China imposes restictions on Uighur Muslims fasting

June 30, 2014
 by aljazeera.com
Source: Muslimvillage.com

Chinese authorities in the northwestern province of Xinjiang have banned Muslim officials and students from fasting during the month of Ramadan, prompting an exiled rights group to warn of new violence.

Guidance posted on numerous government websites called on Communist Party leaders to restrict Muslim religious activities during the holy month, including fasting and visiting mosques.
Xinjiang is home to about nine million Uighurs, largely a Muslim ethnic minority, many of whom accuse China’s leaders of religious and political persecution.

The region has been rocked by repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence, but China denies claims of repression and relies on tens of thousands of Uighur officials to help it govern the province.
A statement from Zonglang township in Xinjiang’s Kashgar district said that “the county committee has issued comprehensive policies on maintaining social stability during the Ramadan period.
“It is forbidden for Communist Party cadres, civil officials (including those who have retired) and students to participate in Ramadan religious activities.”

The statement, posted on the Xinjiang government website, urged party leaders to bring “gifts” of food to local village leaders to ensure that they were eating during Ramadan.
Similar orders on curbing Ramadan activities were posted on other local government websites, with the educational bureau of Wensu county urging schools to ensure that students do not enter mosques during Ramadan.

‘Administrative methods’

During Ramadan, Muslims fast from dawn to dusk and strive to be more closer to God, pious and charitable.

An exiled rights group, the World Uyghur Congress, warned the policy would force “the Uighur people to resist [Chinese rule] even further.”

“By banning fasting during Ramadan, China is using administrative methods to force the Uighur people to eat in an effort to break the fasting,” said group spokesman Dilshat Rexit in a statement.
Xinjiang saw its worst ethnic violence in recent times in July, 2009, when Uighurs attacked members of the nation’s dominant Han ethnic group in the city of Urumqi, sparking clashes in which 200 people from both sides died, according to the government.

Link:  http://muslimvillage.com/2014/06/30/55029/china-imposes-restictions-on-uighur-muslims-fasting/.

Turkey says open to alternatives to Chinese missile defense system

3 hours ago

Source: Yahoo News

 

 

MUNICH (Reuters) - Turkey's Foreign Minister said on Sunday Ankara had not yet decided which missile defense system it would buy and it was open to bids from other companies besides the current Chinese favorite if these guaranteed joint production.

NATO member Turkey's decision last September to choose a $3.4 billion offer from the China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corp (CPMIEC) irked Ankara's Western allies as the Chinese company is under U.S. sanctions for violations of the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act.

U.S. and NATO officials also voiced concerns that a Chinese product would not be compatible with other NATO systems.

"Turkey did not decide yet which system should be bought.. for us three criteria are important - joint production, the time of delivery and price," Ahmet Davutoglu told a panel at the Munich Security Conference.

The deal would mark a breakthrough for China in its bid to become a supplier of advanced weapons. But Davutoglu said Turkey was still negotiating and he had held a meeting with a U.S. company a day earlier.

"The Chinese company was the first because they offered us joint production. Joint production was important for us," he said.

Rival offers from Franco-Italian Eurosam SAMP/T and U.S.-listed Raytheon Co RTN.N, the maker of Patriot missiles, were also in the running he said.

"If the other two companies give us the assurance of joint production in Turkey and the transfer of technology, of course we wish to have this with NATO allies."

NATO's top military commander urged Turkey last November to buy a missile defense system that is compatible with other NATO systems.

"Everyone knows how difficult it is if you want to buy something from the United States, there is a long process of getting permission. If those companies are offering us joint production it is negotiable," Davutoglu added.

(Reporting by Alexandra Hudson and Adrian Croft; Editing by Rosalind Russell)

European Union Backs Down on China Tariffs

June 4, 2013
By JAMES KANTER and KEITH BRADSHER
Source: The New York Times

BRUSSELS — The European Union moved on Tuesday to impose tariffs of 11.8 percent on solar panels from China, only one-quarter of the expected level, as an intensive Chinese diplomatic effort over the past week appeared to result in Brussels officials backing down.

Karel De Gucht, the union’s trade commissioner, said that the tariffs would bounce up in early August to 47.6 percent if the government in Beijing does not remedy what the European Union contends is a systematic effort by Chinese firms to sell solar panels in Europe below the cost of making them, a practice known as dumping.

“The ball is in China’s court,” he said, referring to negotiations expected over the next two months. The period of the lower tariff “is a window of opportunity of 60 days,” he said. But windows “can also shut,” he warned.

Earlier, the trade commissioner had indicated he would stand firm behind recommended duties of as high as 47.6 percent in order to defend the credibility of European Union trade rules. But pressure had been mounting on him to back off.

Premier Li Keqiang of China bypassed Mr. De Gucht during a visit to Germany last week and persuaded Chancellor Angela Merkel to call for further negotiations. He then went over Mr. De Gucht’s head on Monday night with a phone conversation with the European Commission president, José Manuel Barroso.

Mr. Li warned that China was ready to retaliate if the European Union took action. The state-run Xinhua news agency said that Mr. Li had warned Mr. Barroso that “there would be no winners in a trade war.”

The solar panels represent one of the largest categories of Chinese exports to the European Union, worth more than 6 percent of China’s exports to the Continent.

“Our action today is an emergency measure to give lifesaving oxygen to a business sector in Europe that is suffering badly from this dumping,” Mr. De Gucht at a news conference in Brussels.

“This is not protectionism,” insisted Mr. De Gucht, adding that the United States had also applied duties to Chinese solar exports. China was carrying out “dumping that has the potential to destroy an important industry within Europe if we do not act today,” he said.

He said Chinese exporters had captured 80 percent of European Union’s market share, and he suggested that “massive overcapacity” in China had led the Chinese to flood the European market. China is “producing today one and half times the amount of solar panels the world needs,” he said.

In a nod to the heavy lobbying in Europe against the duties, Mr. De Gucht said “cheap and plentiful seems great, but ultimately this will lead to a race to the bottom” where “everyone loses.”

Western governments and trade associations have long contended that Beijing has helped several Chinese industries take over global markets through a combination of huge loans from state-owned banks, extensive government research programs, protection of the domestic Chinese market from imports and sometimes even industrial espionage.

China’s rapid expansion in renewable energy, a national priority, has long been cited as an extreme example.

China went from a negligible player in the solar panel industry as recently as 2006 to the dominant world producer now, with two-thirds or more of global manufacturing capacity in the sector following $18 billion in loans from state banks.

That expansion contributed to the bankruptcy of or capacity cutbacks at a score of American and European solar companies in the last three years. Chinese solar panel companies have also suffered lately from overcapacity, with Suntech Power of Wuxi, China, putting its main operating unit into bankruptcy in March.

Li Junfeng, a senior Chinese government energy policy maker who is also the president of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association, expressed delight when told that the European Union had sharply lowered its target for the preliminary tariffs.

“That’s really good news,” said Mr. Li, a senior energy official at the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s main economic planning agency. “At 11 percent, the Chinese companies can do very good business — it doesn’t affect them very much.”

The European Union’s decision to impose much lower initial duties than expected could greatly reduce the incentive for the Chinese government to offer concessions in further negotiations.

Yet individual Western companies, in the solar industry and other sectors, have been very wary of taking any public stand against China, which has become the world’s largest market in industries ranging from steel to cellphones to automobiles. Chinese officials have considerable discretion in issuing factory permits, export licenses and even visas for visiting executives, making most companies leery of publicly voicing any criticism whatsoever of China or any support for trade actions against it.

Mr. De Gucht has become so frustrated with the unwillingness of European companies to publicly support any trade action against China that he said last month that he was prepared to launch a trade case against China on certain kinds of telecommunications equipment even without the public support of any European companies in the sector.

SolarWorld, a German company, has brought anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases against China in the United States and the European Union in the past two years. But its executives waited to file the cases until the company was already financially struggling. SolarWorld is also unusual in that it is not a diversified company but dependent on a single narrow sector in which China’s market is still a small although growing share of global demand.

On Tuesday, Milan Nitzschke, a vice president of SolarWorld, a German company that is part of the coalition of European firms that filed the anti-dumping case with the European Commission in July 2012, said in a telephone interview, “I’m not against giving a time window for negotiations, but China has to move.”

A settlement should require the Chinese to make “an agreement on prices and volumes, so that there is not dumping onto the market,” Mr. Nitzschke, who is also president of EU ProSun, the European coalition.

Mr. Nitzschke also said that European Union countries, including Germany, would be more willing to support higher duties if China failed to negotiate in good faith during the next few months.

The European Union, like the United States, designates China as a nonmarket economy, which means that anti-dumping penalties are calculated under special rules that almost always produce very high tariffs -- unless political leaders intervene.

Solar panel production is in some ways a chemicals industry, as much of the cost of a panel lies in the materials that are used to assemble them. Senior executives at two of the world’s largest chemicals companies expressed misgivings on Tuesday about any kind of showdown with China over the solar industry, following the pattern of individual companies being reluctant to endorse trade actions against China.

Thomas M. Connelly Jr., the executive vice president and chief innovation officer at DuPont, said Tuesday before the announcement in Brussels that his company was worried that the uncertainty caused by trade cases was hurting investment in solar panels and in renewable energy industries more broadly. He specifically criticized Europe’s plans to impose tariffs, saying in a telephone interview from Beijing that, “These kinds of trade actions are unhelpful.”

Martin Brudermüller, the vice chairman of BASF, the German chemicals giant, expressed concern about the potential for escalation in the trade dispute. “A tit-for-tat policy will more destabilize than help us,” he said when asked about the dispute during a news conference in Hong Kong on BASF’s ambitious investment plans in China and elsewhere in Asia. The news conference was held several hours before the European announcement.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/business/global/european-union-backs-down-on-china-tariffs.html?_r=0&adxnnl=1&partner=yahoofinance&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1370358310-udAHamMTEdZnP7u00OD7sA

China poised to control strategic Pakistani port

3 hrs ago
By Sebastian Abbot, Associated Press | Associated Press
Source: Yahoo News

KARACHI, Pakistan (AP) -- China is poised to take over operational control of a strategic deep-water Pakistani seaport that could serve as a vital economic hub for Beijing and perhaps a key military outpost, according to officials.

The construction of the port, in the former fishing village of Gwadar in troubled Baluchistan province, was largely funded by China at a cost of about $200 million. It has been a commercial failure since it opened in 2007, because Pakistan never completed the road network to link the port to the rest of the country.

Chinese control of the port would give it a foothold in one of the world's most strategic areas and could unsettle officials in Washington, who have been concerned about Beijing's expanding regional influence.

The port on the Arabian Sea occupies a strategic location between South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. It lies near the Strait of Hormuz, gateway for about 20 percent of the world's oil.

China's interest is driven by concerns about energy security as it seeks to fuel its booming economy. It wants a place to anchor pipelines to secure oil and gas supplies from the Gulf. Beijing also believes that helping develop Pakistan will boost economic activity in its far western province of Xinjiang and dampen a simmering, low-intensity rebellion there.

Some experts view Gwadar as the westernmost link in the "string of pearls," a line of ports from China to the Gulf that could facilitate expansion of the Chinese Navy in the Indian Ocean. That has sparked concern in both the U.S. and India.

Pakistan's Cabinet agreed Wednesday to a proposal for a company owned by the Chinese government, China Overseas Port Holdings Limited, to purchase control of the port from Singapore's PSA International Pte Ltd., which won a bid in 2007 to operate the port for 40 years. The transaction has not yet occurred, a spokesman for Pakistan's Ministry of Ports and Shipping, Mohammed Raza, said Friday.

Pakistan views China as one of its most important allies and a counterweight to the United States, which has given Islamabad billions of dollars in aid but is often viewed as a fickle taskmaster.

China is expected to pay $35 million for control of the port to PSA and two other groups that own an interest, said Aqeel Karim Dhedhi, one of the other shareholders. The third shareholder is the National Logistics Cell, which is controlled by the Pakistani army. The Chinese are waiting for a Pakistani court case challenging PSA's control of the port to be dismissed to complete the transaction, Dhedhi said.

A senior Pakistani official said Beijing has agreed to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to finish a 900-kilometer (550-mile) road that would link the port with Pakistan's north-south Indus Highway, facilitating overland transport from Gwadar to China. The Pakistani government was supposed to complete the road in 2012, but it is only 60 percent finished, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

It will still be a tough drive, passing along the Karakorum Highway that winds through the rugged mountains of northern Pakistan and then into Xinjiang province via a border crossing point at an elevation of 4,693 meters (15,397 feet). The path is often blocked by snow in winter.

Even so, the route will cut the overland distance from China's western provinces to the sea in half, from about 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) to China's east coast, to just 2,000 (1,250 miles) south to Gwadar.

Longer-term plans also call for road and rail links from Gwadar that would pass through strife-torn Afghanistan to energy-rich Central Asian states.

Asked about the port on Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said "as long as projects are conducive to China-Pakistan relations, the Chinese side will positively support them."

The port is operating at only about 15 percent capacity now, and machinery originally installed by China is rusting for lack of use, said a Pakistani port worker, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters.

On a purely economic basis, the level of trade through the port should be zero because of its drawbacks, but the government is spending millions of dollars in subsidies to ship fertilizer through the facility. It would be cheaper to send the shipments through the coastal city of Karachi, 700 kilometers (430 miles) to the east, the worker said.

Some government officials have claimed that violence in Baluchistan has prevented them from completing the road network. Baluch nationalists have waged a decades-long insurgency against the government, demanding greater autonomy and a larger share of the province's natural resources.

Gunmen shot to death two Pakistani air force personnel and a shopkeeper in a town near Gwadar on Tuesday, said local police official Izat Ali.

Other officials said the ruling Pakistan People's Party simply shifted priorities away from Baluchistan and spent the money building roads in its main areas of support in Sindh province.

"The solution to Gwadar is the Chinese, since they have shown the willingness to work in Pakistan under tough conditions," said shareholder Dhedhi.

___

Associated Press writers Adil Jawad in Karachi, Pakistan, Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Joe McDonald in Beijing contributed to this report.