French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe said yesterday that he will discuss China’s need to increase the value of its currency when he visits Beijing this week.
“We have as an objective that China’s position evolve in a certain number of areas, in particular in terms of currency,” Juppe told reporters through an interpreter during a visit to the Australian capital, Canberra.
“We believe that the yuan is undervalued at present. We will certainly discuss this with the Chinese,” he added.
UNDER PRESSURE
Beijing is under pressure from Washington and other trading partners to ease currency controls and other measures that they complain keep the yuan undervalued and swell China’s trade surplus.
Juppe will visit Beijing on Wednesday for talks ahead of a summit of the G20 nations in the French coastal resort of Cannes in November.
The summit will discuss the global economic crisis and high levels of sovereign debt owed to China.
HOPES
Asked if he expected that China would accelerate efforts to appreciate the yuan, Juppe replied: “We hope so.”
“This system that we have in place at the moment is not in the long-term a sustainable system and one of the main issues that will be discussed at the G20 meeting is how we can rebalance this system worldwide,” Juppe said.
China’s trade growth accelerated last month despite weakening global demand and its politically sensitive trade surplus narrowed from a more than two-year high.
Export growth for the world’s second-largest economy grew to 24.5 percent from 20.4 percent in July, while imports surged to 30.2 percent, up from 22.9 percent in July, customs data showed on Saturday.
IMPORT GROWTH
The unexpectedly strong import growth shows that Chinese demand remained robust last month despite government efforts to steer economic growth to a more sustainable level.
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
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],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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