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US-China Relations - 48. page
SMIC’s Claim of Having No Military Tie Is Questionable
Taiwanese news site NewTalk recently reported that U.S. Pentagon officials advised that the Trump administration is considering blacklisting Chinese domestic chip maker SMIC due to its ties to the Chinese military. This could cause major damage to the Chinese chip-making industry, since SMIC is China’s largest and the most advanced chip manufacturer. It is also Huawei’s only hope for low-end chip supply. SMIC has issued announcements claiming it has no relationship with the Chinese military. However, according to Mainland media reports, SMIC was the sole manufacturer for the KD5660 Level-A network exchange chip designed by a company named ArmyFly, which is headquartered in Beijing and is dedicated to serving the Chinese military with focuses on army information network and equipment innovation. The KD560 chip even won the highest award issued by the Equipment Development Department of the Central Military Commission. ArmyFly’s customers are all military branches and SMIC, as its award-winning chip supplier, now declares it has nothing to do with ArmyFly.
Source: NewTalk, September 10, 2020
https://newtalk.tw/news/view/2020-09-10/463575
People’s Daily Refused to Publish U.S. Ambassador’s Op-Ed, Accusing U.S. of Being Overbearing
Terry Branstad, the U.S. Ambassador to China, recently approached the People’s Daily, hoping to publish his op-ed on improving U.S.-China relations. People’s Daily, however, rejected the U.S. Ambassador’s request. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and People’s Daily responded on Thursday September 10, calling the U.S. Ambassador’s article “full of loopholes” and accused the U.S. of being ” illogical, overbearing and unreasonable” in this matter.
In the Op-Ed titled, “Resetting the Relationship Based on Reciprocity,” Branstad stated that the relationship between the U.S. and China has become increasingly imbalanced. U.S. companies, journalists, diplomats, and even civil society have been given unequal access. While U.S. journalists face restrictions on reporting and even entering China, Chinese state media workers have long enjoyed open access in the United States.
At a regular press conference on Thursday, Zhao Lijian, spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that Branstad’s article “attacks” and “smears” China, saying that the U.S. request of “publishing the op-ed with its full content with no alteration” clearly has nothing to do with freedom of the press. Zhao Lijian said that the US is “deliberately touching porcelain to find fault” [Editor’s note: deliberately manufacturing the outrage to find fault with China.]
U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo issued a statement late on Wednesday night to the People’s Daily for refusing to publish Branstad’s op-ed criticizing China’s propaganda agencies of hypocrisy and lack of reciprocal treatment and that China’s Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai alone has published five Op-eds this year in prominent U.S. news outlets.
Since the beginning of this year, the U.S. has begun to put pressure on the Chinese authorities to achieve reciprocity in terms of the number of media, the working environment of journalists, and the free flow of information. Related measures have caused a strong backlash from China. The People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and other Chinese propaganda agencies have recently published long articles in succession criticizing U.S. practices.
On August 25, the People’s Daily published a 30,000-word article in three pages criticizing the China policy speech delivered by US Secretary of State Pompeo at the Nixon Presidential Library.
Source: Voice of America, September 10, 2020
https://www.voachinese.com/a/china-u-s-trade-attacks-after-paper-refuses-to-carry-envoy-s-op-ed-20200910/5578345.html
Micron Announced Cut-Off of Supply to Huawei
Well-known Chinese news site NetEase (NASDAQ: NTES) recently reported that Micron, Huawei’s sole primary memory and flash memory supplier for 20 years, announced compliance with the U.S. ban on Huawei. This is another major blow to Huawei’s supply chain after TSMC’s similar announcement. Micron is the world’s largest semiconductor memory vendor. Micron, Samsung and Hynix together own 95 percent of the world’s DRAM market. Micron is also one of the six vendors that together hold 99 percent of the world’s NAND flash memory market. The only hope Huawei has now is to obtain domestic support from Yangtze Memory Technologies for NAND, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) for DRAM, and Jinhua Integrated Circuit (JHICC) for DRAM. However, the U.S. already banned JHICC in 2018, due to a lawsuit that Micron filed for unauthorized use of intellectual properties. Yangtze Memory’s manufacturing process depends heavily on high-end equipment like the mask aligners from the Netherland’s SAML, which also uses U.S technology. If the U.S. blacklists the other two Chinese domestic suppliers, Huawei will face a death sentence on the memory side too, in addition to the central processing chips.
Source: NetEase, September 2, 2020
http://dy.163.com/article/FLJ48FM70517M7S3.html
Google and Facebook Gave Up on Hong Kong Submarine Cable Plan
Well-known Chinese news site Sohu (NASDAQ: SOHU) recently reported that the Google and Facebook joint venture plan of laying new submarine cable now officially dropped the U.S.-to-Hong Kong segment. The two quickly adjusted and submitted a new plan to connect with the Philippines and Taiwan. The adjusted pacific fiber cable plan eliminated the earlier partner named Pacific Optical Data Communications, headquartered in Hong Kong. The move was in response to the objection from multiple U.S. government organizations, including the FCC and the Justice Department, as well as several U.S. national security agencies. In April, Google obtained a six-month temporary permit to proceed. The new plan is the official amendment to the original application. The FCC confirmed the national security concerns. Google validated the report and ensured the public that the application is going through the proper channels for final approval. A Facebook representative encouraged people to check the official FCC filing information for more details.
Source: Sohu, August 30, 2020
https://www.sohu.com/a/415573819_99956743
People’s Daily Attacks Pompeo, Again
On August 25, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece newspaper People’s Daily, in three full pages out of a total of 20, published an extremely lengthy opinion that runs through a barrage of criticisms against U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as a response to his speech on July 23, 2020, at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California.
The first two paragraphs read:
“A few days ago, U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo delivered a speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California. He totally negated China-U.S. relations, maliciously attacked the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and China’s political system, drove a wedge between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people, and made groundless accusations on China’s domestic and foreign policies. Pompeo spread the ‘China Threat Theory’ in an attempt to provoke and piece together an international anti-China alliance and contain China’s development.”
“Pompeo’s remarks, ignoring history and reality, are full of strong ideological prejudice and a Cold War mentality. Not only did the Chinese people condemn Pompeo’s remarks, but also rational people in the United States and the international community criticized and opposed them.”
It then dug out 26 statements from Pompeo’s speech and ran a point-by-point rebuttal. The 34,000-Chinese-character-long article, if put into Word with a font size of 12 and normal margins, would be 30 pages long.
Source: People’s Daily, August 25, 2020
http://paper.people.com.cn/rmrb/html/2020-08/25/nw.D110000renmrb_20200825_1-10.htm
LTN: Huawei Came up with New Method to Avoid U.S. Sanctions
Major Taiwanese news network Liberty Times Network (LTN) recently reported that, with the United Stated continuously tightening up sanctions against Huawei in order to cut off its chip-making capabilities, leading U.S. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) vendor Synopsys saw strong growth. The source of the growth came mainly from China. Many integrated Circuit (IC) companies in China suddenly started purchasing chip design software on a large scale. This type of software is on the Huawei sanction list, so Huawei can no long purchase licenses. Synopsys, along with two other U.S. companies Cadence and ANSYS, plus the German vendor Siemens, control over ninety percent of the global chip design software market. Chinese local governments were also found to be purchasing U.S. EDA software. IT Experts from Japan expressed the belief that it is highly likely Huawei can use Chinese chip design firms to perform the design work previously done by its own branch named HiSilicon. All it takes is for HiSilicon to send a group of semiconductor engineers to a small local firm to bypass U.S. sanctions on software completely.
Source: LTN, August 21, 2020
https://ec.ltn.com.tw/article/breakingnews/3267514
China State Media Says Military Exercise over Taiwan not Impossible
On August 18, 2020, the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece China Central TV reported that, at the end of U.S. Secretary of Health Azar’s visit to Taiwan, the Eastern Theater District of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) announced that it had organized actual combat exercises in the Taiwan Strait and on the northern and southern sides of the Taiwan Strait and made it clear that it was a necessary action for the current security situation across the Taiwan Strait and the maintenance of national sovereignty.
The state media claimed that, as a result of the China military “showing its muscles,” the United States immediately announced the withdrawal of the USS Ronald Reagan from the East China Sea.
“Today it is an exercise in the Taiwan Strait and on the north/south sides of the Strait. Tomorrow it is not impossible to carry out a large exercise around Taiwan Island or even an exercise over the Taiwan Island. The strength, confidence, and determination of the People’s Liberation Army will determine that once the ‘reunification by force’ is triggered. ‘The first battle’ will be the ‘final battle.’”
Source: The Paper Times, August 18, 2020
https://m.thepaper.cn/wap/v3/jsp/newsDetail_forward_8779848