Chinese Premier Li Qiang (李強) yesterday arrived in New Zealand’s northern hub of Auckland, stirring up hope of new trade avenues among the nation’s business leaders.
Li is on a six-day tour of New Zealand and Australia, the highest-ranking official to visit either nation since his predecessor in 2017.
China accounts for 30 percent of New Zealand’s export earnings, according to World Bank data, but there are fears this could evaporate if the world’s second-largest economy continues to slow.
Photo: AFP
The New Zealand China Council — which represents some of the nation’s biggest exporters and most influential companies — was slated to meet with Li yesterday evening. A council spokesperson said they were enthusiastic about “hearing the premier’s views on potential new areas of growth for the bilateral relationship.”
Mark Piper, chief executive of a top New Zealand government science institute, met Li earlier during a tour of a research facility.
“He was talking about more research collaborations and more people exchanges, which is what we’re really interested in,” Piper said. “He was really big on collaboration, the value that New Zealand can bring to China and that China can bring to New Zealand.”
New Zealand was one of the first developed nations to ink a comprehensive free-trade deal with Beijing. Chinese consumers have a voracious appetite, in particular, for New Zealand’s premium meat, dairy and wine.
Li on Thursday touted opportunities for trade, tourism and investment as he started his tour in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, but he warned that emerging differences between the two nations “should not become a chasm that blocks exchanges and cooperation between us.”
New Zealand, long seen as one of China’s closest partners in the region, has become increasingly bold in its criticism of Beijing’s role in the South Pacific.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Filipino farmers like Romeo Wagayan have been left with little choice but to let their vegetables rot in the field rather than sell them at a loss, as rising oil prices linked to the Iran war drive up the cost of harvesting, labor and transport. “There’s nothing we can do,” said Wagayan, a 57-year old vegetable farmer in the northern Philippine province of Benguet. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs. We don’t earn anything from it. That’s why we decided not to harvest at all,” he said. Soaring costs caused by the Middle East
For two decades, researchers observed members of the Ngogo chimpanzee group of Kibale National Park in Uganda spend their days eating fruits and leaves, resting, traveling and grooming in their tropical rainforest abode, but this stable community then fractured and descended into years of deadly violence. The researchers are now describing the first clearly documented example of a group of wild chimpanzees splitting into two separate factions, with one launching a series of coordinated attacks against the other. Adult males and infants were targeted, with 28 deaths. “Biting, pounding the victim with their hands, dragging them, kicking them — mostly adult males,
RSS