Boston Herald Columnist, Adriana Cohen, former Bush senior campaign advisor, Mark Serrano, and Club for Growth president, David McIntosh on President Trump’s trade policies and his desire to put America first.
Note: the above image is from Japanese social media. Original source unknown. But very typical of popular ‘kawaii’ image editing apps. See more of our Japan coverage here.
Since October, the government has acted to slow outflows by tightening existing measures, such as approvals for foreign currency transfers, and has leant on banks to be stricter, making it harder for companies and individuals to change money and transfer money abroad.
SHANGHAI: Zhang Yuting lives and works in Shanghai, has only visited the United States once, and rarely needs to use foreign currency. But that hasn’t stopped the 29-year-old accountant from putting a slice of her bank savings into the greenback.
“Expectations of capital flight are clear. I might exchange more yuan early next year, as long as I’ve got money.”
She is not alone. In the first 11 months of 2016, official figures show that foreign currency bank deposits owned by Chinese households rose by almost 32 per cent, propelled by the yuan’s recent fall to eight-year lows against the dollar.
The rapid rise – almost four times the growth rate for total deposits in the yuan and other currencies as recorded in central bank data – comes at a time when the yuan is under intense pressure from capital outflows.
The outflows are partially a result of concerns that the yuan is going to weaken further as US interest rates rise, and because of lingering concerns about the health of the Chinese economy.
US President-elect Donald Trump’s threats to declare China a currency manipulator and to impose punitive tariffs on Chinese imports into the US, as well as tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea, have only added to the fears.
“Expectations of capital flight are clear,” said Zhang, who used her yuan savings to buy US$10,000 this year. “I might exchange more yuan early next year, as long as I’ve got money.”
Household foreign currency deposits in China are not huge compared to the money that companies, banks and wealthy individuals have been directing into foreign currency accounts and other assets offshore.
All up, households had US$118.72 billion of foreign money in their bank accounts at the end of November, while total foreign currency deposits were US$702.56 billion.
But the high growth rate in the household forex holdings are symbolic of a growing headache for the government as it struggles to counter the yuan’s weakness.
Since October, the government has acted to slow outflows by tightening existing measures, such as approvals for foreign currency transfers, and has leant on banks to be stricter, making it harder for companies and individuals to change money and transfer money abroad. Read the rest of this entry »
In order to be successful in Asia, Trump will have to reassure allies, create common ground with potential partners, and not cede any ground to our main challengers. Doing so does not necessarily mean dramatically changing U.S. policy or suddenly forcing a crisis with China. It does, however, require having a clear policy and placing the maintenance of Asian stability at the top of U.S. policy goals.
The following is an expanded version of an essay that first appeared in the Nikkei Asian Review.
Michael Auslin writes: The shock from Donald Trump’s stunning upset victory will eventually wear off, but the world will continue to obsess over his planned policies as he begins to lay out his governing agenda. For the nations of the Asia-Pacific, perhaps the biggest news was Trump’s reiteration of his vow to quit the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his first day in office next January. Given the expectations that TPP would help create a new strategic architecture for America in Asia, fears once again abound that Trump will reduce America’s position in the broader Indo-Pacific region.
“Despite the longevity of these relationships, Trump will inherit an alliance system that is under strain. First, his campaign rhetoric singled out both Japan and South Korea, our two main Asian allies, for not paying enough to support the U.S. forces that are based in their countries.”
Yet how well President-elect Trump deals with Asia will be a major factor in determining whether his presidency is a success or not. If he chooses to try and isolate America from half the world, then he may well find himself dealing with serious and unexpected crises that will shake the global economy and change the balance of power.
“He suggested that he might “walk away” from the alliances, if they do not increase their contributions. Moreover, Trump mused openly about letting both Japan and South Korea develop a nuclear weapons capability, thereby ending the decades-long U.S. policy of extended deterrence that prevented a nuclear arms race.”
Despite the attention paid by the Obama Administration to the Asia-Pacific, the regional geopolitical environment has deteriorated since 2009. China has become bolder, and has changed the balance of power in the South China Sea, at the same time that it is facing growing economic and political risk at home. North Korea continues to develop its nuclear and missile capabilities. America’s allies have become less convinced of the credibility of U.S. commitments, while other Asian nations have sought to avoid being drawn into a competition between America and China.
“Yet surprising some of his critics, just a week after winning the election, Trump met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in New York. The meeting came at Abe’s request, and after an equally important phone call with besieged South Korean president Park Geun-hye, seemed to indicate that Trump recognized the importance of close ties with America’s Asian allies. “
In order to be successful in Asia, Trump will have to reassure allies, create common ground with potential partners, and not cede any ground to our main challengers. Doing so does not necessarily mean dramatically changing U.S. policy or suddenly forcing a crisis with China. It does, however, require having a clear policy and placing the maintenance of Asian stability at the top of U.S. policy goals.
Trump and US Allies
America’s postwar policy in Asia has had the overriding goal of preventing any one power from dominating the region. It has pursued this goal by maintaining an open, rules-based system that encourages trade and exchange, and creates norms of behavior that lead to greater cooperation. The primary means of ensuring the stability of that system has been the six decade-old U.S. alliance structure, often referred to as the “hub-and-spokes.” Centered on Japan (whose treaty was signed in 1960), along with South Korea (1953), Australia (1951), the Philippines (1951), and Thailand (1954), the alliance system is not merely about U.S. commitments to protect its treaty allies; rather, it has evolved over time into a way to facilitate a permanent, forward-based U.S. presence in Asia. This, in turn, has made the U.S. commitment to maintaining stability more credible than it would be otherwise. Read the rest of this entry »
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping spoke late Sunday and set a tone of “mutual respect.” But if Mr. Trump’s earlier campaign rhetoric is put in motion, U.S.-China relations look set for a significant shift. WSJ’s Niki Blasina explains.
…One of the more frustrating and fruitless conversations in modern politics is with a Trump supporter who just insists that Trump can be trusted. But trusted to do what? If you want boots on the ground in the Middle East, Trump’s your guy. If you want America to stop sending its soldiers to die on foreign soil, Trump’s your guy. If you want higher taxes, Trump’s your guy. If you want lower taxes, Trump’s your guy. The list goes on…
Here we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I’m wondering if we’ve come even one step closer to a moral reckoning with our status as the world’s only country to use atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. Will an American president ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain” that spread radiation and killed even more people — slowly and painfully — leading in the end to a death toll for the two cities conservatively estimated at more than 250,000?
There’s also the fact that the conventional firebombing of Tokyo by 330 B-29 Superfortresses killed the same number of people as the Hiroshima bomb with plain old firebombs. Is this somehow morally superior to Hiroshima? 100,000 people dying in one bombing s perfectly acceptable as long as uranium and plutonium aren’t bombed, eh, @salon??? How about millions, @salon???
If you can’t tell me which of the below cities is Hiroshima and which one is Tokyo, you really should stop talking.
Look at this. Look at it. We did this without any fucking atom bombs and they still didn’t surrender.
But that’s not important.
Do you have any fucking clue what the alternative was, @salon???
It’s blood chilling.
Put simply, that above is the alternative, but no mere map can drive home the horror that would have been the aptly named Operation Downfall. D-Day would have been PEANUTS in comparison
It would have consisted of two phases: Operation Coronet and Operation Olympic. Olympic was scheduled for November 1st, 1945, with the goal of invading the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu. It would have been spearheaded by forty two aircraft carriers, twenty four battleships and over four hundred assorted cruisers, destroyers and destroyer escorts. By comparison, today’s US Navy only has 271 deployable combat ships.
Fourteen Army and Marine Corps divisions would have fought and bled and died on those beaches, with the Fifth, Seventh and Thirteenth Air Forces providing tactical close air support. The Twentieth Air Force would have continued the job of strategic bombing, pummeling Japanese infrastructure in the hopes of slowing down the inevitable Japanese main counterattack. Thirty-five landing beaches would have been concentrated around the cities of Miyazaki, Ariake and Kushikino, most of which were as heavily defended if not more so than Omaha Beach in Normandy. For the record, as can be clearly seen on the maps below, we weren’t even planning on taking the whole island, just the southern third of it because casualty rates would have been that FUCKING high.
Here’s a close-up map of Olympic:
Operation Coronet was scheduled for March 1, 1946- no, that date is not wrong; this would have extended World War II into the fifties- and was supposed to march on Tokyo, the heart and soul of the Japanese empire. Twenty five Army and Marine divisions would have landed that day on two opposing beaches with the plan being to take the city in the largest pincer movement since Operation Barbarossa. For comparison, the entirety of all American, Canadian and British forces landing on D-Day amounted to twelve divisions.
Here’s Coronet:
It wasn’t hard at all for the Japanese to figure out where we’d be landing and they had some plans of their own. Operation Ketsu-Go aim was not to win Japan the war; they knew that was impossible at this point in the game. No, their entire goal was to kill as many Allied troops as possible before going down.
They had five thousand aircraft, just for use as kamikazes. During the Battle of Okinawa just months prior, they had launched fifteen hundred kamikazes, causing more than 10,000 casualties; with more favorable terrain on Kyushu their kill rates would only have risen. They also planned to target troop carriers as they ferried men to the beaches; this alone could have destroyed one third of the invasion force before it even arrived.
They also had a little over a thousand suicide submarines and suicide boats- literally motorboats filled with explosives- to ram Allied shipping. They also planned on using “human mines”- just men in diving gear who would swim out and detonate bombs as the American transports passed overhead.
On the beaches, the Japanese moved one million soldiers to Kyushu. They also forced civilians into the fight, training women, schoolchildren and old men to kill Americans with goddamn muskets, longbows and bamboo spears! Anything they had they were told to kill Americans with. They were strapping explosives to schoolchildren as suicide bombers- eerily similar to what US soldiers are facing right now in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
But that’s barely scratching the surface. What’s truly chilling is the predicted casualty rates. The very best estimate for Allied forces was in the hundreds of thousands, more likely in the millions; up to that point the US had lost “only” 240,000 men in combat; we would have doubled and then tripled that in the first week of the invasion alone. The Japanese, on the other hand, were facing upwards of nine million to ALL OF THEM. Civilians would be dying left and right from starvation, the bombings, the blockade; even the atrocities their own military would have committed against them. This is the same military that forced parents on Okinawa to kill their children and then themselves, this is the same military that in Nanking raped and killed upwards of three hundred thousand people; this is the same military that did shit that puts your worst nightmares to shame.
Of course, the truest irony of it all is that even if we had gone with Operation Downfall, wasting another fifteen million innocent lives in a war that had already cost us eighty million, is that some plans for Downfall called for the usage of atomic bombs anyway! Numbers vary from seven to twenty; seven is most likely. So even if we had invaded, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been destroyed anyway!
We were also planning on nuking the beaches to soften up Japanese defenses too. But think about that. Nobody knew about radiation at the time. We would have been marching our troops through the still glowing impact zone. We were this close to killing EVERYONE in BOTH armies. Compared to the 250,000 dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this seems like a blessing!
However, for me, the most thought-provoking reminder of how many people almost died is the fact that in the leadup to the invasion that ultimately never was, the USA manufactured over 500,000 Purple Hearts. These have been used in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever else brave men have been injured or died defending our freedom…. and we still to this day have one hundred thousand of them left.
Factory activity cools for fifth month running as overseas demand for Chinese goods continues to fall
A further slowdown in China’s vast manufacturing sector has intensified worries about the year ahead for the world’s second largest economy.
“Against the backdrop of a faltering global economy, turmoil in the country’s stock markets and overcapacity in factories, Chinese economic growth has slowed markedly. The country’s central bank expects growth in 2015 to be the slowest for a quarter of a century.”
The latest in a string of downbeat reports from showed that activity at China’s factor ies cooled in December for the fifth month running, as overseas demand for Chinese goods continued to fall.
Against the backdrop of a faltering global economy, turmoil in the country’s stock markets and overcapacity in factories, Chinese economic growth has slowed markedly. The country’s central bank expects growth in 2015 to be the slowest for a quarter of a century.
After growing 7.3% in 2014, the economy is thought to have expanded by 6.9% in 2015 and the central bank has forecast that it may slow further in 2016 to 6.8%.
A series of interventions by policymakers, including interest rate cuts, have done little to revive growth and in some cases served only to heighten concern about China’s challenges.
Friday’s figures showed that the manufacturing sector limped to the end of 2015. The official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) of manufacturing activity edged up to 49.7 in December from 49.6 in November.
The December reading matched the forecast in a Reuters poll of economists and marked the fifth consecutive month that the index was below 50, the point that separates expansion from contraction. Read the rest of this entry »
Rezvani Beast, as the name speaks for itself, is a high-performance supercar built by Rezvani Motors. Introduced in the year 2014, Rezvani Beast is adorned brilliantly with a lightweight carbon fiber body based on the… 350 more words
Thousands of Japanese rallied Sunday in protest at plans by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to bolster the role and scope of the pacifist nation’s military
The protest which surrounded the Diet building was held as the nationalist premier tries to force through parliament a set of controversial bills making the changes.
The bills are a pet project of Abe, who says Japan can no longer shy away from its responsibility to help safeguard regional stability, and must step out from under the security umbrella provided by the United States.
The draft legislation would broaden the remit of Japan’s well-equipped and well-trained armed forces.
It would allow them to go into battle to protect allies-so-called “collective defense“-something which is banned by a strict reading of Japan’s pacifist constitution. Read the rest of this entry »
The President Needs to Respond to the Chinese Government Hack and Start Tightening the Screws
Michael Auslin writes: The news flashing through Washington, that Chinese hackers stole up to 4 million federal employees’ personal information, should elicit more than just a shrug from the Obama administration. The breach is yet more evidence that Beijing sees the US as an adversary and is unworried about any response aggression will elicit from the White House.
“Drop the useless diplomatic parleys to start, cut off military exchanges after that. And start rounding up your liberal allies and potential partners in Asia for talks on joint naval exercises in the South China Sea and the hosting of a democracy forum that invites Chinese dissidents.”
Whether it’s economic espionage, security challenges, or now hacking US government websites, Beijing is testing, probing, and undermining America in any way that they can.
Just a week ago, the Chinese were recorded warning a US Navy surveillance plane away from the reclaimed islands they have been building in the South China Sea. Video footage showed air strips on the islands, while subsequent reports indicated that China had already put some weaponry there.
The hack revealed today, which took place last December, is not the first time that Chinese sources have breached US government sites, and they’ve been charged with stealing information on almost every U.S. weapons program. Read the rest of this entry »
Was she flaunting a luxury item on air, or just wearing something that many Chinese can afford?
Bethany Allen-Fbrahimian writes: It’s almost axiomatic by now that Chinese bureaucrats of all stripes should be careful what they wear on their wrist. On May 5, a sharp-eyed Web user spotted a host on state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) wearing an Apple Watch on her left wrist while giving a news report that day. After the user posted screen shots of CCTV host Wang Yinqi and her expensive timepiece, the photos spread quickly on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging platform, setting off a fervent debate about what counts as luxury and excess in contemporary China.
“Expensive watches have become a symbol of corruption in China ever since August 2012, when netizens unearthed an image of provincial safety bureaucrat Yang Dacai smiling at the scene of a deadly traffic accident — and wearing a luxury timepiece likely beyond his modest means.”
The photos initially attracted attention as an example of an ostentatious display; a spate of news articles and Weibo media posts on May 5 accused Wang of “showing off her wealth.” Some Weibo users chimed in to criticize Wang as well. “Official media should appear thrifty,” wrote one Weibo user, arguing that the image of official media and that of the government that controls it are closely related. More than one speculated without evidence that Wang, beautiful and in her mid-20s, might be mistress to a wealthy man.
Those claims are harsh (and unsubstantiated) – but the vitriol toward China’s reviled state broadcaster is more understandable. While CCTV has often served as an important mouthpiece for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s nationwide anti-corruption crackdown, now into its third year, the state broadcaster itself has been embroiled in several scandals during that time. In July 2014, authorities unexpectedly detained one of CCTV’s most outspoken hosts, Rui Chenggang. That same month, authorities held senior CCTV executive Guo Zhenxi for suspected bribery, and in August 2014 they detained Huang Haitao, a prominent CCTV deputy director, for alleged graft.
Expensive watches have become a symbol of corruption in China ever since August 2012, when netizens unearthed an image of provincial safety bureaucrat Yang Dacai smiling at the scene of a deadly traffic accident — and wearing a luxury timepiece likely beyond his modest means. Read the rest of this entry »
The brutal beheadings of Japanese nationals Kenji Goto and Haruna Yukawa by the Islamic State in January have shocked the island nation and lent momentum to an effort to expand the limitations imposed on its constitution and military after its defeat by the United States in World War II.
Leftists in Japan fear that the incident will encourage a departure from the country’s pacifist constitution, whose Article 9 states that “the Japanese people forever renounce… the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” Right-wingers, meanwhile, see an opportunity to allow Japan to assert itself as a truly sovereign state.
VICE News reports from Japan as its prime minister and right wing are pushing for re-militarization of the pacifist nation, amid protests from the left who staunchly oppose any changes to Article 9 of the constitution.
MOVIE LIFE KYOTO is a video series which aims to introduce Japanese culture to foreigners in a light-hearted and humorous fashion. With English narration and Japanese subtitles, they’re filled with little factoids and hilariously on-point observations that will be of interest to foreign visitors and a source of much ‘that’s so true!’ amusement for Japanese people, too…(read more)
TOKYO (AP) – U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel delivered a two-pronged warning to Asia Pacific nations Sunday, announcing that the U.S. will send two additional ballistic missile destroyers to Japan to counter the North Korean threat, and saying China must better respect its neighbors.
“…you cannot go around the world and redefine boundaries and violate territorial integrity and sovereignty of nations by force, coercion and intimidation whether it’s in small islands in the Pacific or large nations in Europe.”
— Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel
In unusually forceful remarks about China, Hagel drew a direct line between Russia’s takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea region and the ongoing territorial disputes between China, Japan and others over remote islands in the East China Sea.
“I think we’re seeing some clear evidence of a lack of respect and intimidation and coercion in Europe today with what the Russians have done with Ukraine,” Hagel told reporters after a meeting with Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera. “We must be very careful and we must be very clear, all nations of the world, that in the 21st century this will not stand, you cannot go around the world and redefine boundaries and violate territorial integrity and sovereignty of nations by force, coercion and intimidation whether it’s in small islands in the Pacific or large nations in Europe.” Read the rest of this entry »
BANGKOK — Richard S. Ehrlich reports: The U.S. is leading the largest multinational military exercise in the Asia-Pacific region, and Chinese media are hailing Beijing’s first-time participation in the annual drill as proof that the communist nation’s “regional military impact” cannot be ignored.
Nearly 14,000 troops from the U.S. and Asia-Pacific countries are participating in Cobra Gold 2014, which opened Tuesday at Camp Akatosarot, about 230 miles north of Bangkok.
“Cobra Gold truly replicates the dynamic security environment we find ourselves in today, and what we will face in the future,” Navy Adm. Samuel J. Locklear III, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, said at the opening ceremony for the military exercise.
Moscow and Washington have yet to exploit the potential for bilateral cooperation in the Asia-Pacific
Anton Barbashin writes: It’s been a rocky year for U.S.-Russia relations. We have seen espionage accusations, diplomatic slaps in the face, and unpleasant media fallouts in both domestic arenas. Moreover, it seems that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent success (short-lived though it may be) at keeping Ukraine in the fold will frustrate Washington politicians into abandoning any attempts to seek common ground with Moscow. But the need for a strategic vision calls for an unbiased evaluation of all long term cooperation possibilities. One that is evident and as yet unexplored is U.S.-Russia relations in the Pacific region.
The Asian-Pacific region’s strategic significance is acknowledged both by Washington and Moscow. In a 2011 Foreign Policy article, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized the importance of the Pacific region for U.S. foreign policy, trade, security and global stability. Recognizing the developments, especially in the economic realm, that have already taken place, she formally announced the U.S. “pivot” to the region that would become a key driver of global politics. On the other side of the Pacific, Putin has also recognized the ongoing developments in the region and its strategic value for Russia’s ambition to diversify and strengthen its economic development and global engagement and security. Truly, the national interests of two major global actors intertwine in this region far more than official Moscow and Washington are willing to admit.
Mr. Xi, the keynote speaker, delivered a long, tightly scripted speech that made no reference to Mr. Obama and concentrated on the theme of Chinese economic overhaul at home, and the need for China to have the Asia-Pacific region as a partner abroad.
“China cannot develop in isolation of the Asia-Pacific, and the Asia-Pacific cannot prosper without China,” Mr. Xi said.
The absence of Mr. Obama, who canceled to try to resolve the government shutdown in Washington, was repeatedly noted at the conference, held in this enclave of international resorts on the Indonesian island of Bali. But Mr. Kerry, for his part, made light of his role as the stand-in.
“In 2004, obviously, I worked very, very hard to replace a president,” Mr. Kerry told his audience, referring to his unsuccessful campaign against President George W. Bush. “This is not what I had in mind.” [Source]
Starbucks is opening two flagship stores in China (Photo: Starbucks for USA TODAY)
China to become No. 2 market for Starbucks
Americans who like to joke about having a Starbucks on every street corner soon may have an unlikely partner in on the joke: the Chinese. Read the rest of this entry »
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President Obama has cancelled his trip to Southeast Asia
