China Gets Defensive About the Coronavirus and Expels American Journalists From the Country

 

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Hello Readers of China Buzz Today! How are you all???


I have taken a 10 year sabbatical and now I am back, taking charge of all my blogs including this one. 😁I just updated another blog I had let go for about a decade called Small Biz Society International Blog. I have about 11 or 15 of these blogs that I just let go about a decade ago and completely forgot how to even log in to them. I was trying to clean my digital archives and found a bunch of these blogs which were all under the same log in. I figured it would be a good idea to maybe start blogging on them again.

So, I visited China a long time ago, around 2011. I wrote a love letter to the country on this blog when I returned to America and you can read all about it here. 

In addition to that, I wrote a piece on China for Small Biz Society International Blog called, simply China which you can read here.

Since that time, a lot has obviously happened in the world. At the time of my visit, Barack Obama was president of the United States and I was living in the USA. It could have been in Brooklyn but I may also have been studying at the time so I was in Texas when I wrote the last post on China Buzz. Now I am living in Paris and spend a huge part of my day on a new blog called Business English Paris.

These days, there is a new president in the USA and his name is Donald Trump. And he and the Chinese Prisident Xi Jinping have a very uneasy relationship to say the least. The last straw seems to be the insistence on President Trump to dub the coronavirus which is currently decimating the world by taking lives and making people very ill, the "Chinese virus" or the "Wuhan virus" (the first case of the virus showed up in Wuhan China.)

The Chinese government objects to this and has accused  the president of being "racist", of using racist tactics and of trying to stigmatize China and Chinese people by calling the virus the "Chinese virus." As a result, the government of China has decided to revoke press credentials of dozens of American journalists in the country. They also stated that they were taking "countermeasures" for Mr Trump's expulsion of dozens of Chinese journalists in the USA.

The situation has gotten so out of hand, that reputable media in the US and Europe are calling it an "escalation between superpowers." According to a recent piece in the New York Times,

Reporters at foreign news outlets in China were among those who aggressively reported on the coronavirus epidemic in January and February, including in its earliest days, when it was a regionalized outbreak in central China and the Chinese government sought to play down its severity.

The news organizations have also reported in the past year on other issues deemed extremely sensitive by Chinese officials, including the mass internment of Muslims in the Xinjiang region and the shadowy business dealings of family members of leaders, including President Xi Jinping.

Oh, what a difference a decade makes! 

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China biggest importer of U.S. goods (they especially like American "waste and scrap")

The New York Times ran an article last month that should be encouraging to American economists, and to the White House, and to Americans generally. It seems that China is the biggest importer of American made products and the Chinese's thirst for good ole Made in the USA is good for our GDP. According to the article, As China Grows, So Does Its Appetite for American-Made Products the states enjoying the biggest impact of this phenomenon are Texas, California and Washington. They export aircraft and computer components to China. (And the author seems to think that China will surpass the U.S. as the biggest importer in the world. China is now the second biggest and the U.S. is the biggest.)

Feeding billions of people is also taking a toll on China's agriculture sector. Apparently they are not making any more land so they also import huge quantities of food products from America like grain. They also need a lot of our cotton.

But it was what the Chinese import from New York that is fascinating. According to the article, New York exported nearly a billion dollars in "waste and scrap" to China last year. China apparently recycles these products to make paper and other merchandise.

That is why I think Donald Trump is massively uninformed about these trade issues and his plans for dealing with China. It will upset the balance of trade in such a way, that the jury is out who will suffer more: China or the U.S. I mean, I am sure, if they must, the Chinese can import their waste and scrap from someplace else. And where would New York sell a billion dollars worth of the stuff if the Chinese pull the account due to high tariffs on their exports to the U.S.?