1. NYT: Kerry and Hagel defend U.S. engagement abroad in face of criticism
The American secretaries of state and defense on Saturday presented an emotional defense of the Obama administration’s engagement in international crises in the face of widespread European and Middle Eastern criticism that the United States was retreating from a leadership role
.Speaking here at the Munich Security Conference, the most important trans-Atlantic security gathering, Secretary of State John Kerry expressed some exasperation with the criticism, rejecting “this narrative which frankly has been pushed by some people who have an interest in trying to suggest that the U.S.
is somehow on a different track.” He went through a litany of American involvement in places like Afghanistan, Libya and the Middle East, saying, “I can’t think of a place in the world where we’re retreating.”
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2. NYT: On 35th anniversary of diplomatic ties with U.S., China tries to soften image
With tensions between China and the United States
growing over a range of political and economic issues, the Chinese government is using the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations this year as part of an intensified effort to soften its image. Combining the anniversary with the Chinese New Year, which began on Friday, China has moved to expand friendly cultural exchanges with the United States and promote a series of prominent collaborations in music, dance and education, particularly in New York. The effort, an acknowledged priority of China’s ruling Communist Party, partly reflects what both countries regard as a deepening intertwined relationship between the world’s two leading economic powers, which hardly seemed possible when
embassies were formally established on Jan. 1, 1979. But it also comes against a backdrop of rising mistrust of China among Americans who see it as an economic and military threat. A surge of Chinese investments in American holdings, ranging from Treasury debt to commercial real estate, coupled with frictions that have accompanied China’s rapid expansion and assertiveness toward its Asian neighbors, are viewed as part of the reason.
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3. WSJ: Fractures emerge between Obama, Congressional Democrats
Coming midterms complicate White House's agenda on trade, energy, health care.
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4. WP - Charles Lane: U.S. benefits from trade deals — never mind the protectionists’ hype
The Great Recession wrought global havoc, but at least it did not rekindle protectionist sentiment. Or so it seemed until last week, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) trashed President Obama’s request for authority to expedite major trade-expanding agreements with the Pacific Rim and Europe. It is not a bullish indicator if the man who controls Senate business says, “Everyone would be well advised just to not push this right now.” Protectionists appear to be gaining traction with their attacks on the proposed pacts, especially the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which “could mean toxic food and environmental contamination,” according to a scary video on the AFL-CIO’s Web site. The critics’ central claim is less lurid: The TPP would destroy U.S.
jobs and wages — just as its “model,” the 20-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), allegedly did.
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5. WSJ: Judge's ruling on accounting firms in China touches on Hong Kong units
A judge's ruling against the Chinese affiliates of the Big Four accounting firms over their refusal to cooperate with U.S.
regulators has drawn attention to a practice of some auditors' Hong Kong units. Last month's ruling suspended the Chinese affiliates of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, KPMG and Ernst Young from auditing U
.S
.-listed companies for six months, because they wouldn't give the Securities and Exchange Commission documents about some of their Chinese audit clients to help the commission investigate the companies for possible accounting fraud.
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6. WSJ: China demand still buoys global producers
Despite China's slowing economy, its appetite for goods and commodities from Africa to Asia are holding up.
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7. Reuters: China says no cover-ups using state secrecy as excuse
China has unveiled new rules telling officials not to cover up what should be publicly available information using the excuse it is a
state secret, in what state media said was a move towards greater government transparency. China has notoriously vague state secret laws, covering everything from the number of people executed every year to industry databases and even pollution figures, and information can be retroactively labeled a state secret. The issue received international attention in 2009 when an Australian citizen and three Chinese colleagues working for mining giant Rio Tinto were detained for stealing state secrets during the course of tense iron ore negotiations.
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8. Quartz: It’s true. Your trade secrets aren’t safe in China
Here’s an interesting effort by the OECD, which is trying to quantify how well-protected trade secrets are across a number of large, significant economies Called the Trade Secrets Protection index, the gauge tries to assess how stringent countries are when it comes to various aspects of protecting business secrets, from actual legal provisions to how well protections are administered by the justice system. There’s a long piece explaining the effort here. But for those of us who just want to cut to the chase, here are the headline results.
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9. LAT: Japan-China tension has U.S. walking a fine line
Washington wants good relations with Japan and China, as well as South Korea. But war wounds keep animosity burning among the three.
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10: WSJ - Editorial: The great Chinese internet crash
Web freedom is the best answer to Beijing's foreign media crackdown.
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11. Xinhua: China imports more natural gas in 2013
China saw its aggregate volume of natural gas imported from overseas jump 25 percent year on year in 2013, approaching one-third of its apparent consumption, a new report
has showed. The country imported 53 billion cubic meters of natural gas last year, 31.6 percent of its domestic gas output plus imported volume, according to a report released by an economic and technological academy under China National Petroleum Corporation, the country's state-owned oil giant. In 2013, local authorities more strongly promoted the use of natural gas to reduce dependency on coal, prompted by the needs for environmental protection and economic advances. The drive contributed to the country's surging imports of natural gas, noted the report.
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12. SCMP: Xi Jinping told aircraft carrier captain to build up combat readiness: official magazine
A Communist Party magazine has revealed the chief concerns President Xi Jinping expressed during his inspection of the country’s first aircraft carrier in August. “[You should] build up [the carrier’s] combat readiness and logistics and
support expeditiously,” the carrier’s captain,
Zhang Zheng, said Xi told him before wrapping up his inspection of the Liaoning, according to an account in this month’s issue of Dangjian, or Party Construction, magazine. The Liaoning, originally a Soviet-built carrier of the Admiral Kuznetsov class, was sold to China in 1998 after it was stripped of all weapons and engines. It underwent years of refitting and was handed over to the Chinese navy in September 2012 as an "aircraft carrier training platform". Last November, it began to take part in sea drills in a battle formation with escort warships in the South China Sea. Two of the Liaoning’s escort ships confronted the USS Cowpens during that carrier group exercise in nearby waters in December 2013, in an incident the Pentagon described as a near-collision. The US State Department raised the matter with Beijing.
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13. FT - Gideon Rachman: The future still belongs to the emerging markets
Just as the west
has emerged from crisis before, the newcomer economies will return to growth.
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14. AP: China's reality TV movie is box-office smash
A movie based on a reality TV show about the relationships between celebrity fathers and their children has become a Chinese box-office smash, state media reported Monday. ‘‘
Dad, Where Are We Going?’’ raked in 90 million yuan ($15 million) on Friday, the day it was released and the first day of the Chinese New Year, the People’s Daily website reported. The film broke the record for a single day’s earnings for a 2-D Chinese-language movie, it added. ‘‘
Dad, Where Are We Going?’’ was a hit show on China’s television last year as five celebrities who were more used to spending time away from their children attempted to look after them. The movie follows the same format, with the fathers and kids visiting a wildlife park and attempting tasks such as cleaning animals’ teeth and making dumplings.
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15. GW Hatchet: GW abandons potential plan to build campus in China
The University has backed away from potential plans to build a campus in China after a group of faculty experts called the costly move overly ambitious. The faculty committee helping to plan GW's future in China said a Beijing campus – which administrators had floated last year – would drain resources without offering clear benefits, Provost Steven Lerman said Friday. “We have decided, and the committee’s advice has been quite clear on this, that right now in our evolution and given our
financials, we think that it’s probably more than we should be undertaking,” Lerman said. The group of professors, led by Lerman, instead recommended that the University prioritize partnerships with Chinese universities for more specific, short-term programs. The move represents a step away from the ambitious strategy devised under former GW School of Business dean Doug Guthrie, who planned to transform GW into one of the top U.S.
universities in China. By building up a campus and undergraduate programs there, the University could attract big donors and top applicants from China, administrators planned. Guthrie, who also served as vice president of China operations, was fired last August after overspending in the business school.
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16. Sinosphere: China to ramp up military spending
China already spends more on its military than any country in the world except the United States. Now, as defense budgets at the Pentagon and in many NATO countries shrink, China’s People’s Liberation Army is gearing up for a surge in new funding, according to a new report. China will spend $148 billion on its military this year, up from $139.2 billion in 2013, according to IHS Jane’s, a defense industry consulting and analysis company. The United States spends far more – a forecast $574.9 billion this year – but that is down from $664.3 billion in 2012 after budget cuts slashed spending. By next year China will spend more on defense than Britain, Germany and France combined, according to IHS. By 2024, it will spend more than all of Western Europe, it estimates. The surge in weapons spending by Beijing – military outlays this year are set to be a third higher than in 2009 – has come in tandem with an escalation in tensions with its neighbors over longstanding territorial disputes. Vietnam and the Philippines have overlapping claims with China to islands and shoals in the South China Sea. Japan and China have been at loggerheads over uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
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17. The Hill - John Feehery: Reid tips balance on trade
It was typical Harry Reid: blunt, to the point and unambiguous. “Everyone knows how I feel about this. ... The White House knows. Everyone would be well-advised to not push this right now.” The “this” is trade promotion authority. And with that unadorned statement, the Democratic Senate majority leader killed the president’s most important job-creating initiative. Earlier in the year, the Commerce Department announced that the United States exported a record $194.9 billion in goods and services in November 2013. The New York Times reported last week that “exports also surged while imports increased only slightly, making trade the second biggest contributor to growth after consumer spending.” This is what the president said about trade in his State of the Union address last week: “When 98 percent of our exporters are small businesses, new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help them create even more jobs. We need to work together
on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment and open new markets to new goods stamped ‘Made in the USA.’ ” The bottom line is that Reid, the Senate majority leader and the man who first picked Barack Obama to be his candidate for president and who helped him to attain the highest office in the land, doesn’t trust him to look out for the best interests of the American people in trade negotiations. How can you expect Republicans to trust this president if his No. 1 ally in the Senate won’t?
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