which is a standard often used in anti-dumping cases.
In the latest of a slew of EU anti-dumping cases launched against China, the European nations agreed last month to extend anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made candles that enter force on Friday and will last for five years.
The Europeans are eager to get Beijing to commit to ambitious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in view of a key international meeting on climate change in Copenhagen in December but China has proved reluctant.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts