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December 12 , 2017
  • Bloomberg：Why China Won't Cut Off North Korea's Oil Lifeline
    Bloomberg reports: "With North Korea advancing its ballistic missile capability, boasting it can strike anywhere in the U.S., President Donald Trump is pressing China to do more to rein in its errant neighbor. Beijing has joined United Nations sanctions aimed at tightening the economic noose on the regime but has held out on the biggest leverage of all: oil. Trump called President Xi Jinping in late November to tell him the time had come for China to cut off all oil exports to North Korea. China supplies most of North Korea's crude, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but it's hard to know exactly how much. It hasn't reported any volumes in its published customs data since 2013... The U.S. proposed a full oil embargo after North Korea tested its sixth and most powerful nuclear bomb in September. The UN Security Council watered down that request at the behest of China and Russia, cutting North Korea's imports of refined petroleum products to 2 million barrels a year. Overall, the sanctions cut off more than 55 percent of refined petroleum products, representing about 30 percent of the country's oil intake, according to the U.S. Why won't China do more? While China has said it wants North Korea to lay down its nuclear arms, it also desires stability along their shared border, where money and trade flow both ways... China is concerned that if oil were cut off -- in a country with often-harsh winters -- it could prompt leader Kim Jong Un to lash out at the U.S., sparking a conflict, or set off internal dissent that precipitates the collapse of his regime. Either outcome could mean a humanitarian disaster, a flood of refugees and possibly U.S. troops on China's border."
  • The New York Times：Sri Lanka, Struggling With Debt, Hands a Major Port to China
    The New York Times reports: "Struggling to pay its debt to Chinese firms, the nation of Sri Lanka formally handed over the strategic port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease last week, in a deal that government critics have said threatens the country's sovereignty. In recent years, China has shored up its presence in the Indian Ocean, investing billions of dollars to build port facilities and plan maritime trade routes as part of its 'One Belt, One Road' initiative to help increase its market reach. Along the way, smaller countries like Sri Lanka have found themselves owing debts they cannot pay. Sri Lanka owes more than $8 billion to state-controlled Chinese firms, officials say. Sri Lankan politicians said the Hambantota deal, valued at $1.1 billion, was necessary to chip away at the debt, but analysts warned of the consequences of signing away too much control to China. 'The price being paid for reducing the China debt could prove more costly than the debt burden Sri Lanka seeks to reduce,' said N. Sathiya Moorthy, a senior fellow specializing in Sri Lanka at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation."
  • The Wall Street Journal：The West Faces Up to Reality: China Won't Become 'More Like Us'
    The Wall Street Journal comments: "For decades, the relationship between China and the West rested on illusion and pretense. Western politicians fooled themselves into thinking that the Chinese system, centrally directed and authoritarian, would in time resemble their own, open and democratic. For its part, China camouflaged its global ambitions. Obeying Deng Xiaoping's maxim to 'hide our capabilities and bide our time,' it built itself into a manufacturing colossus and the world's largest trader, amassed "hard" military power and projected "soft" influence, sometimes covert and bought with cash. This game of make-believe is winding down. Last week's trip to China by Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister whose father engineered his country's opening to the People's Republic, will likely go down as one of the last in a series of largely futile Western efforts to 'shape' China's rise by encouraging its adoption of liberal Western ideas. He arrived with plans to open talks on a 'progressive' free-trade agreement that stresses gender equality, labor protections and environmental rights. He was politely shown the door."
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