US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s attacks on China and promise to name the country a currency manipulator if elected are foolish and hypocritical, Xinhua news agency said yesterday.
In a strongly worded English-language commentary, Xinhua said Romney’s anti-China rhetoric, if converted into policy upon him assuming office, would trigger a catastrophic trade war and damage the already weak global economic recovery.
“It is rather ironic that a considerable portion of this China-battering politician’s wealth was actually obtained by doing business with Chinese companies before he entered politics,” Xinhua wrote.
“Such blaming-China-on-everything remarks are as false as they are foolish, for it has never been a myth that pushing up the value of China’s currency would be of little use to boost the chronically slack job market of the world’s sole superpower, not to mention to magically turn the poor US economic performance around,” it said.
Romney has repeatedly pledged to get tougher with China on its trade and currency practices, including pledging to quickly declare China a currency manipulator if elected. His opponent, US President Barack Obama, has accused Romney, who founded and led private equity firm Bain Capital, of outsourcing jobs to both India and China.
China says the yuan’s exchange rate is essentially set by market forces, and that the currency has appreciated about 30 percent against the dollar since a landmark revaluation in 2005.
The Chinese government has generally been silent in the run-up to the November presidential poll. However, the state media has waded into the debate to lambaste what it sees as attempts to play the “China card,” in a reflection of official thinking and concern the country’s name is being unfairly dragged through the mud overseas.
Xinhua said such China-bashing had been “a cancer in US electoral politics, seriously plaguing the relations between the two countries.”
“It has also become a handy tool for US politicians who try to court the votes and support of ill-informed voters by ratcheting up antagonistic sentiment towards China, while truly serious social and economic woes within the United States have been left unfixed,” Xinhua said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS