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Briefings - 221. page

China’s Q1 Foreign Direct Investment Showed a 4.6 Percent Annual Increase

On March 25, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced that foreign direct investment data for the first quarter of 2021 was 206.14 billion yuan (US$31.79 billion), a year over year increase of 4.6 percent. The data showed that foreign non-financial direct investment was 160.81 billion yuan (US$24.76 billion), a year-over-year decrease of 4.9 percent. The amount for the completion of contracted projects was 195.31 billion yuan (US$30.07 billion), roughly the same as the same period last year. The newly signed contract value was 347.24 billion yuan (US$534.62 billion), a year-over-year decrease of 10.2 percent. In addition, 74,000 individuals from different labor forces were dispatched overseas. At the end of March 590,000 personnel were working abroad.

Below are four major highlights:

1) “Belt and Road” countries showed a steady growth in investments. In the first quarter, China’s non-financial direct investment in these countries was US$4.42 billion, an increase of 5.2 percent year over year. The value of newly signed contracted projects was US$31.34 billion, and the completed contract value was US$17.75 billion, an increase of 19.4 percent and 12.4 percent year-over-year respectively.

2) The investments in manufacturing, information transmission and other fields showed a rapid growth. In the first quarter, investment in manufacturing was US$3.84 billion, a year over year increase of 17.8 percent; the investment in the information transmission industry was US$1.62 billion, a year over year increase of 20.9 percent.

3) Foreign investments from local enterprises have increased. In the first quarter, foreign non-financial direct investment by local enterprises was US$20.03 billion, a year over year increase of 9.9 percent, accounting for 80.8 percent of the total foreign direct investment in the same period. The year over year growth of foreign investment from the eastern, central and western regions reached 7.2 percent, 45.6 percent and 6.3 percent respectively.

4) Foreign contracted projects are mostly in infrastructure. In the first quarter, the value of newly signed contracts for overseas infrastructure projects was US$41.2 billion, and for the completed contracts, it was US$24.6 billion, accounting for 77 percent and 81.6 percent of the total respectively.

Source: Sina, April 25, 2021
https://sina.com.hk/news/article/20210425/2/81/2/%E5%95%86%E5%8B%99%E9%83%A8-%E4%B8%80%E5%AD%A3%E5%BA%A6%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B%E5%B0%8D%E5%A4%96%E7%9B%B4%E6%8E%A5%E6%8A%95%E8%B3%872061-4%E5%84%84%E5%85%83-12988123.html

Briefings | | |   Economy/Resources

The Population of Eight Chinese Cities Is Declining

According to the 21st Century Business Herald, a Chinese business-news daily newspaper published in China, at least 26 prefecture-level cities have disclosed their population data. Eight of them see that their natural population growth rate has turned negative. A prefectural-level city is an administrative division that ranks below a province and above a county in the country’s administrative structure.

The eight cities include the northeastern cities of Shenyang and Fushun, five cities in Jiangsu province – Taizhou, Yangzhou, Zhenjiang, Changzhou and Wuxi – as well as Weihai in Shandong province. In 2020, Wuxi, a city with a household population of more than 5 million, registered a birth rate of 7.75 percent, a death rate of 7.91 percent and a natural population growth rate of -0.16 percent. Some cities are also on the verge of negative growth, such as Wuhu from Anhui province, Jiaxing and Ningbo from Zhejiang province, with natural population growth rates of 0.12 percent, 0.43 percent and 0.75 percent respectively.

Jiangsu ranks among the richest provinces in China. In 2020, it reported a gross regional product of 10.27 trillion yuan (US$1.58 trillion), becoming the second province to break 10 trillion yuan after Guangdong. Jiangsu’s GDP per capita reached 125,000 yuan (US$19,230), ranking first in the country. The city of Wuxi has an economy of 1.2 trillion yuan (US$180 billion); Changzhou, Yangzhou and Taizhou’s economic volume also range between 530 billion and 770 billion yuan.

Cai Fang, a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of China’s Central Bank, stated at a recent meeting that China’s total population will peak in 2015 and then decline afterwards. The People’s Bank of China released a research paper on April 14, calling for the complete removal of restrictions on childbirth and easing the difficulties that women encounter in pregnancy, childbirth, childcare and schooling, so that “women dare to have children, can have children and want to have children.”

Yi Fuxian of the University of Wisconsin in Madison is skeptical. “This involves a series of reforms … and is more difficult than (the reform) in 1979. The government can’t do anything if they don’t want to or they can’t give birth. The only thing it can do is to (solve) the problem of not being able to afford to have children. This requires real money, but local governments are cheapskates and no one is willing to pay money to encourage childbirth. Education, health care and childbirth subsidies all need money. Raising consumption taxes would lead to a decline in economic vitality.”

Source: Radio Free Asia, April 21, 2021
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/shehui/xx-04212021161813.html

Briefings | | |   Economy/Resources

Finnish Military Rejects China’s Attempted Purchase of Arctic Airport

Finnish media recently reported that the city of Kemijärvi, located in Finland’s northernmost Lapland region, after notifying the Finnish Defence Forces, rejected an offer a Chinese state agency made to buy or lease a local airport adjacent to a military zone.

The Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) reported on March 4 that the  director of the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC), the head of the polar research of China’s State Oceanic Administration, and a military attaché from Chinese Embassy in Finland, led a delegation, and traveled to Kemijärvi in 2018 with a plan to buy the airport. The airport would be used for landing and take-off of Arctic research airplanes. The Chinese side did not rule out covering the costs of renovating and expanding the airport.

“Their intention was to conduct Arctic research on the polar ice cover. They would have needed a base for these operations in Kemijärvi. A large jet aircraft with different measuring equipment would have come there, and they would have flown to the North Pole, taken their measurements and flown back,” explained Kemijärvi’s Mayor Atte Rantanen.

The flight route would have also made observations possible over the Arctic Ocean and the Northeast Passage, which is an area of interest to both China and Russia.

The 3,000-nautical-mile-long Northeast Passage of the Arctic Route, sailing westward through the Bering Strait, passing through the Chukchi Sea along the northern waters of the Eurasian continent, through the Barents Sea to the vicinity of the North Cape of Norway, and finally arriving at various ports in Europe, is the shortest sea channel to connect China and Europe. From the perspective of maritime transport efficiency, the Arctic route is 12 to 15 days less than the traditional route, known as the “Golden Waterway.”

The Kemijärvi municipal airport and airspace is adjacent to the Rovajärvi firing range, which  the Finnish Defence Forces often use. After receiving the Chinese proposal, the city inquired about the response of the Defence Forces to the idea. “There was a clear view from the army that this type of activity could not be carried out there. It’s too close to Rovajärvi,” said Mayor Rantanen.

Anu Sallinen, a consultant with the Finnish Ministry of Defence, also told YLE that the idea to buy the Kemijärvi airport came to the Ministry three years ago. She noted that the property is unlikely to be sold to a foreign state-owned enterprise as it is next to a strategically important firing range. Moreover, such a proposal would be unrealistic given the 2020 EU legislation restricting foreign investment. China currently has Arctic research centers in Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, situated north of mainland Europe.

Source: Radio France International, March 5, 2021
https://rfi.my/7BxW.T

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend

Report Discloses Huawei Was Able to Eaves-drop on Dutch Phone Calls

A report from Holland made serious allegations against Huawei, China’s tech giant that supplied mobile cellphone network equipment for KPN, a Dutch mobile telecom company that also operates in Belgium, Germany and France. According to the report, Huawei was able to monitor any calls that subscribers made, even including the Prime Minister and several cabinet ministers.

According to reports from The Daily Mail on April19, “Huawei staff were able to monitor all of KPN’s mobile users and eavesdrop on their private conversations. According to the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, the staff even knew which numbers the police or intelligence agencies were tapping.”

“The newspaper cited a report that consultancy firm Capgemini prepared for KPN, which it said flagged that Huawei could have been accessing users’ calls in 2010 without KPN knowing.”

“Huawei was, allegedly, even able to monitor phone calls that the former Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, government ministers and Chinese dissidents made.”

Ma Yongtao, a Chinese citizen movement activist living in exile in the Netherlands, told Radio Free Asia that this is a real-life version of the movie “The Lives of Others.” Ma said, “Unlike the former East German regime, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been practicing high-tech totalitarianism not only in China, but around the globe. The CCP allows Huawei to enter the Western market as a private company with a low price and then it acts as a tool for its expansion.”

According to an anonymous source, Huawei remains a key supplier to KPN. This even includes the radio antenna equipment for its 5G network. This means that the company’s mobile network now runs almost entirely on Huawei equipment and technology. The source warned that once the Western governments start to monitor Huawei, Huawei can immediately turn off its surveillance functions. In Europe, he said, if these telecom companies cannot remove Huawei equipment, the security risks will remain.

The Daily Mail added, “The report’s findings were so shocking that the internal report was kept secret, de Volkskrant reports.  … ‘The continued existence of KPN Mobile is in serious jeopardy as licenses can be revoked or the government and businesses can lose their trust in KPN if it becomes known that the Chinese government can eavesdrop on KPN mobile numbers and shut down the network,’ the report said.”

The report disclosed that Huawei, as early as 2004, was acquiring the information of the then Dutch telecom company Telfort, which was later merged with KPN. In 2009, KPN started using Huawei’s network technology and hired six Huawei employees to work at its headquarters in the Hague.

KPN switched to working with Ericsson and Nokia only after the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD issued an alert and launched a security investigation into the matter. After the report came to light, KPN said it found no evidence of wiretapping by Huawei and insisted that it had not outsourced its core network to Huawei.

Source: The Daily Mail, April 19, 2021
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9487631
Radio Free Asia, April 20, 2021
https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/nd-tap-04202021114941.html

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend

Chinese Military Suspected of Being behind Cyberattacks against Japanese Companies

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and many defense-affiliated companies have been subjected to large-scale cyberattacks. Japanese police believe that hacker groups may have carried out these attacks at the behest of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

JAXA suffered a cyberattack in 2016. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department found that the attack used a server rented in Japan, and that a Chinese man in his 30s was in Japan at the time and had rented the server five times under a false name. The man, a Chinese Communist Party member, is a systems engineer. It was reported that the ID information needed to log in to the server was passed to a Chinese hacker group called “Tick.”

Police found that another Chinese man also rented a server in Japan under a false name at the behest of the People’s Liberation Army’s “Unit 61419,” a group that specializes in cyberattacks.

The police believe that the hacker group “Tick” carried out the “cyberattacks at the behest of the PLA. The 2016 attack targeted about 200 research institutions and companies, including powerful defense-related companies, in addition to the one against JAXA.

Source: NHK, April 19, 2021
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/zh/news/295247/

Briefings | | |   Defense/Military

Hong Kong Looses over 14,000 Students from Government Subsidized Schools

The Hong Kong government’s Education Bureau recently submitted a written response to the city legislature’s Legislative Council, disclosing the number of students in each district and each grade of primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong in the 2020/2021 school year. The statistics showed a loss of more than 14,000 enrolled students in government subsidized schools as compared to the previous school year, a record high for the past five years.

In primary schools, there was a loss of 4,900 students, a 22-fold increase over the 200-odd dropouts in the 2019/2020 school year. In secondary schools, there were usually a few thousand dropouts every year, but the number of students enrolled this year saw a loss of nearly 9,200 students, more serious than last year.

According to Cheung Yung Pong, the honorary chairman of the Aided Primary School Heads Association in Hong Kong, parents, regardless of their political background, are concerned about the changes in the social and political environment and in the education reform in Hong Kong over the past two years. They have lost confidence in the future of Hong Kong. “Those who can afford to leave will do so and those who do not leave for the time being will also transfer their children to international schools to prepare for emigration.” Cheung believes that the government and the Legislative Council are about to change, setting off waves of repercussions. This year’s dropouts have not topped off, and the situation may be worse next year.

Source: Sing Tao Daily, April 15, 2021
https://std.stheadline.com/daily/article/2349887

Briefings | | |   Government/Politics

BBC Chinese: Record Number of Chinese Military Aircraft Entered Taiwan Air Defense Area

BBC Chinese Edition recently reported that, according to the Taiwanese authorities, on April 12, the number of Chinese military aircraft entering the Taiwanese air defense identification area reached a single-day record of 25 aircraft, including fighter jets and bombers with the capability of carrying nuclear bombs. This happened when the United States warned that China has become more and more aggressive. The Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense also confirmed that the Taiwanese Air Force did send fighter jets to warn the Chinese aircraft and started missile defense system tracking and monitoring of the Chinese activities. Some analysts expressed the belief that this could be a response to the increased U.S. Navy’s activities in the region. It could also be utilized to prepare the public opinion, especially inside Mainland China, for potential military actions against Taiwan. China never made the promise that it would not invade Taiwan militarily.

Source: BBC Chinese, April 13, 2021
https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-56734011

Briefings | | |   Defense/Military Geo-Strategic Trend

Sputnik Chinese: Ankara Threatens to Rename the Street Where Chinese Embassy Is Located

Well-known Russian news agency Sputnik recently reported on its Chinese Edition site that the authorities from Turkey’s capital city are considering renaming the street where the Chinese Embassy sits. The motion was submitted to the city government committee for review. This happened after the Chinese Embassy in Turkey tweeted condemnation of Turkish politicians for slandering human rights in Xinjiang. The Chinese Embassy’s tweet was in response to criticism from two Turkish opposition politicians. Later the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Chinese Ambassador to Turkey to protest. At a regular press conference, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson supported the Chinese ambassador’s position against certain Turkish politicians’ comments on Xinjiang affairs and stated that the relevant response of the Chinese Embassy in Turkey was completely reasonable and beyond reproach. The Ankara city government has already started “maintenance work” near the Chinese Embassy and cut off the water supply to the Embassy.

Source: Sputnik Chinese, April 13, 2021
http://sputniknews.cn/politics/202104131033471779/

Briefings | | |   Geo-Strategic Trend