China’s chief trade negotiator is headed back to the US at the end of the month for the next round of talks, the Chinese government confirmed yesterday.
“At the invitation from US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Vice Premier Liu He (劉鶴) will visit the US on Jan. 30 to Jan. 31 for trade negotiations,” Chinese Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng (高峰) told reporters in Beijing. “They will work together to further implement the important consensus reached by the two state leaders.”
Liu is a top economic aide to President Xi Jinping (習近平) and is in charge of the talks with the US. This would be his second trip to Washington to talk trade, after he appeared to reach an agreement in May last year, only for US President Donald Trump to back away from it.
This time, Liu travels to Washington with a more challenging domestic economic backdrop, which makes it even more pressing to strike a deal.
On top of the uncertainty generated by the trade dispute, recent economic data has been poor, with worsening factory sentiment, deflation risks and falling exports.
The decline in last month’s exports was due to slowing global demand, the comparison with strong results a year ago and fading front-loading effects, Gao said, talking about exporters shipping products early to avoid being hit with higher US tariffs.
A day after it was reported that the US is investigating China’s Huawei Technologies Co (華為), Gao re-iterated that the world’s two largest economies are deeply intertwined.
“China’s technological advancement is not a threat to the world,” he said in response to a question about Western nations limiting purchases of Chinese-made tech equipment.
Developed nations should be more open to the China’s equipment, instead of making accusations based on hearsay that they are unsafe, Gao said.
“Recently some nations said that Chinese technology products are threats and contain security risks. Those are circumstantial, groundless accusations against Chinese companies and products,” Gao said.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said that proposed US legislation targeting Huawei, ZTE Corp (中興) and other Chinese telecommunications equipment companies was due to “hysteria,” and it urged US lawmakers to stop the bills.
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
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained