EU, China to Ink Investment Pact as Trump Admin Blacklists Major State-Controlled Chinese Firms
China’s Communist Party-run Global Times: EU-Beijing agreement “a landmark deal closely binding the economic interests of China and Europe.”
While the Trump administration takes tough measures to limit Chinese state-run companies’ access to U.S. technology and market, the European Union is in the final stages of signing a major investment pact with Beijing by the end of 2020.
The White House on Friday added China’s leading chipmaker SMIC to the list of over 60 Chinese companies barred from doing business in America. The measure is part of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in November aimed at banning companies tied to China’s military from acquiring U.S. technology.
Beijing is “increasingly exploiting United States capital to resource and to enable the development and modernization of its military, intelligence, and other security apparatuses,” the executive order said. The order, set to come into effect in early January, targets Chinese companies that pose a threat to U.S. national security.
China is pursuing a strategy of “Military-Civil Fusion,” the White House believes. The communist regime is boosting “the size of the country’s military-industrial complex by compelling civilian Chinese companies to support its military and intelligence activities,” the executive order added.
“The United States will use all countermeasures available, including actions to prevent (Chinese) companies and institutions from exploiting U.S. goods and technologies for malign purposes,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement on Friday.
The Associated Press reported the latest move by the Trump White House:
The Trump administration blacklisted China’s top chipmaker Friday, limiting the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.’s access to advanced U.S. technology because of its alleged ties to the Chinese military.
“We will not allow advanced U.S. technology to help build the military of an increasingly belligerent adversary,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement explaining the decision to put SMIC on the U.S. government’s so-called Entity List. (…)
Commerce is putting more than 60 other firms on the list for such things as allegedly supporting the Chinese military, assisting the Chinese government’s crackdown on dissent, being involved in the theft of trade secrets and helping Beijing’s aggressive efforts to claim territory in the South China Sea. Among them is Chinese dronemaker DJI, sanctioned for allegedly helping the Chinese government conduct surveillance on its own citizens. But SMIC is the most high-profile target.
The move means that U.S. companies will need to get a license to sell sophisticated technology to SMIC. Technology that helps with the production of the most-advanced chips — those 10 nanometers or smaller — face the “presumption of denial,” Commerce said. Other items will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
While the Trump administration is rolling back China’s footprint in critical sectors of the U.S. economy, Europe is opening itself further to Beijing by inking a major deal in coming weeks.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is the driving force behind the new EU-China investment pact set to be inked by the end of the month, news reports suggest. “An EU official also said a deal was close after a push from Germany, which holds the EU presidency until the end of the year and is the biggest European exporter to China,” the Reuters news agency reported on Friday.
China is equally upbeat about a favorable deal with Brussels. Chinese Communist Party-run newspaper The Global Times described the EU-China agreement as “a landmark deal closely binding the economic interests of China and Europe.” The deal is “expected to be signed at the end of 2020 before Joe Biden formally takes his oath as US president in January,” the communist daily assured.
The Reuters reported the finalizing of the Brussels-Beijing investment pact:
The European Union and China aim to reach an investment accord by the end of 2020 that would grant European companies greater access to the Chinese market after six years of talks, officials and diplomats said on Friday.
Potentially a big step in repairing Sino-European ties after the coronavirus outbreak in China and Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong, the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment would put most EU companies on an equal footing in China. (…)
“Negotiations are now in their final stages,” Wang Wenbin, a spokesman at the Chinese foreign ministry, said on Friday.
An EU official also said a deal was close after a push from Germany, which holds the EU presidency until the end of the year and is the biggest European exporter to China.
Instead of decoupling its supply chain, Europe has increased it dependency on China in the wake of the Wuhan pandemic. In 2020, China surpassed the U.S. as Europe’s leading trading partner. “Over the first nine months of 2020, trade between the EU and China totalled €425.5 billion, while trade between the EU and the United States came in at €412.5 billion,” the Belgian news website Euractiv reported earlier this month.
Europe’s growing dependence makes it vulnerable to China’s blackmail. Chinese penetration of Europe’s 5G wireless network, which will also regulate military logistics and communications, poses a major security threat to the U.S. and allied nations.
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Comments
Maybe the Chinese have started to focus on the weaklings, hence their increased presence in Europe.
The faster they will both be buried.
The Banana Republic of America will do nothing to stem the Communist Chinese tide sweeping the world. Until the FBI & DOJ is replaced with law enforcement agencies that prosecute the criminals within government the USA will remain a distant memory.
KISS THE YOKE YOU FECKLESS EUROPEANS! INSTEAD OF BANDING TOGETHER WITH THE U.S. TO MEET THE CHICOM ONSLAUGHT THEY JOIN THE ENEMY AND HAND THEM THE ROPE THE KILLERS ARE GOING TO USE TO HANG THEM…..WHAT THE HELL KIND OF PEOPLE ARE THESE? SICKENING STUFF. WATCH CHINA JOE SIGN IT TO. AFTER FECKLESS JOE REJOINS THE ISLAM PACT AND THE SIGNS THE CLIMATE HOAXER PACT. THIS IS BAD BAAAAD STUFF FOR WORLD PEACE….THE CHICOMS ARE GOING TO WIN W/OUT FIRING A SHOT. WELCOME TO THE CHAINING FOLKS…FREEDOM DIES IN A BOWL OF WON TON SOUP….SICKENING STUFF..#STOPTHESTEAL IT’S OUR ONLY HOPE!
So who rules Europe first, China or Islam?
Why wouldn’t Europe “ink deals” with China? Remember how everybody there wanted to be both Franz Joseph’s and Hitler’s friends? And how they have sidled up to Putin?
Europe loves tyrants.
Meant von Hindenburg, but Franz Joseph was also true.
Why not stop giving Europe free protection? The truth is that Muslims are going to overrun Europe, in the end we will have to nuke them, or maybe drop big rocks. As long as those rocks do not penetrate too deep into the surface, there will be little radioactivity.
I am wondering what it would take to create an artificial volcano, and what the impact would be on climate, such as tempering warming.
Might be easier ways of solving climate change lol
I, for one, welcome our Sino-Bidenese overlords.
The devil is in the details. On the surface, it reminds me of something I learned in a superb History of WW2 course I took at the U of Wisconsin back inthe 1970s. This was long before cancel culture, so UW had professors from the conservative side of the spectrum, including the guy who taught that class.
He believed that, in the 1930s, top American policy makers were alarmed by the development of what he called a “quarter-sphere world” in which Japan would control East Asia; the Soviets would control the Russian empire and Central Asia; the Germans would run Europe and Africa; the U.S. and Britain would be left with the rest.
The problem was that, in the division they saw forming, the U.S. and Britain would be competing against slave labor and would be critically disadvantaged. Moreover, a U.S,.-British sphere that would include South America was an economic mismatch. At the time, South America’s exports were of agricultural produce, and the U.S. in particular was already struggling to keep its farmers afloat in a time of surpluses in that sector.
The Germans were no dummies, and they created a currency called the “askimark,” which could be used to buy German industrial goods. The idea was to pay Brazil and Argentina, and eventually others, in askimarks for their food, and cut off U.S industrial export markets in the Western Hemisphere.
From the professor’s viewpoint, WW2 was essentially a classic trade war of conquest. He firmly believed (and made a damn good case) that FDR and his people had advance knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack, and welcomed it not because they wanted war with Japan but because the Japan-German axis would obligate Germany to declare war — which they did shortly after the U.S. declared war on Japan.
Germany’s economy was twice as big as Japan’s, and FDR’s people saw them is Threat #1. Defeat Germany, and the rest would fall into place — which is what happened. And when South America saw the war unfold and the Americans winning, they abandoned their neutrality, seeing that the German askimark scheme would work only with military backing.
Today, China is the new Germany AND Japan, seeking to implement its own version of that quarter-sphere world. Maybe not four spheres, but the idea is close enough to examine the parallels. Again, we don’t know the details of that agreement, and the pathetic U.S. media are too stupid and too lazy to examine any of it.
In short, there are larger forces at work here, and we’re heading into some rough waters indeed.
Random, my Italian grandfather was investigated by the FBi during WWII for telling anyone who would listen that FDR knew about Pearl Harbor before it happened. “Damn Roosevelt” (damn in the biblical sense), and “Damn the Anarchista, damn the Bolsheviki” were heard all over the neighborhood.
Thanks for the memory.
The Rs conducted multiple investigations on that issue during WW2, and could never prove anything. On the day the Japanese attacked, they were all smiles in the White House.
Lost in the sands of time is another reality. FDR’s “fireside chats” included at least one long one made during a baseball game roughly six months before the attack. The people who heard it expected a declaration of war, but it didn’t come then — probably because public opinion was VERY heavily against joining the world war.
The U.S. needed an excuse to get in, but given public opinion at the time, simply entering was a political non-starter. Whether or not there was foreknowledge — something that I don’t expect to ever be proven — the attack on Pearl Harbor instantly galvanized opinion in the other direction, and was a godsend to the top policymakers who urgently believed that the United States had to enter the war.
I’d compare it to the first Gulf War, where Bush Sr. drew Saddam into conflict by having his ambassador to Kuwait signal that we’d be okay with an invasion. Saddam’s complaint at the time was that Kuwait, with the help of Halliburton, whose CEO had been Dick Cheney, was drilling sideways into Iraq’s oil fields.
Whatever else we’ll say about Saddam, he was correct about the sideways drilling. Also at the time, Bush Sr. arranged for the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Russians to not only support the first invasion but to pay for it. Those payments showed up in our international balance of payments, making the first Iraq invasion one of history’s only wars run at a profit — not on the booty but on the war itself.
Recall that, in the second invasion, Bush Jr. did NOT get the support from Europe and Russia. Not sure about the Japanese. Why did the Europeans and Russians support and pay for it the first time but not the second time? Aha! There’s a story for that too.
When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the early 20th century, the “Great Powers” of the time divided up the oil in the Middle East. The Brits kept Iran (which led to the 1953 coup); the U.S. got what is now Saudi Arabia (and in fact installed the House of Saud on the throne); Iraq was split between the Euros, the Brits, the Russians, and I believe the United States to some degree.
In the first invasion, Bush Sr. promised not to tamper with the oil concessions in Iraq. In the second invasion, Bush Jr. declared that the U.S. would take over those concessions. That’s why the Europeans and the Russians opposed it. This was never, EVER a matter of morality or international law, whatever that might be.
Same for WW2, which was never fought for human rights. Just as WW1 was never fought to “save the world for democracy.” Oh, and the Lusitania that the Germans sank? Turns out it WAS carrying munitions, just as the Germans claimed.
The bottom line is that wars are fought primarily for resources and secondarily for religion, the second motive often being a stalking horse for the first motive. No one has clean hands.