CHINA PLANS TO RULE THE WORLD – TRUMP IS HELPING THEM! – As America Withdraws From Asian Trade, Shuns Foreign Talent, & Disses Clean Energy, The PRC Is Happy To Step In & Take Over Leadership!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/china-has-a-plan-to-rule-the-world/2017/11/28/214299aa-d472-11e7-a986-d0a9770d9a3e_story.html

Foreign Affairs expert David Ignatius writes in the Washington Post:

“As foreign scientists pull back from some U.S. labs because of visa and government-grant worries, the Chinese are doubling down. According to the second Air Force study, China surpasses the United States in annual patent applications, is now No. 2 in peer-reviewed research articles and in 2014 awarded more than twice as many degrees in science, technology, engineering and math.

China is mobilizing its best tech talent for this global empire. China Telecom plans to lay a 150,000-kilometer fiber-optic network covering 48 African nations. IZP, a big-data company, plans to expand soon to 120 countries. BeiDou, a government agency, is building a GPS-like satellite navigation system for all Eurasia.

There’s an eerie sense in today’s world that China is racing to capture the commanding heights of technology and trade. Meanwhile, under the banner of “America first,” the Trump administration is protecting coal-mining jobs and questioning climate science.

Sorry, friends, but this is how empires rise and fall.”

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Read the entire, rather sobering, article at the link.

This is what a “Government of Fools” looks and acts like! Trump turns his back on our traditional democratic allies and trade partners to pal around with dangerous dictators like President Xi, President Putin, President Duterte, and President Sisi. But, all the while those guys are making a fool out of him and the US!

PWS

11-29-17

BANISHING THE BEST & THE BRIGHTEST: One Would-Be H-1B Nonimmigrant’s Tale Of How The Bureaucracy & America’s New Anti-Immigrant Attitude Sent Her Packing!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/23/opinion/immigration-visa-h1b-trump-.html

Frida Yu writes in the NY Times:

“Six months ago I won the lottery — the H-1B visa processing lottery for skilled foreign workers. I called my thrilled parents and celebrated with friends. I’m from northeastern China and have an M.B.A. from Stanford, and was planning to stay in Silicon Valley to help start a company based on a promising new technology to improve the use of data. I was overjoyed because, historically, being selected in the lottery was a near guarantee that an applicant could remain in this country at least three more years.

But at the end of July, I received the dreaded Request for Further Evidence from immigration authorities. I provided the extra information that United States Citizenship and Immigration Services asked for. In September, I got another request. I complied again. Finally, on Oct. 11, half a year after my celebration, I learned I had been denied a visa.

After earning law degrees in China and at Oxford, after having worked in Hong Kong as a lawyer at a top international firm, after coming to United States three years ago for an M.B.A. and graduating and joining a start-up, I was given just 60 days to leave the country. I have 17 days left.

In the past, it was fairly safe to assume that once you were selected in the lottery, your H-1B petition would be accepted by immigration officials. In 2016, this happened about 87 percent of the time. But things began to change in April when the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice announced measures to increase scrutiny of the highly skilled applicants who use the H-1B program, and President Trump signed an executive order calling for federal agencies to suggest reforms to the program.

While it’s unclear exactly what percentage of petitions have been approved so far in 2017, requests for evidence like the ones I received have increased by 44 percent compared with last year, according to immigration statistics, strongly suggesting that more people are being denied than before Mr. Trump took office.

Many of my fellow international students are in situations similar to mine. Some had job offers from companies like Google, Apple and PwC when they learned that their applications had been denied or did not even make it into the lottery. For those whose employers have only United States offices, losing the lottery meant losing jobs and going home, with no real way to use the skills they were on the verge of contributing to the American economy.

And some classmates who, like me, were picked in the H-1B lottery last spring are still waiting for an answer. The Trump administration on April 3 announced that it would suspend the “premium processing” service that, for a fee, guaranteed applicants responses to their petitions within 15 days. This has caused problems for students who needed a quick decision because their work authorization expired over the summer or because they wanted to plan overseas trips that they couldn’t make while their status was in limbo. My mom had surgery for cancer in July, but I simply couldn’t go back to China to be with her and risk being denied at the border upon my return because I didn’t have H-1B approval.

My two requests for evidence asked me to prove my job was a “specialty occupation” — that is, work that only someone with a bachelor’s degree or higher can do. My work involves artificial intelligence and big data, and my letters of support came from an authority in my industry and veteran start-up investor, and a Nobel Prize winner. But it wasn’t enough to convince the government that my job requires advanced skills.

While I gave up my law job and used my savings and my parents’ to pay my Stanford graduate school tuition, in the grand scheme of things, I know my situation is much better than that of many immigrants who are forced to leave this country: Just this week, thousands of Haitians in the United States learned that they may have to return to Haiti as a result of the administration’s decision to strip them of the Temporary Protected Status they were granted while their country recovered from disasters.

It’s true that I’m brokenhearted about missing the chance to return to China to care for my mother (she insisted that I stay and pursue the visa that was her dream for me), but I’m not looking for sympathy. As much as I hate to leave, I know I will be fine.

Rather, I’m frustrated, because I know I’m part of a pattern: America is losing many very skilled workers because of its anti-immigrant sentiment, and while this is a disappointing blow to me and my classmates, it will also be a blow to the United States’ competitiveness in the global economy. Tech giants such as Google and Tesla were founded by immigrants.

I can’t make sense of why an administration that claims to want this country to be strong would be so eager to get rid of us. We are losing our dreams, and America is losing the value we bring.

As I make plans to go back to China, I find myself wondering: If I am not qualified to stay in the United States, then who is?

 

 

TRUMP’S “DISSING” OF MEXICO MIGHT BACKFIRE — BIG TIME! — If Mexico Plays The “China Card” The U.S. Might Regret Electing A Bully As President!

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/mexicos-revenge/521451/

Franklin Foer writes in The Atlantic:

“The Mexico–U.S. border is long, but the history of close cooperation across it is short. As recently as the 1980s, the countries barely contained their feelings of mutual contempt. Mexico didn’t care for the United States’ anticommunist policy in Central America, especially its support of Nicaraguan rebels. In 1983, President Miguel de la Madrid obliquely warned the Reagan administration against “shows of force which threaten to touch off a conflagration.” Relations further unraveled following the murder of the DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985. Former Mexican police officers aided drug traffickers who kidnapped and mercilessly tortured Camarena, drilling a hole in his skull and leaving his corpse in the Michoacán countryside. The Reagan administration reacted with fury at what it perceived as Mexican indifference to Camarena’s disappearance, all but shutting down the border for about a week. The episode seemed a return to the fraught days of the 1920s, when Calvin Coolidge’s administration derided “Soviet Mexico” and Hearst newspapers ginned up pretexts for a U.S. invasion.

. . . .

Once the threat of Soviet expansion into the Western Hemisphere vanished, the United States paid less-careful attention to Latin America. It passively ceded vast markets to the Chinese, who were hunting for natural resources to feed their sprouting factories and build their metropolises. The Chinese invested heavily in places like Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela, discreetly flexing soft power as they funded new roads, refineries, and railways. From 2000 to 2013, China’s bilateral trade with Latin America increased by 2,300 percent, according to one calculation. A raft of recently inked deals forms the architecture for China to double its annual trade with the region, to $500 billion, by the middle of the next decade. Mexico, however, has remained a grand exception to this grand strategy. China has had many reasons for its restrained approach in Mexico, including the fact that Mexico lacks most of the export commodities that have attracted China to other Latin American countries. But Mexico also happens to be the one spot in Latin America where the United States would respond with alarm to a heavy Chinese presence.

That sort of alarm is just the thing some Mexicans would now like to provoke. What Mexican analysts have called the “China card”—a threat to align with America’s greatest competitor—is an extreme retaliatory option. Former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda told me he considers it an implausible expression of “machismo.” Unfortunately, Trump has elevated machismo to foreign-policy doctrine, making it far more likely that other countries will embrace the same ethos in response. And while a tighter Chinese–Mexican relationship would fly in the face of recent economic history, Trump may have already set it in motion.

The painful early days of the Trump administration have reminded Mexico of a core economic weakness: The country depends far too heavily on the American market. “Mexico is realizing that it has been overexposed to the U.S., and it’s now trying to hedge its bets,” says Kevin Gallagher, an economist at Boston University who specializes in Latin America. “Any country where 80 percent of exports go to the U.S., it’s a danger.” Even with a friendly American president, Mexico would be looking to loosen its economic tether to its neighbor. The presence of Trump, with his brusque talk of tariffs and promises of economic nationalism, makes that an urgent task.Until recently, a Mexican–Chinese rapprochement would have been unthinkable. Mexico has long steered clear of China, greeting even limited Chinese interest in the country with wariness. It rightly considered China its primary competition for American consumers. Immediately after nafta went into effect in 1994, the Mexican economy enjoyed a boom in trade and investment. (A flourishing U.S. economy and an inevitable turn in Mexico’s business cycle helped account for these years of growth too.) Then, in 2001, the World Trade Organization admitted China, propelling the country further into the global economy. Many Mexican factories could no longer compete; jobs disappeared practically overnight.Mexico’s hesitance to do business with the Chinese was also a tribute to the country’s relationship with the “Yanquis.” A former Mexican government official told me that Barack Obama’s administration urged his country to steer clear of Chinese investment in energy and infrastructure projects. These conversations were a prologue to the government’s decision to scuttle a $3.7 billion contract with a Chinese-led consortium to build a bullet train linking Mexico City with Querétaro, a booming industrial center. The cancellation was a fairly selfless gesture, considering the sorry state of Mexican infrastructure, and it certainly displeased the Chinese.

But China has played the long game, and its patience has proved farsighted. The reason so many Chinese are ascending to the middle class is that wages have tripled over the past decade. The average hourly wage in Chinese manufacturing is now $3.60. Over that same period of time, hourly manufacturing wages in Mexico have fallen to $2.10. Even taking into account the extraordinary productivity of Chinese factories—not to mention the expense that comes with Mexico’s far greater fidelity to the rules of international trade—Mexico increasingly looks like a sensible place for Chinese firms to set up shop, particularly given its proximity to China’s biggest export market.Mexico began quietly welcoming a greater Chinese presence even before the American presidential election. In October, China’s state-run media promised that the two countries “would elevate military ties to [a] new high” and described the possibility of joint operations, training, and logistical support. A month and a half later, Mexico sold a Chinese oil company access to two massive patches of deepwater oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. And in February, the billionaire Carlos Slim, a near-perfect barometer of the Mexican business elite’s mood, partnered with Anhui Jianghuai Automobile to produce SUVs in Hidalgo, a deal that will ultimately result in the production of 40,000 vehicles a year. These were not desultory developments. As Beijing’s ambassador to Mexico City put it in December, with the American election clearly on the brain: “We are sure that cooperation is going to be much strengthened.”. . . .

Not so long ago—for most of the postwar era, in fact—the United States and Mexico were an old couple who lived barely intersecting lives, hardly talking, despite inhabiting the same abode. Then the strangest thing happened: The couple started chatting. They found they actually liked each other; they became codependent. Now, with Trump’s angry talk and the Mexican resentment it stirs, the best hope for the persistence of this improved relationship is inertia—the interlocking supply chain that crosses the border and won’t easily pull apart, the agricultural exports that flow in both directions, all the bureaucratic cooperation. Unwinding this relationship would be ugly and painful, a strategic blunder of the highest order, a gift to America’s enemies, a gaping vulnerability for the homeland that Donald Trump professes to protect, a very messy divorce.”

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Remember, folks, you read about the potential “Chinexico” disaster first on Courtside! http://wp.me/p8eeJm-AF

Pretty scary when we elect a President who might understand even less about the global politico-economic situation than a retired U.S. Immigration Judge!

PWS

04-234-17

 

 

 

Make China Great — For Years, China’s Leaders Have Been Trying To Get The Upper Hand On The US — Now, Trump Is Doing The Job For Them, According to Thomas L. Friedman In The NY Times!

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/29/opinion/trump-is-a-chinese-agent.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=0

Friedman writes:

“Now more Asian nations are falling in line with China’s regional trading association — the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — which has no serious environmental, intellectual property, human trafficking or labor standards like TPP. A Peterson Institute study said TPP would “increase annual real incomes in the United States by $131 billion” by 2030, without changing total U.S. employment levels. Goodbye to that.
But Trump took his Make China Great campaign to a new level on Tuesday by rejecting the science on climate change and tossing out all Obama-era plans to shrink our dependence on coal-fired power. Trump also wants to weaken existing mileage requirements for U.S.-made vehicles. Stupid.

O.K., Mr. President, let’s assume for a second that climate change is a hoax. Do you believe in math? There are now 7.5 billion people on the planet, and there will be 8.5 billion by 2030, according to the United Nations population bureau — and most will want to drive like us, eat protein like us and live in houses like us. And if they do, we’ll eat up, burn up, smoke up and choke up the planet — and devour our fisheries, coral reefs, rivers and forests — at a pace we’ve never seen before. Major cities in India and China already can’t breathe; wait for when there are another billion people.

That means that clean power, clean water, clean air, clean transportation and energy-efficient buildings will have to be the next great global industry, whether or not there is climate change. The demand will be huge.

So what is China doing? Its new five-year plan is a rush to electric cars, batteries, nuclear, wind, solar and energy efficiency — and a cap-and-trade system for carbon. Trump’s plan? More coal and oil. Hello? How can America be great if we don’t dominate the next great global industry — clean power?

The U.S. state leading in clean energy innovations is California, which also has the highest vehicle emissions standards and the strictest building efficiency codes. Result: California alone has far more advanced energy jobs than there are coal miners in America, and the pay is better and the work is healthier. In January 2016, CNNMoney reported that nationally the U.S. “solar industry work force is bigger than that of oil and gas construction, and nearly three times the size of the entire coal mining work force.”

“More than half the electric vehicles sold in the U.S. are sold in California,” said Hal Harvey, C.E.O. of Energy Innovation. “If there are two jurisdictions hellbent on transformation, it is China and California. There have been 200 million E.V.s sold in China already. They’re called electric bicycles, which cost about $400 — quiet, not contributing to congestion or pollution, and affordable.”

China is loving this: It’s doubling down on clean energy — because it has to and it wants to leapfrog us on technology — and we’re doubling down on coal, squandering our lead in technology.

It was bitterly ironic that on the same day that President Trump took America on a great leap backward to coal, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Tencent Holdings Ltd. bought a 5% stake in Tesla Inc., giving the backing of China’s most valuable company to the Silicon Valley electric-vehicle maker as it prepares to launch its first car aimed at the mass market. … Having a powerful friend in China could help Tesla as it eyes further global expansion. Big Chinese tech companies have backed a wave of green-car start-ups in the country recently.”

. . . .

So you tell me that Trump is not a Chinese agent. The only other explanation is that he’s ignorant and unread — that he’s never studied the issues or connected the dots between them — so Big Coal and Big Oil easily manipulated him into being their chump, who just tweeted out their talking points to win votes here and there — without any thought to grand strategy. Surely that couldn’t be true?”

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Friedman didn’t even get to my recurring thought. As we push Mexico, our second leading trading partner away, China will be waiting with open arms. What better than to fuel up some technology and capital-driven economic competition for the U.S. right here in North America, right across our Southern Border. And, once Mexico sees that the Chinese aren’t going to lean all over them on immigration and Central American migration, and that Beijing has no particular interest in trying to publicly humiliate Mexico’s leaders, the incentive for Mexico to cooperate with us on reducing migration and border issues drops to somewhere below zero.

I’m certainly no economist or foreign trade expert. But, I’m getting the feeling that neither are our President and his team. They just go around stirring things up, making gaffes, insulting friendly foreign leaders and organizations, and then, apparently, relying on their secret weapon, “Czar of Everything Trumpian” Jared Kushner to work behind the scenes to assure folks that nobody meant anything they said or did. Wow! What a way to make policy.

PWS

03/29/17

ECONOMICS: Mary Anastasia O’Grady In The WSJ Says Mexico Can Fight Back Against US Threats!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mexicos-trade-reply-to-trump-1488144051

“Many conservatives who opposed Hillary Clinton are still skeptical of the Trump presidency as well. It may have something to do with recurring whoppers from the administration like White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s claim last week that “the relationship with Mexico is phenomenal right now.”

Bilateral relations with Mexico are on the rocks “big league,” and if Mr. Spicer doesn’t know that, he should get out more. Declaring otherwise undermines presidential credibility and leaves Trump fence-sitters to wonder what else the press secretary is making up.

Millions of American workers, investors and entrepreneurs who depend on trade with Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement are right to be worried. Unless President Trump finds a way to climb down from his position that Mexico cheats the U.S. under Nafta, their livelihoods are at risk.

Courteousness and formality are signs of good breeding in Mexican society and this often produces, in foreigners, illusions of approval. But when the extranjeros are out of earshot, locals can be colorful. It is now fashionable to hold protest marches, beat Trump piñatas, burn effigies with orange hair and even post vulgarities about the U.S. president on public buses. Angry does not begin to describe the popular mood.”

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Read the entire article at the link. My main question is why would the Trump Administration pick this unnecessary fight with a neighbor whose goodwill, economic partnership, and cooperation we depend on?

PWS

02/27/17