EU and Chinese leaders are on Wednesday to steer clear of tough issues at a fence-mending summit focused on trade and the economic crisis after Beijing canceled their last meeting over the Dalai Lama.
The summit, to be held in Prague, was originally set for last December but China called it off in protest at a meeting between the Tibetan spiritual leader and French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Poland.
France held the rotating presidency of the 27-nation EU at that time until Paris handed the baton over to the Czech Republic at the start of the year.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus will host Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) at Prague Castle along with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
“It’s certainly a fence-mending summit and the problem is that it is only a fence-mending summit,” said analyst John Fox with the European Council on Foreign Relations, lamenting that tough political issues and the environment are on the backburner.
“The best thing that can happen is that the summit goes ahead and that it won’t be prevented by the Chinese being angry at Czech politicians making statements on Taiwan, or Tibet or the Dalai Lama,” he said.
At talks in Brussels earlier this month, EU commissioners and a Chinese delegation headed by Vice Premier Wang Qishan (王岐山) agreed that trade and investment would lead the way to economic recovery.
Two-way trade has exploded in recent years making the EU the top destination for exports of Chinese goods while China is Europe’s biggest trade partner after the US.
Last year they traded 326 billion euros (US441 billion) in goods with Europe running a 169.4 billion euros deficit with China.
However, despite promises to broadly cooperate on trade, China and Europe have many differences on trade issues.
The Chinese government said on Friday it would urge the EU at the summit to relax limits on high-tech exports to China and review its anti-dumping policies.
Beijing is particularly eager to address the issue of gaining market economy status from the EU, which is a standard often used in anti-dumping cases.
In the latest of a slew of EU anti-dumping cases launched against China, the European nations agreed last month to extend anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made candles that enter force on Friday and will last for five years.
The Europeans are eager to get Beijing to commit to ambitious cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in view of a key international meeting on climate change in Copenhagen in December but China has proved reluctant.
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
ADVERSARIES: The new list includes 11 entities in China and one in Taiwan, which is a local branch of Chinese cloud computing firm Inspur Group The US added dozens of entities to a trade blacklist on Tuesday, the US Department of Commerce said, in part to disrupt Beijing’s artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing capabilities. The action affects 80 entities from countries including China, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, with the commerce department citing their “activities contrary to US national security and foreign policy.” Those added to the “entity list” are restricted from obtaining US items and technologies without government authorization. “We will not allow adversaries to exploit American technology to bolster their own militaries and threaten American lives,” US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said. The entities
Minister of Finance Chuang Tsui-yun (莊翠雲) yesterday told lawmakers that she “would not speculate,” but a “response plan” has been prepared in case Taiwan is targeted by US President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, which are to be announced on Wednesday next week. The Trump administration, including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, has said that much of the proposed reciprocal tariffs would focus on the 15 countries that have the highest trade surpluses with the US. Bessent has referred to those countries as the “dirty 15,” but has not named them. Last year, Taiwan’s US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US
Prices of gasoline and diesel products at domestic gas stations are to fall NT$0.2 and NT$0.1 per liter respectively this week, even though international crude oil prices rose last week, CPC Corp, Taiwan (台灣中油) and Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) said yesterday. International crude oil prices continued rising last week, as the US Energy Information Administration reported a larger-than-expected drop in US commercial crude oil inventories, CPC said in a statement. Based on the company’s floating oil price formula, the cost of crude oil rose 2.38 percent last week from a week earlier, it said. News that US President Donald Trump plans a “secondary
RSS