China Fires Back at Pence, Says U.S. Should Get House in Order

China fired back at Vice President Mike Pence’s criticism on human rights, calling his speech “lies” and chiding him for ignoring U.S. problems like racism and wealth disparity.

Pence on Thursday gave a long-anticipated speech in which he criticized China’s actions against protesters in Hong Kong while calling for greater engagement between the world’s two biggest economies. He said the U.S. stands with demonstrators in Hong Kong and accused Beijing of curtailing the rights and liberties of the city’s residents.

Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China’s foreign ministry, blasted Pence’s “arrogance” and said no force would stop the country’s progress. She accused him of seeking “to disrupt China’s unity or internal stability” and called Hong Kong, Taiwan and the far west region of Xinjiang “internal affairs.”

View the complete October 25 article by Carolynn Look and Jenny Leonard on the Bloomberg News website here.

Bannon Teams Up With Chinese Group That Thinks Trump Will Bring on End-Times

Steve Bannon made a fiercely anti-China movie for some of the Chinese government’s biggest foes.

After trying to launch his own cryptocurrency and failing to turn an Italian monastery into a training camp for Europe’s far right, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has a new plan: teaming up with a Chinese spiritual movement that reportedly believes Trump will bring about Judgment Day.

On Saturday night, viewers of the rabidly pro-Trump cable news channel One America News Network will witness the premiere of Bannon’s latest effort, a ripped-from-the-headlines political thriller modeled after the real-life legal battle that ensued following the arrest of an executive for Chinese tech company Huawei in Canada.

Bannon didn’t exact for subtlety as the executive producer of the film, Claws of the Red Dragon. Chinese communist officials in the movie meet in shadowy rooms to discuss the utmost importance of their “secret plan,” while an intrepid reporter investigating Huawei stand-in “Huaxing” finds a dead cat left on her car in warning. In a Bannonian touch at the end, viewers are left with an Edmund Burke quote warning that evil triumphs when “good men do nothing.”

View the complete October 19 article by Will Sommers on the Daily Beast website here.

Investors signal they hate Trump’s “Phase 1” China trade deal

Axios logoWall Street was bursting at the seams with excitement about a trade deal between the U.S. and China — until details of the deal were revealed.

The big picture: China agreed to more than double its annual purchases of U.S. agriculture, up to $50 billion and made yet-to-be-determined concessions on intellectual property rights while the U.S. agreed not to implement its planned Oct. 15 tariffs of 30% on Chinese imports.

What happened: The S&P 500 was flirting with a 2% rise for the day, and then details of the agreement started leaking out and the market’s gains leaked with them.

View the complete October 14 article by Dion Rabouin on the Axios website here.

China Wants More Talks Before Signing Trade Deal With Trump

China wants to hold more talks this month to hammer out the details of the “phase one” trade deal touted by Donald Trump before Xi Jinping agrees to sign it, according to people familiar with the matter.

Beijing may send a delegation led by Vice Premier Liu He, China’s top negotiator, to finalize a written deal that could be signed by the presidents at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit next month in Chile, one of the people said. Another person said China also wants Trump to scrap a planned tariff hike in December in addition to the hike scheduled for this week, something the administration hasn’t yet endorsed. The people asked not to be named discussing the private negotiations.

The S&P 500 Index was little changed, Europe’s Stoxx 600 fell and the yen rose as investors grew pessimistic on the handshake deal. The yuan pared much of its earlier gains offshore.

View the complete October 14 article on the Bloomberg News website here.

China Declines Trump Request To ‘Investigate’ Biden

One week after President Donald Trump stood on the White House lawn and asked China to investigate his top political opponent, Joe Biden, China is responding. In a word, “no.”

“We have no intention of intervening in the domestic affairs of the United States. Our position is consistent and clear,” foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said, as reported by the South China Morning Post.

“China has long pursued the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries,” Geng added, as The Hill reports.

View the complete October 9 article by David Badash from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.

Report: China tariffs tab approaches $1 billion for Minnesotans

A global trade advocacy group predict businesses face price hike pressure and could be forced to freeze hiring.

Minnesotans have faced nearly $1 billion in additional tariffs since February 2018, according to a new report from advocacy groups favoring global trade.

Using import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, consultants for the groups Americans for Free Trade and Farmers for Free Trade said new tariffs on Chinese imports totaled $632 million in Minnesota from February 2018 through August 2019. In addition, Minnesota farmers and other businesses faced $343 million in retaliatory tariffs placed on American exports that cut their sales significantly.

In August, the tariff toll on Minnesotans was $60 million for importers of Chinese products and $46 million for those facing Chinese retaliation, said Americans for Free Trade, a coalition of other trade groups whose members include Minnesota multinationals such as Best Buy, Target Corp., 3M, Ecolab, Cargill, Medtronic and General Mills.

View the complete October 9 article by Jim Spencer on The Star Tribune website here.

We Absolutely Could Not Do That’: When Seeking Foreign Help Was Out of the Question

New York Times logoWASHINGTON — One day in October 1992, four Republican congressmen showed up in the Oval Office with an audacious recommendation. President George Bush was losing his re-election race, and they told him the only way to win was to hammer his challenger Bill Clinton’s patriotism for protesting the Vietnam War while in London and visiting Moscow as a young man.

Mr. Bush was largely on board with that approach. But what came next crossed the line, as far as he and his team were concerned. “They wanted us to contact the Russians or the British to seek information on Bill Clinton’s trip to Moscow,” James A. Baker III, Mr. Bush’s White House chief of staff, wrote in a memo later that day. “I said we absolutely could not do that.”

President Trump insists he and his attorney general did nothing wrong by seeking damaging information about his domestic opponents from Ukraine, Australia, Italy and Britain or by publicly calling on China to investigate his most prominent Democratic challenger. But for every other White House in the modern era, Republican and Democratic, the idea of enlisting help from foreign powers for political advantage was seen as unwise and politically dangerous, if not unprincipled.

View the complete October 6 article by Peter Baker on The New York Times website here.

Schiff: Trump requests to China, Ukraine are ‘fundamental breach’ of office

The Hill logoHouse Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) on Thursday blasted President Trump for asking China and Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, calling it a “fundamental breach” of presidential decorum and a threat to national security.

Emerging from a closed-door meeting in the Capitol basement, where lawmakers from three committees are interviewing a key witness as part of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, Schiff said the comments are evidence that Trump has ignored the lessons from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference — and Mueller’s warnings of ongoing foreign influence over critical domestic affairs.

“To have the president of the United States suggesting — urging — a foreign country to interfere in our presidential elections is an illustration that this president, if he learned anything from the two years of the Mueller investigation, it’s that he feels he can do anything with impunity,” Schiff told a crowd of reporters staking out the meeting.

View the complete October 3 article by Mike Lillis on The Hill website here.

Trump urges China to investigate Bidens

The Hill logoPresident Trump on Thursday publicly encouraged both China and Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son amid growing concerns over how Trump has used his position to pressure foreign governments to look into his political rivals.

“I would think that if they were honest about it they’d start a major investigation into the Bidens,” Trump told reporters at the White House when asked what he wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to do about the Bidens following the July 25 call between the two leaders.

That call triggered an intelligence community whistleblower complaint and is at the heart of House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry into the president.

View the complete October 3 article by Brett Samuels and Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

‘Celebrating a country that shoots protesters’: Trump scorched for congratulating China on adoption of communism

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump has repeatedly embarrassed the United States, upended decades of foreign policy, and wholly embraced the core aspects of our enemies. He just did it again.

In a Tuesday morning tweet Trump congratulated China’s President Xi Jinping “and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!”

The People’s Republic of China is governed by the Communist Party of China. Trump just congratulated its president for 70 years of communism.

View the complete October 1 article by David Badash from The New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.