China July-September surplus totaled $102.3 billion, double last year.

What is a current account surplus?

An imbalance in a nation's balance of payments current account in which payments received by the country for selling domestic exports are greater than payments made by the country for purchasing imports. In other words, imports (of goods and services) by the domestic economy are less than exports (of goods and services). This is generally a desireable situation for a domestic economy. However, in the wacky world of international economics, a current account surplus is often balanced by a capital account deficit, which is generally considered an undesireable situation. If, however, the capital account does not balance out the current account, then a current account surplus contributes to a balance of payments surplus.

Economic Glossary

China's current-account surplus widened in the third-quarter to slightly more than double its year-earlier level

By Michael Kitchen
LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- China's current-account surplus widened in the third-quarter to slightly more than double its year-earlier level, the country's foreign-exchange regulator reportedly said in a statement Thursday. The July-September surplus totaled $102.3 billion, up 103% from the third quarter of 2009, according to several reports citing the State Administration of Foreign Exchange statement. The stated surplus represented 7.2% of gross domestic product, according to Dow Jones Newswires, and compared to the second-quarter surplus of $72.9 billion, which marked a 35% year-on-year rise.

More Results of US Stupidity in Latin America

As trade with Costa Rica grows, so does Beijing’s influence in Latin America. US influence will decrease. The Colombian Free Trade agreement is a prime example. Why are we ruled by fools?

Hu’s Visit Reflects China’s New Clout



By Gillian Gillers
Tico Times Staff |

For the first time in history, a Chinese president has visited Central America, a former bastion of Taiwanese support and a region that the United States has long considered its backyard.

During Hu Jintao's visit to Costa Rica on Monday, the two nations agreed to begin negotiations on a free-trade agreement and work together to expand Costa Rica's national oil refinery.

China will also open a center here to spread Chinese language and culture, and the China Development Bank will offer $40 million in credit to the cash-strapped Banco Nacional.

Hu spent about 24 hours in Costa Rica with his wife, Liu Yongqing, and a delegation of about 110 people, including government officials, journalists and advisers. Separately, about 100 Chinese businessmen visited this week to meet with their Tico counterparts.

“China is ready to intensify its contacts with Costa Rica's government, Congress and political parties,” Hu said at a press conference Monday.

Hu's visit here, followed immediately by trips to Cuba and Peru, highlights China's growing influence in Latin America, where the U.S. has been largely politically absent.

In courting Latin America, China appears to be seeking raw materials, new export markets and diplomatic support from the region's 12 countries that still back Taiwan.

China's gifts to Costa Rica are a reward for President Oscar Arias' decision in June 2007 to recognize China and end a 63-year relationship with Taiwan, according to a secret memo that a Costa Rican high court recently made public.

During Hu's visit, China agreed to free up additional funds for a national soccer stadium in La Sabana Park, on the western edge of San José. China will invest $83 million in the stadium, to be built over the next two years by the Chinese firm Anhui Foreign Economic Construction Group.

Also this week, China National Petroleum Corporation agreed to help Costa Rica expand its national refinery in Moín on the Caribbean coast. The expansion, set to more than double the refinery's capacity, could take up to five years and cost $1 billion, to be divided between the two nations, said José León Desanti, president of Costa Rica's National Oil Refinery.

After the United States, China is Costa Rica's second most important trading partner, and commercial ties are set to strenghten over the next few years.

Trade officials will hold the first round of talks on a free-trade agreement Jan. 19 in San José, and negotiations will likely finish by early 2010, said Foreign Trade Minister Marco Vinicio Ruiz.

China is also donating 320 square meters of space to Costa Rica at the next World Expo, an international fair scheduled in Shanghai from May through October 2010.

Some companies are ahead of the game. Florida Bebidas, a subsidiary of Florida Ice & Farm, signed an agreement with the Chinese distributor Powersun on Monday to sell fruit juice and Imperial beer to Chinese consumers. Florida Bebidas will also distribute the Chinese beer Tsingtao here.

Trade with China has grown dramatically over the last five years. In 2002, just 0.64 percent of Costa Rica's exports went to China, compared to 9 percent in 2007. Ruiz said he expects exports to China to grow 11 percent under a free-trade agreement.

China is also seeking to strengthen cultural ties with Costa Rica through a new Confucius Institute, set to open soon at the University of Costa Rica (UCR). The center, funded jointly by the two nations, will offer Mandarin classes to students, teachers and the general public.

Costa Rica will be the eighth country in Latin America to have a Confucius Institute, joining Brazil, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Cuba and Mexico.

China's generosity has impressed Costa Ricans and filled some of a niche once occupied by the United States. When asked in July to name Costa Rica's best friend, 25 percent of Ticos said China, while 29 percent named the United States. Two decades ago, 58 percent of Ticos considered Uncle Same the best, said Carlos Denton, president of CID-Gallup.

“The U.S. is disengaged,” Denton said. “That's why Costa Ricans aren't as conscious of the U.S. as a friend as they were 25 years ago.”

In the early 1980s, the U.S. pumped millions of dollars into Costa Rica's Central Bank to prop up the country's teetering economy. But the USAID mission in Costa Rica closed in 1996, and last year the Washinton, D.C., gave Costa Rica just $7 million in direct aid.

“The clasped hands have disappeared from Costa Rica,” Denton said, referring to the USAID emblem.

The United States is still Costa Rica's No. 1 destination for exports and the top source of tourists. And next month, Costa Rica is expected to join the Central American Free-Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA).

Still, as Costa Rica diversifies its exports, commercial ties with the North American giant have become less important. In 2002, half of Costa Rican exports went to the U.S., compared to 35.2 percent in 2007.

While China's ambitions in the region have raised eyebrows in Washington, U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica Peter Cianchette seems unfazed. Stronger ties to China, he said, do not detract from Costa Rica's relationship with the United States.

“This isn't a zero-sum game,” he said.

Transfering American Technology Companies to China. No Problem?

Communist Party 17th Congress. They know who they are.

Why don't we see people for what and who that they say they are? Look at the stage for the current 17th Congress in China. It looks like they take communism seriously to me. The predicted purpose of opening trade with China was to teach them the lessons and power of capitalism over communism. How do you think that is working out?

One sided "free trade" with China is madness. It never made any sense and the results are beginning to be understood as Chinese government agencies recycle American dollars into more and more acquisitions of US technology that will be used to challenge America on a global scale. Many on the left think that is a good thing. Thankfully, most Americans do not.

It is in US vital interests to end the US trade deficit with China. It will not be easy but it can be done. The same defeatists that say we cannot control our borders will not agree, but they are wrong. A lot of mistakes have been made in the last thirty years. It is past time to demand complete reciprocity on all trade issues with China.

Chinese hackers rewrite rules of war

Chinese cyber-attacks on Western governments are a real threat, says linton chiswick The First Post

Revelations that Chinese hackers are believed to be behind a series of cyber-attacks on British government departments further muddy the distinctions between organised crime, state terrorism and hi-tech warfare.

The latest attacks - aimed at the Foreign Office, among others - follow an assault last year that shut down a House of Commons network, a serious security breach of a Pentagon email system and the discovery of Chinese hacking software across German government networks and inside Chancellor Angela Merkel's own office.

All three attacks were traced back to China; and the last two specifically to the Chinese province of Guangdong, known to be a People's Liberation Army stronghold. The Chinese Government denies any involvement.

Hackers can either attempt to gain access to a secure network of computers by trying to find a single, vulnerable machine, or (as in the case of the attack on Estonian government systems in June) they can launch crude 'denial-of-service' attacks, in which networks of infected computers across the world are used to bombard a particular server with access requests - effectively shutting it down. In either case, it's almost impossible to reach a forensic certainty regarding responsibility.

The recent attacks on Britain, the US and Germany come after the Chinese government publicly committed itself to advancing 'informationised' warfare and achieving 'a solid foundation' by 2010.

The US has codenamed Chinese attacks on the Pentagon and other departments 'Titan Rain'. "The Chinese see no difference between asymmetric warfare and conventional warfare," one expert warned.

Last week, on a trip to Beijing, Angela Merkel demanded China respect "the rules of the game". Western governments need to think long and hard about how these rules might need to change in a 21st century of strategic information technology.

Free trade is not free. The dark side of free trade.

US manufacturers, farmers and food producers are often weighted down with government rules and regulation. The Chinese are not as particular. China can roll over domestic US producers and the Chinese are not held to the same standards as US manufacturers. Clever idea.

In August 1996, residents in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn described odd tree damage to a forestry inspector. Showy beetles collected from the neighborhood trees stumped the experts until Richard Hoebeke, assistant curator of Cornell University's insect collection, recognized it as Anoplophora glabripennis, a well-known menace in China, Korea, and Japan.

During the past 20 years or so, he's spotted about three dozen insect species that were invading the United States. Most of them turned out to be relatively harmless.

"This is the worst," he says. "This could easily be on the same level with the gypsy moth and the medfly."

The Asian long-horned beetle spends most of its life as a grub inside wood. It probably hitchhiked from China to the United States hidden in the cheap, untreated wood often used for pallets or packing material. APHIS' roughly 1,300 inspectors manage to check only about 2 percent of the goods sweeping into U.S. ports, and Cavey has been worried that the recent trade boom would start an international boom of alarming pests.

"We don't usually jump in as hard as we did," he says. Hoebeke had called Cavey when he recognized the Asian long-horned beetle, and within days, a federal quarantine forbade moving wood or plants out of an irregular area that eventually stretched some 16 miles across Brooklyn.

Nevertheless, in September 1996, beetles turned up in nearby Amityville, N.Y. They might have hitchhiked there compliments of a tree-pruning company that did many Brooklyn jobs for the telephone company. A year later, beetles appeared in Lindenhurst, N.Y.

Two years later, a Chicago man surfing the Web to identify beetles crawling out of his firewood tipped off authorities that the pest had reached the Midwest. Investigators found infested trees in Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood and the communities of Addison and Summit.

Beetle watchers discovered yet another hot spot, in the Bayside area of Queens. The USDA has estimated that it has the potential to cause more damage than Dutch elm disease, chestnut blight, and gypsy moths combined, destroying millions of acres of America’s treasured hardwoods, including national forests and backyard trees. The beetle has the potential to damage such industries as lumber, maple syrup, nursery, and tourism accumulating over $41 billion in losses.

Now we have this and there are many many more examples:

Additive that tainted U.S. pet food is commonly used in China

By David Barboza and Alexei Barrionuevo International Herald Tribune
Published: April 29, 2007

ZHANGQIU, China: American food safety regulators trying to figure out how an industrial chemical called melamine contaminated so much pet food in the United States might come to this heavily polluted city in Shandong Province in the northern part of the country.

Here at the Shandong Mingshui Great Chemical Group factory, huge boiler vats are turning coal into melamine, which is used to create plastics and fertilizer.

But the leftover melamine scrap, small acorn-sized chunks of white rock, is then being sold to local entrepreneurs, who say they secretly mix a powdered form of the scrap into animal feed to artificially enhance the protein level.

The melamine powder has been dubbed "fake protein" and is used to deceive those who raise animals into thinking they are buying feed that provides higher nutrition value.

"It just saves money," says a manager at an animal feed factory here. "Melamine scrap is added to animal feed to boost the protein level."

The practice is widespread in China. For years animal feed sellers have been able to cheat buyers by blending the powder into feed with little regulatory supervision, according to interviews with melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.

But now, melamine is at the center of a massive, multinational pet food recall after it was linked earlier this month to the deaths and injuries of thousands of cats and dogs in the United States and South Africa.

No one knows exactly how melamine - which had not been believed to be particularly toxic - became so fatal in pet food, but its presence in any form of American food is illegal.

U.S. regulators are now headed to China to figure out why pet food ingredients imported from here, including wheat gluten, were contaminated with high levels of the chemical.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has banned imports of wheat gluten from China and ordered the recall of over 60 million packages of pet food. And last week, the agency opened a criminal investigation in the case and searched the offices of at least one pet food supplier.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture also stepped in Thursday, ordering more than 6,000 hogs to be quarantined or slaughtered after some of the pet food ingredients laced with melamine were accidentally sent to hog farms in eight states, including California.