True Left

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has announced that the State Department is voiding longstanding restrictions on how US diplomats and others have contact with their counterparts in Taiwan, another move that is expected to upset China as the Trump administration winds to an end.

China's state media have criticised the United States for ending decades of restrictions on official contact with Taiwan.
It has accused Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of trying to "inflict a long-lasting scar on China-US ties".
The move has angered Beijing because it considers Taiwan as its territory.

(Jan. 13) U.S. President Donald Trump famously tweeted that “trade wars are good, and easy to win” in 2018 as he began to impose tariffs on about $360 billion of imports from China. Turns out he was wrong on both counts.

Even before the coronavirus infected millions of Americans and sparked the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, China was withstanding Trump’s tariff salvos, according to the very metrics he used to justify them. Once China got the virus under control, demand for medical equipment and work-from-home gear expanded its trade surplus with the U.S. despite the levies.

While trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economic powers didn’t start under Trump, he broadened the fight with the unprecedented tariffs and sanctions on technology companies. The tougher approach, according to the scorecard that follows, didn’t go as he hoped. But he’s leaving his successor Joe Biden a blueprint of what worked and what didn’t.

“China is too big and too important to the world economy to think that you can cut it out like a paper doll” said Mary Lovely, an economics professor at Syracuse University. “The Trump administration had a wake-up call.”

The U.S. Trade Deficit Grew
Trump vowed in his 2016 election year to very quickly “start reversing” the U.S. goods trade deficit with China, ignoring mainstream economists who downplay the importance of bilateral deficits. However, the deficit with China increased since then, hitting $287 billion in the 11 months to November last year, according to Chinese data.

The deficit did fall year-on-year in 2019, as U.S. companies switched to imports from countries like Vietnam, but it remained higher than the $254 billion gap in 2016. That was partly because Beijing’s imposition of retaliatory tariffs on about $110 billion in goods reduced its imports of American products, and these only started recovering in the last few months of 2020.

As part of the phase-one trade deal signed a year ago, Beijing made an ambitious vow to import $172 billion worth of U.S. goods in specific categories in 2020, but through the end of November it had bought just 51% of that goal. The slump in energy prices amid the pandemic and the problems with Boeing Co.’s planes played a part in that failure.

The persistent deficit demonstrated how reliant companies are on China’s vast manufacturing capacity, which was highlighted again by the pandemic. China was the only country capable of increasing output on a big enough scale to meet surging demand for goods such as work-from-home computers and medical equipment.

President Xi Jinping expressed his confidence in China’s rise Monday, telling officials that “time and the situation are in our favor.” The Chinese leader said that he saw “opportunities in general outweighing challenges,” a marked shift from his sometimes dire-sounding warnings of recent months.

China’s Export Machine Rolls On
Trump repeatedly said that China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 caused its economy to take off like a “rocket ship,” a result he viewed as unfair. As it turned out, Trump’s trade war with China coincided with another expansion in Chinese exports. After shrinking for two straight years in 2015 and 2016, China’s total shipments grew each year after Trump took office, including in 2019 when exports to the U.S. fell.

A group of 10 Southeast Asian nations replaced the U.S. as China’s second-largest trading partner in 2019. The shift to Asia is likely to continue as Southeast Asian economies are projected to grow faster than developed countries over the next decade. Those trade links will be further cemented by the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership pact signed late last year, which will see 15 regional economies gradually drop some tariffs on each others’ goods.

The U.S. on Tuesday became the first country to declare that China's actions toward its Uyghur population and other ethnic minorities in the northwestern Xinjiang region constitute a 'genocide.' It is expected to be the Trump admin's final action regarding China, culminating four years of marked international tensions between both countries and creating a new set of opportunities and challenges for the incoming Biden administration. Biden similarly referred to China's treatment of Uyghur populations as 'genocide' on the campaign trail.It's possible the new Biden admin will pursue additional sanctions on China as a result of this finding.
In recent years, an estimated 1-2 million Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang region have allegedly faced forcible relocation to internment, or re-education, camps. Many have also allegedly been subjected to practices like forced sterilization, food & sleep deprivation, and more. The Chinese government has disputed these accusations, with one official recently calling claims of genocide an 'utterly untethered fabrication.'

Three years ago, Myanmar's military escalated its persecution of the Rohingya -- a mostly-Muslim ethnic minority -- with a sustained, violent campaign of murder, **** and beatings that cleared hundreds of thousands from their land and burned their villages to the ground.

America is a toxic country and therefore untrustworthy

every time that China puts it's best foot forward the Americans will step on it and then ask that China back up,

China and rest of non Western World : we want cooperation for peace, stability and poverty alleviation
US : we want confrontation to keep our elites richer