"Sinocism is the Presidential Daily Brief for China hands"- Evan Osnos, New Yorker Correspondent and National Book Award Winner
- U.S. accuses China, India of hiding subsidy programs | Reuters – The United States on Thursday accused China of flouting World Trade Organization rules by failing to notify the world trade body of nearly 200 government subsidy programs.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk also said India had failed to notify 50 such programs, and the United States had taken the unusual step of presenting its "voluminous information" on both countries' programs to the WTO.
- China games trading system with yuan policy: Obama | Reuters – President Barack Obama said on Thursday China has been hurting the United States by manipulating its currency to help its exports, but he stopped short of backing a bill in Congress that could punish Beijing.
"China has been very aggressive in gaming the trading system to its advantage and to the disadvantage of other countries, particularly the United States," Obama told a news conference.
"Currency manipulation is one example of it," he said.
Obama said it was important that trade partners play by the same rules, but he appeared wary about a proposal in Congress to place tariffs on imports from countries with deliberately undervalued currencies.
- Can Confucius save America’s middle class? | David Rohde – BOWLING GREEN, KENTUCKY–For decades, this bucolic corner of southwestern Kentucky depended on Corvette sales from the local GM plant for its economic life. Now, it’s trying something different.
Last year, the state university opened a “Confucius Institute” that offers nighttime Chinese language classes to local business people. An American auto parts company chose to create 280 new manufacturing jobs here instead of Mexico. And government officials brag about the 19 companies from India, Japan, Finland, Germany, Israel and other foreign countries that have invested locally.
“We just came back from China,” Ron Bunch, the head of the Bowling Green Chamber of Commerce, told me as he escorted Chinese investors around town. “We’re starting an Indo-Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.”
- Continuing crisis in Wenchuan: the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, hasty reconstruction and geological risk | chinadialogue.net – Three years after the Sichuan earthquake, the disaster zone remains perilously unstable as expanding mines and hasty reconstruction aggravate geological risks, writes Wang Tao.
- ‘Tiger Cub’ Kelusa Seeks Money for China Hedge Fund After Gains – Businessweek – Kelusa Capital Group, a New York- based manager backed by Julian Robertson, plans to increase the size of its China hedge fund almost five times to $250 million after outperforming the nation’s stocks.
Kelusa Capital China, which focuses on the world’s second- largest economy and has assets of about $55 million, gained more than 7 percent this year through September, said Kenton Leo, the founding partner of the fund, which is run out of Singapore.
- To Rule the Arctic’s Waves, U.S. Can’t Waive the Rules: View – Bloomberg – The melting of Arctic ice as a result of global warming has set off a race to capitalize on the polar region’s suddenly accessible resources and expanding navigable waterways. Yet even as Canada, Russia and others stake their claims to this potential bounty of economic and trade opportunities, the U.S. is choosing to sit on the sidelines.
Why? Because it won’t sign on to the rules of the game: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The opponents justify their obduracy by citing a nonexistent threat to national sovereignty. The greater threat to the U.S. lies in its continued failure to ensure it will have a central role on this new frontier.