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Media Report
January 16 , 2018
  • Financial Times：China fake data mask economic rebound
    Financial Times reports: "China's carbon emissions are rising, foreign executives report they are seeing strong growth and luxury cars form long lines outside top hotels in cities where coal is king. But economic data due out on Thursday are unlikely to reflect the revival because, as a series of admissions of falsified data attest, the true extent of the preceding downturn was never revealed. China's gross domestic product grew 6.9 per cent last year, Premier Li Keqiang told a regional meeting in Cambodia last week. "The overall situation was better than expected," he said. Mr Li's estimate is higher than the 6.7 per cent growth reported for 2016 but the real recovery has been sharper. Corporate results are rosy, commodity imports are hitting new records and producer prices have shifted back to steady gains, signifying better industrial health. So why will Thursday's 2017 GDP figures not reflect the good news? China's national statisticians regularly discount local data to correct for local officials' habit of inflating figures to look good. This 'smoothing' masks fluctuations in China's economic cycles and reduces the utility of publishing statistics in the first place. 'We already have so much better quality data for 2017 that the official GDP growth rate, which I expect will be close to the 2016 pace, will not be valuable to investors when it is published next week,' said Andy Rothman, economist at Matthews Asia."
  • The Wall Street Journal：Battle Stations: U.S. and China Prepare for Trade Clash of the Titans
    The Wall Street Journal reports: "The last time Washington mobilized for a trade war, Ronald Reagan was president and Japan the adversary. Today, the White House is readying the same big guns—a mix of tariffs and quotas—aimed mainly at Chinese imports. It has in its sights everything from steel to solar panels and washing machines. A record Chinese annual trade surplus with the U.S., announced last week, is the potential catalyst for hostilities after a year of bluster from President Donald Trump. A trade war isn't a certainty, but if it comes, it will look nothing like the battles that raged in the 1980s over Japanese semiconductors, cars and TV sets. The forces are more evenly matched this time: America has never faced off in a trade skirmish with an opponent like China in terms of economic size, industrial capabilities and global ambitions. Japan was a U.S. ally, China increasingly a rival. That raises the risk of tit-for-tat escalation, especially since support for Beijing is crumbling across the U.S. political spectrum as well as in the U.S. business community, traditionally a strong advocate for China trade."
  • War On The Rocks：Contrasting China's and Russia's Influence Operations
    War On The Rocks comments: "A series of scandals from Russian meddling in the U.S. elections to China's influence over Western politicians, like Australian Sen. Sam Dastyari and U.S. Sen. Steve Daines, has brought American attention back to the Cold War-style fight for influence and narratives. Congress has started to act, incorporating counter-propaganda funding into the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act and proposing reforms to the Foreign Agent Registration Act and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The United States finally may be waking up to the challenge that its NATO allies and Taiwan have been facing for years. As Americans try to make sense of modern political warfare, the struggle to polish the rust off of the Cold War toolkit for countering foreign influence has run into the problem of insufficient to explain the challenges now faced by the United States and its allies. In a series of presentations, conferences, and phone calls over the last year the discussion of Chinese intelligence and information operations invariably raises the question: 'How do the Chinese compare to the Russians?' I have attempted to describe the differences with three distinctions between Russian and Chinese influence operations: set-piece operations vs. playing the man; service-led operations vs. service-facilitated operations; and agents of influence vs. influenced agents. These are not perfect distinctions, and both systems can and do draw on a wide variety of means. Beijing's methods also appear to be evolving over the last year to incorporate Russian techniques, if its operations on Taiwan can be viewed as the leading edge. The operational differences, for all their practical implications, may be less important than the simple recognition that Beijing and Moscow both approach influence operations and active measures as a normal way of doing business. The United States approaches covert action as something distinct from the routine business of foreign policy, requiring special authorities and oversight or legal arguments over whether Title 10 or Title 50 applies. This is simply not the case for the contemporary Chinese or Russian states. They still bear the hallmarks of their totalitarian and Leninist pasts."
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