Video: Taiwan province facing surging COVID19, lack of testing facilities and vaccines turn a bad situation worst. 台灣省面對激增的COVID19，缺乏檢測設施和疫苗使情況變得更糟。But Tsai Government is very picky, said only accept vaccines from her US masters, but US will not release some of the more than 100 millions COVID19 vaccines in cold storage to help her. 但蔡政府很挑剔，說只接受她美國主子的疫苗，但美國不會放出冷藏的1億多COVID19中的一些來幫助她。China has offered help repeatedly. Not only does she refused to accept Chinese COVID19 vaccines approved by WHO, also banning local government to get Chinese vaccines to save the people. 中國一再提供幫助。 她不僅拒絕接受世衛組織批准的中國COVID19疫苗，還禁止當地地方政府獲得中國疫苗以拯救人民生命. Taiwan Province is following US and India, world’s two largest failing democracy failing and betraying the very same people putting them in office. 台灣省正在追隨美國和印度，世界上最大的兩個虛假民主國家背叛了其人民曾經認為是投票給為人民服務的政府. 他們何其失望. 【頭條開講】大陸送疫苗也不要?人命關天還在挑三揀四! 疫苗支票一再跳票 沒有人負責? 台灣省長蔡英文祇接受美國主子提供的新冠病毒藥苗, 不接受世衛提供或中國提供的中國藥苗. 主持人 周玉琴 來賓: 不演了新聞台主持人 朱凱翔 公衛專家 內科醫師 祝年豐 前駐紐西蘭大使 介文汲 國民黨前青年黨團團長 田方倫 https://vimeo.com/556393599 https://youtu.be/laU_JK_L6sA https://www.facebook.com/100036400039778/posts/500560957833901/?d=n
The New Yorker: American Democracy Isn’t Dead Yet, but It’s Getting There. A country that cannot even agree to investigate an assault on its Capitol is in big trouble, indeed. By Susan B. Glasser May 27, 2021
Mitch McConnell, who is delivering on his pledge to focus on blocking Joe Biden’s agenda, claimed that an investigation into the Capitol insurrection was pointless. Photograph by Craig Hudson / Bloomberg / Getty
When Joe Biden was a Presidential candidate, he carried around a wonkish book of international comparative politics by two Harvard professors, “How Democracies Die,” from 2018, to explain the urgency of his campaign against Donald Trump. He touted the book in an interview with my colleague Evan Osnos, marked up passages with notes and observations, and even, one of the book’s authors told me this week, recommended it to a random stranger he met while riding his beloved Amtrak. Now that he is President, Biden has characterized his efforts to restore American democracy as part of a global struggle with resurgent autocracies, in places such as China and Russia. “This generation is going to be marked by the competition between democracies and autocracies,” Biden said, in April, as he lobbied Republicans to support his sweeping, multitrillion-dollar infrastructure bill. “The autocrats are betting on democracy not being able to generate the kind of unity needed to make decisions to get in that race. We can’t afford to prove them right. We have to show the world—and, much more importantly, we have to show ourselves—that democracy works, that we can come together on the big things.” He ended with a typical Biden flourish: “It’s the United States of America, for God’s sake.”
United we are not. A month later, prospects for Biden’s ambitious legislative agenda remain uncertain, G.O.P.-controlled state legislatures are passing measures that will make it harder for many Americans to vote, and the White House may be only days away from giving up on bipartisan talks over the infrastructure bill, which have come nowhere close to a deal. Far from embracing Biden’s call for unity, Republicans remain in thrall to the divisive rants and election conspiracy theories of their defeated former President. As a result, Congress is at such a partisan impasse that it cannot even agree on a commission to investigate the January 6th attack by a pro-Trump mob on its own building.
Before leaving town for their Memorial Day recess, in fact, Senate Republicans successfully used the legislative filibuster for the first time this session to block the proposed bipartisan panel. Their stated arguments against a commission range from the implausible to the insulting; the real explanation is political cynicism in the extreme. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is so far delivering on his pledge to focus a “hundred per cent” on blocking Biden’s agenda, even claimed that an investigation was pointless because it would result in “no new fact.” John Cornyn, a close McConnell ally, from Texas, was more honest, at least, in admitting, to Politico, that the vote was all about denying Democrats “a political platform” from which to make the 2022 midterm elections a “referendum on President Trump.” For his part, Trump has been putting out the word that he plans to run for reëlection in 2024—and exulting in polls showing that a majority of Republicans continue to believe both his false claims of a fraudulent election and that nothing untoward happened on January 6th. Needless to say, these are not the signs of a healthy democracy ready to combat the autocratic tyrants of the world.
“Turns out, things are much worse than we expected,” Daniel Ziblatt, one of the “How Democracies Die” authors, told me this week. He said he had never envisioned a scenario like the one that has played itself out among Republicans on Capitol Hill during the past few months. How could he have? It’s hard to imagine anyone in America, even when “How Democracies Die” was published, a year into Trump’s term, seriously contemplating an American President who would unleash an insurrection in order to steal an election that he clearly lost—and then still commanding the support of his party after doing so.
Three years ago, it was still conceivable, if not likely, that Trump and Trumpism could be expunged by an overwhelming result at the ballot box or a clear-cut impeachment and expulsion from public life. But Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky, his co-author, never thought that would happen. Instead, they highlighted a more realistic possibility: that Trump’s electoral defeat would not stop the continued polarization, flouting of political norms, and increased “institutional warfare” in America—leaving the country a battered “democracy without solid guardrails” that would be “hovering constantly on the brink of crisis.” The crisis, however, turned out to be even more existential than they had predicted; the present is “much more worrisome,” Ziblatt told me. In contemporary Germany, he pointed out, an incitement to violence of the kind deployed by Trump and some of his backers might be enough to get a political party banned. But, in America’s two-party system, you can’t just ban one of the two parties, even if it takes a terrifying detour into anti-democratic extremism.
This is the worrisome essence of the matter. In one alarming survey released this week, nearly thirty per cent of Republicans endorsed the idea that the country is so far “off track” that “American patriots may have to resort to violence” against their political opponents. You don’t need two Harvard professors to tell you that sort of reasoning is just what could lead to the death of a democracy. The implications? Consider the blunt words of Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a ruling on a case involving one of the January 6th rioters at the Capitol, issued even as it became clear that Republican senators would move to block the January 6th commission from investigating what had caused the riot:
The steady drumbeat that inspired defendant to take up arms has not faded away; six months later, the canard that the election was stolen is being repeated daily on major news outlets and from the corridors of power in state and federal government, not to mention in the near daily fulminations of the former President.
It’s worth noting that Jackson released this ruling this week, the same week that Trump issued statements calling the 2020 vote “the most corrupt Election in the history of our Country,” touting himself as “the true President,” and warning that American elections are “rigged, corrupt, and stolen.”
As bad as this is, it’s too early to say that Biden’s approach has failed. To start, there’s the argument, from Ziblatt and others, that dialling down the rhetoric might actually work. Biden, almost certainly for this reason, does not talk much about either January 6th or Republican obstructionism. The words “Donald Trump” rarely, if ever, cross his lips. “He’s deëscalating,” Ziblatt told me, and trying to take some of the “anger and animosity,” heat and rage, out of American politics. This is more or less the course recommended by “How Democracies Die,” although it’s infuriating to Democrats who wish for stronger pushback to daily outrages generated by a Republican Party that has gone all in on outrage as a strategy.
Politically, Republicans seem increasingly frustrated that they have not managed to attack Biden yet in a way that sticks. The new President, a lifelong centrist with decades of votes to prove it, does not seem to be a “radical socialist” or a cancel-culture warrior. Even the G.O.P.’s not-at-all-subtle efforts to demean him as an old man being pushed into extremism by his staff or by leftists in Congress have not really stuck. Indeed, Biden’s approval rating, like Trump’s before him, has remained remarkably consistent, a virtual straight line, regardless of the attacks lobbed at him: the FiveThirtyEight polling average had Biden at fifty-four per cent this week, which was exactly the same as a month ago, two months ago, and three months ago. That average is not only consistent in a way that suggests the ebb and flow of the Washington news cycle makes little difference with voters—it is also a significantly higher baseline for Biden than for Trump and slightly better than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
Biden came into office vowing to focus on the pandemic and the economy. Both are going well. Thanks to a successful government mobilization, more than half of the U.S. adult population has now been vaccinated; in many states, more than seventy per cent of adults have had at least one shot. Coronavirus infections and deaths have sharply dropped. The country is reopening. “We’ve turned the tide on a once-in-a-century pandemic,” Biden said in a speech on Thursday, in Cleveland—at a site where a campaign rally was supposed to take place last March, before it became the first to be cancelled owing to the coronavirus; he never did another rally. “Put it simply: America’s coming back. America’s on the move.”
Biden, as expected, said nothing about Trump or the political furor over the January 6th commission. He did not accuse his opponents of trying to ruin the country or call them names. But there was a shift—a noticeable one—from the Biden of previous months. He no longer talked of unity. There were no gauzy paeans to bipartisanship. Instead, there was a list that Biden pulled out from his papers and waved in the middle of his speech, an early salvo, perhaps, in the years-long blame game to come. The list, Biden said, was of congressional Republicans who have bragged about the benefits to their constituents from Biden’s $1.9-trillion covid-relief bill, which passed without a single Republican vote. “Some people have no shame,” Biden said, and then both the President and his audience laughed. Before he returned to Air Force One for his trip back to the White House, Biden was asked to comment on the news of the day, which was not his speech in Ohio but the dysfunction back in Washington. “I can’t imagine anyone voting against the establishment of a commission on the greatest assault since the Civil War on the Capitol,” the President told reporters. “But, at any rate . . .”
It all brought to mind a scene from my time as a correspondent in Moscow. I was at a conference where Grigory Yavlinsky, a leading democratic opposition figure, was asked about the parlous state of Russian democracy under its then new President, Vladimir Putin. He responded with an old Soviet joke about an ambulance driver who picks up a critically ill patient and decides to drive him straight to the morgue. The patient protests that he’s not dead, to which the ambulance driver responds, “We’re not there yet.” Hopefully, we are not witnessing the slow-motion death of American democracy. At least, not yet.
This article has been updated to include news developments.
Xi stresses sci-tech self-strengthening at higher levels by Xinhua May 28 2021
China’s new large carrier rocket Long March-5B blasts off from Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China’s Hainan Province, May 5, 2020, sending the trial version of China’s new-generation manned spaceship and a cargo return capsule for test into space.
President Xi Jinping on Friday called for accelerated efforts in building China into a leader in science and technology and achieving sci-tech self-reliance and self-strengthening at higher levels.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks while addressing a meeting conflating the general assemblies of the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and the national congress of the China Association for Science and Technology.
China maintains ‘artificial sun’ at 120 million Celsius for over 100 seconds, setting new world record by Yang Kunyi and Shen Weiduo May 28 2021
Thermo image of inside of the artificial sun fusion reactor – China broke the record by keeping the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) by achieving plasma temperature at 120 million Celsius for 101 seconds and 160 million Celsius for 20 seconds, a major step toward the test run of the fusion reactor.
The Tokamak devise is located at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is designed to replicate the nuclear fusion process that occurs naturally in the sun and stars to provide almost infinite clean energy through controlled nuclear fusion, which is often dubbed the “artificial sun.”
The achievement broke a previous record of maintaining the plasma temperature at 100 million C for 100 seconds. According to Li Miao, director of the physics department of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, it is a milestone in reaching the goal of keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time.
“The breakthrough is significant progress, and the ultimate goal should be keeping the temperature at a stable level for a long time,” Li told the Global Times, adding that the next milestone might be to maintain the stability for a week or more.
Achieving a plasma temperature above 100 million C is one of the key challenges to harness the nuclear fusion. At the end of 2020, South Korea reached 100 million C for 20 seconds. The temperature at the core of the sun is widely believed to be 15 million C, meaning that the plasma at the device’s core will be seven times hotter than that of the sun.
The energy generated from nuclear fusion is the most reliable and clean energy, Lin Boqiang, director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Friday, adding that if the technology can be applied commercially, it will have huge economic benefits.
However, Lin cautioned that as the technology is still in the experimental stage, it still need at least 30 years for the technology to come out of the lab. “It’s more like a future technology that’s critical for China’s green development push.”
The experiment of EAST is part of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) facility, a global big science project second only to the International Space Station in size, and is being jointly constructed by China, the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. Its success is significant to future peaceful utilization of international fusion. China devotes around 9 percent of its research and development.
China urged to increase sea-based nuclear deterrent amid US intensified strategic threat by Zhang Hui May 28 2021
DF-5B intercontinental ballistic missiles – photo. Facing a serious strategic threat from the US, China was urged to increase the number of nuclear weapons, especially its sea-based nuclear deterrent of intercontinental submarine-launched ballistic missiles, to deter potential military action by US warmongers, Chinese military experts said on Friday, after reports that the US’ new defense budget will modernize its nuclear arsenal to deter China.
Having a nuclear arsenal appropriate to China’s position will help safeguard national security, sovereignty and development interests and establish a more stable and peaceful world order, which will be beneficial for the world, they said.
The US defense budget, set to be sent to Congress on Friday, is expected to include investments in troop readiness, space, and the Pacific Deterrence Initiative aimed at countering China’s military existence in the region, and nuclear weapons technology, Reuters reported on Thursday.
However, Chinese military experts believe that US attempts of increasing military deployment in the Indo-Pacific region will not increase returns for the US as most countries in the region will not allow the flames of war initiated by the US to burn themselves.
The US would buy ships and jets and develop and test hypersonic weapons and other “next-generation” weapons systems to build capabilities to counter Russia and China. The total national security budget will be $753 billion, a 1.7 percent increase over the 2021 figure, Reuters said.
China has kept its defense spending at around 1.3 percent of GDP in recent years, which is far below the average global level of 2.6 percent, data shows. The US, by far the world’s top military spender, has spent about four times that of China in recent years.
Chinese analysts said China has never taken aim at US military spending, nor does China want to engage in any form of arms race with the US.
But the US has applied greater military pressure on China, sending warships and warplanes at an increasing frequency to the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits.
The US is also preparing what US media called its “biggest navy exercise in a generation with 25,000 personnel across 17 time zones,” as it’s preparing for a “possible conflict” with China and Russia.
The US attempted to deepen the militarization of space with its new budget plan, including its investment on future weapons. Considering that the US deems China its top imaginary enemy, China needs to increase the quantity and quality of nuclear weapons, especially submarine-launched ballistic missiles, to effectively safeguard its national security, sovereignty and development interests, Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Friday.
Some military experts said China should increase the number of its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), the DF-41, which has the longest operational range among all Chinese ICBMs.
Song said that strengthening sea-based strategic nuclear deterrence is also an important direction for China’s future development, as these weapons are better at stealth and secondary nuclear strikes.
China could use its most advanced submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) to effectively counter the US threat, Song said.
China just commissioned three PLA Navy warships, namely the Changzheng 18, the Dalian and the Hainan, at a naval port in Sanya, South China’s Hainan Province in April. Observers identified the Changzheng 18 as a likely Type 09IV nuclear-powered strategic ballistic missile submarine.
Burning themselves
The US Pacific Deterrence Initiative, created to counter China, focuses on competition in the Indo-Pacific and aims to boost US preparedness in the region by funding radars, satellites and missile systems, according to Reuters.
Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military expert, told the Global Times on Friday that the initiative enables the US to use a variety of spy satellites to conduct reconnaissance and intelligence gathering to provide extensive and accurate intelligence support for US military operations, including joint military operations with its allies, and the US will also use allies, such as US overseas military bases, to deploy more radar systems to guide its weapons.
On the day its budget was sent to Congress, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was expected to meet with India’s Minister of External Affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, as part of India’s first cabinet-level visit to Washington, the Pentagon said.
“The secretary’s meeting with the external affairs minister will continue discussions that the two held in New Delhi in March and will continue the robust bilateral defense and security relationship between our two countries,” the Pentagon said.
Chinese military experts said it’s likely that India would buy more American weapons, have more military drills with the US or deepen its cooperation with the US in military intelligence sharing, and the US will use these in exchange for India’s cooperation for its Indo-Pacific strategy.
But India will have second thoughts on US military deployment on its soil, Song said, noting that weapons and radar deployment involves a country’s sovereignty, and India, which has been claiming to pursue an independent foreign policy, will unlikely give the US a satisfactory answer.
Even if India would like to deepen its military cooperation with the US, certain cooperation such as opening military bases to the US is not an option for India, Song said.
India may not be a very ideal partner, and most of US allies in Asia, including Japan and South Korea, also fear that the flames of war would eventually burn themselves.
In South Korea, protests against US military presence have become louder in the past years, and South Korea will not allow the US to turn Northeast Asia into a battlefield and drag itself into war, nor will it sacrifice its relations with China, observers said.
Zhang Junshe, a senior research fellow at the PLA Naval Military Studies Research Institute, told the Global Times on Friday that Australia is likely to allow the US to deploy more military equipment on its soil, making it the only US friend on its Indo-Pacific strategy.
By doing this, Australia will make itself a target for future military conflicts between the US and other countries, Zhang said, adding that a responsible government which really cares about the interests of its people would never allow it.
Professor Dennis Etler of Cabrillo College – California: As I See It: Why is it that the West is so preoccupied with demonizing China? 如我所見：為什麼西方如此專注於妖魔化中國？
The usual answer is that China’s economic growth is challenging Western global hegemony which has held sway for at least 250 years if not longer. The Chinese military has also reached parity with that of the West, so it is no longer subject to Western intimidation and bullying. All that is true, and sufficient reason for the West to want to savage China and portray it as the root of all evil.
But there is one other consideration that must be taken into account. It’s not only China’s economic prowess and military might that frightens the West, it is also China’s success as a nation versus the West’s failure. Moreover, China has forged a society in which there is harmony between its different ethnicities in contrast to the systemic racism that characterizes Western society.
Western ruling elites and their media mouthpieces do not want to acknowledge the fact that China has eliminated extreme poverty while more and more of their own people descend into poverty. They do not want to admit that China has constructed a 21st century infrastructure while they lag far behind. They do not want to confront the fact that the Chinese people overwhelmingly support their government while people in the West have lost confidence in their own, they do not want to accept that China beat COVIDC-19 while they haven’t, and finally they are loathe to accept the fact that a non-white nation has out performed them and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future.
In order to deflect attention away from these truths the West has concocted a series of lies and slanders that allow them to deny Chinese reality. Instead of poverty alleviation the West imagines “genocide.” Instead of the advances in HSR, EVs, alt-energy and e-commerce they focus on “IP theft,” instead of a socioeconomic system that serves the people, they accuse China of forced labor and forced sterilizations. Instead of seeing China as defending its national sovereignty in the South China Sea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, it’s called an aggressor.
All the China-bashing serves multiple purposes but one of the main reasons is to make sure that people in the West do not get to hear about or see what the real China is all about because if they did they may get ideas that the Western elites don’t want them to have, such as socialism works for the betterment of the 99% while capitalism works primarily to enrich the 1%.
Without war and enemies will forced Americans to look at our problems at home that the 1% elites who controlled everything in America have no intention to solve it or fixed it as it won’t bring billions to their pockets each year through foreign wars, robbing the wealth and resources of any weaker nations at will through fake freedoms, democracy and human rights.
Inside US, we are constantly at war between the two special interest parties: The Republicans and the Democrats. Both parties tried to undo the other parties to score points for the bi-annual elections. Winners will gain huge financial reward through our pay to play political system.
We have a failed country and a failed State. It is going to get much worst. We can complain about it, so what, the people with money and power don’t care.
Meanwhile we spent almost 1 trillion each year on military to fight the continuous wars we created.
US is split and divided. The only way to unite the country is to find or create foreign enemies. It was USSR. It is China today.
If we studied history, creating enemies to unite a country because people are afraid and it always work.
But how to convince Americans that China our enemies but in fact not. US is adopting Germany WWII tactics using controlled medias whose executives slept in the White House (CNN, Wall Street Journal, NYT, Washington Post, BBC International and etc) to repeat the same lies multiple times everyday. When 98% of Americans never been to China, it is an easy sell.
But there are dozens of Americans, Canadians and Europeans lives in China debunk US lies everyday that you can find them on YouTube channels, check them out on YouTube: Daniel Dumbrill Nathan Rich Pascal Coppens Difference Frames the World Joephy Chan (Cantonese Chinese)
Video: COVID-19 Origin 2021: Is It From China? COVID-19 來自中國嗎？ Recently, the sick staff in Wuhan became a hot topic, and western Mainstream media have been excited again, questioning the origin of covid 19 from Wuhan lab without solid evidence. They claimed three lab employees had been hospitalized with covid like symptoms in November 2019. 近日，武漢生病的員工成為熱門話題，西方主流媒體再次激動，在沒有確鑿證據的情況下質疑武漢實驗室的COVID19來源。 他們聲稱三名實驗室員工在 2019 年 11 月因類似冠狀病毒的症狀住院。
Cornerstone of China’s strategic deterrence against the US: more nuclear missiles and warheads by Hu Xijin May 27 2021
A formation of Dongfeng-41 intercontinental strategic nuclear missiles takes part in a military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, capital of China, October 1, 2019.
As the US strategic containment of Chinas has increasingly intensified, I would like to remind again that we have plenty of urgent tasks, but among the most important ones is to rapidly increase the number of commissioned nuclear warheads, and the DF-41s, the strategic missiles that are capable to strike long-range and have high-survivability, in the Chinese arsenal. This is the cornerstone of China’s strategic deterrence against the US.
We must be prepared for an intense showdown between China and the US. In that scenario, a large number of Dongfeng-41, and JL-2 and JL-3 (both intercontinental-range submarine-launched ballistic missile) will form the pillar of our strategic will. The number of China’s nuclear warheads must reach the quantity that makes US elites shiver should they entertain the idea of engaging in a military confrontation with China.
On this basis, we can calmly and actively manage divergences with Washington to avoid a minor incident sparking a war. US hostility toward China is burning. We must use our strength, and consequences that Washington cannot afford to bear if it takes risky moves, to keep them sober.
The author is editor-in-chief of the Global Times. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn
Video: Steel traders lick wounds as Chinese govt swiftly strikes down prices hike by Chu Daye, Yang Kunyi, Qi Xijia and Yin Yeping May 26 2021
Workers use a crane to transport steel coils at a plant in Hefei, East China’s Anhui Province in April.
Under the Chinese government’s swift, resolute and concerted efforts to put down a sudden spike in steel prices, a bubble that began to suddenly inflate in early May started to deflate in recent days. While the bubble burst left many who rushed to the feast licking their wounds, industry insiders and analysts said it may take months for the steel market to return to normal.
China’s steel prices have experienced a roller coaster ride since May 1. Prices for steel products rose by more than 1,600 yuan ($250) per ton in a span of two weeks, attracting the attention of the highest level of the Chinese government. The government’s high-frequency responses reached a peak on Monday with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang stating that it should be avoided that commodity price hikes are passed down to consumers. Steel prices then plunged, retreating to pre-May 1 levels.
Global Times reporters visited North China’s Tangshan, the world’s largest steel-producing city that produced about 14 percent of China’s raw steel in 2020, and steel product markets in Shanghai, to investigate the immediate aftermath of China’s steel trade after the government moved to strike abnormally high prices down.
Boom-bust story, first hand
At Xiaobali, a market place in northern Tangshan where over 400 wholesalers of steel profile products gathered, around a dozen trucks were scattered on a parking lot on Tuesday.
Just a week earlier, steel prices reaching their peak in more than a decade, the market was crowded with all sorts of middlemen, futures traders and producers in what apparently was a speculation frenzy.
“The market, spacious as it is, was buzzing with businessmen trying to strike a deal and full of cargo trucks loading and unloading steel plates that ‘even a motorbike would struggle to get in,'” local tradesmen said.
For many of the local businesses in Tangshan making and selling tin plated steel, profitability ranges from 20 yuan to 30 yuan per ton in normal times. But according to Jia Dongyue, manager of the Rongde Steel company, the soaring price of steel nearing 6,000 yuan has pushed up his profits to up to 1,000 yuan per ton.
Many wholesalers described the situation as “mad” and “rare in a decade” and they admit speculation was behind it.
Even at the height of the market in mid-May, when the price of steel reached a historic record of more than 6,000 yuan per ton, more than half of the trucks collecting steel from Xiaobali markets were middlemen and other steel producers, not downstream manufacturers, Jia said.
“But at the height of the price hike, some of the clients working in the infrastructure industry where the products are mostly used had to cancel their orders because it was beyond their budgets,” Jia said.
Then there came the bust. After the runaway steel market caught the attention of China’s top government departments, which warned not to “collude with each other” to gouge prices, steel prices have plunged since last week.
Businesspeople in Xiaobali said their profits were painfully cut after steel prices plunged. Some say that the cut was so deep that their profits so far this year have been completely wiped out in the past two weeks.
“I’m losing up to 1,300 yuan per ton now and if the price does not pick up soon I will lose more than 1.4 million by the time I sell all my current stock,” Yang Jin, a manager of Xinjinfeng Steel Company in Tangshan, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
At a steel market in Shanghai, steel traders were in a hurry to dump their previous hoard at a heavy lost, only to find few buyers.
Zheng Weiwei, a steel trader from East China’s Fujian Province, was seen shaving his dog in front of his booth in a steel trading market in Songjiang district, Shanghai on Tuesday.
“Business is really damp these days,” he said. Zheng had just sold more than 100 tons of steels on Monday, and that deal cost him 120,000 yuan. Before the regulation he would make 500 yuan a ton and many of his business peers raked in millions. Now he loses 1,400 yuan a ton.
“On May 10, I bought 1,500 tons at the highest price and if I sell them at the current market price, I will lose 1.68 million yuan in two weeks. I could have bought two houses in my hometown with that money,” he said.
Zheng said that his inventory is relatively small in the market, compared with some sharks whose inventory easily tops 40, 000 or 50,000 tons.
Although the price dropped, it is still difficult to sell the current stock, Zheng said.
“As soon as Chinese authorities asked the market to maintain price stability, everyone was competing for a quick sell, pushing the price even lower. The downstream construction sites are also waiting for the price to fall further before placing new orders.”
The speculation at futures and spot trading platforms is only part of the reason behind the price hike, local business owners in Tangshan said. Inflation on the upper stream of steel production and the market anticipation of limited iron ore supply from Australia helped push up price.
“The market is becoming so capricious these days. Never have I seen such a precipitous rise and fall in less than a month,” a Shanghai-based steel trader surnamed Tang told the Global Times on Tuesday, adding that many traders are still waiting to see how the market will react.
“For the time being, I will keep the inventory at a relatively low level,” he said.
Workers load steel on cargo trucks at Xiaobali Market, the biggest steel profile market in Tangshan, North China’s Hebei Province on Tuesday.
Govt acts like thunder
The global commodity price’s recent hike is appalling. Measured by CRB, an index of commodity futures prices, the average price of commodities has risen 46 percent from the second quarter of 2020. To put that steep climb into perspective, it took the index seven years to climb 145 percent from 2001-08.
Since mid-May, the Chinese government has noticed the trend and a series of actions from warnings to interviews swiftly followed like “thunder”, market observers said, as a top-down plan to stem the unusual spike of commodity inflation took shape.
Market regulators have been summoning heads of companies to warn them about price speculation. The State Council Executive Meeting flagged the issue of “excessive speculation,” and a swath of government departments, from the powerful National Development and Reform Commission to industry associations of almost all kinds of metals have weighed in.
The NDRC said the government will closely monitor the prices of commodities and have zero tolerance to irregular trading or price gouging.
On May 24, in his field inspection to Ningbo, East China’s Zhejiang Province, a manufacturing base as well as the world’s largest port, Premier Li Keqiang told a gathering of heads of manufacturing companies that the government will “rake its brains” to ensure commodity supply and stabilize its price, and reasonably guide market expectations.
Li said efforts will be made to avoid the rise in commodity prices to be passed downstream to consumer-end prices and affect people’s livelihood.
“So far the impact from the soaring raw material prices has been limited and controllable,” a source with a leading domestic construction machinery enterprise told the Global Times on Wednesday, anonymously.
The company has taken physical contingency measures such as beefing up internal cost controls and bolstering raw material inventories, as well as financial hedges to cushion the price jump in raw materials.
“As a champion, we will definitely react proactively to national policies and instructions to maintain the healthy development of the industry,” the person said.
The person, however, declined to comment on whether the company would absorb the rising costs or bear the burden to help alleviate the pressure for downstream clients in dealing with the high raw material costs.
Hong Shibin, deputy executive director of the marketing committee of the China Household Electrical Appliances Association, told the Global Times on Wednesday that the impact from soaring raw material prices would be felt very differently for companies of varying sizes as a bargaining game between dealers and manufacturers ensued.
Industry giants like Midea and Haier have already announced a price jump of as much as 15 percent and the increase has often been passed on to their dealers across the country to absorb the rising costs.
“Dealers can only bear it, or they may lose their business partnership with the giants,” Hong said, noting that consumers won’t take the hike as their purses forbid them from doing so.
But small and medium-sized production enterprises would have to bear the costs because they have much weaker bargaining power than the big companies.
“It is the manufacturer, or the dealer who pays, never the customers,” Hong said.
But Hong said that as the government is now putting greater efforts on cracking down on the “insane” price surges on commodities, downstream industry participants should be able to breathe easier soon.
For economists, the swift crackdown on excessive speculative behavior by certain market participants bore a deeper meaning.
Wan Zhe, a professor at Beijing Normal University who was a former researcher at NDRC and a commodity expert, noted that “it appears that this round of surging commodity prices has peaked, but not due to the government’s policy measures to curb runaway prices, rather because the hike has genuinely exhausted its inertia.”
“The Chinese government discovered the issues [of potential inflation] just as it sprouted; sent an earlier warning in a timely fashion, and did a lot of work,” Wan said, noting that for the moment things are getting back under control.
From now on, commodity prices will embark on a long, stabilizing period stretching months, Wan predicted.
“If there were no black swan incidents, the stabilization could reach a new equilibrium in the third and fourth quarter with the gradual receding of commodity prices,” said Wan.
Analysts said commodity price hikes is the result of quantitative easing, subsidies and liquidity flooding by developed countries led by the US, an uneven global economic recovery from the pandemic, a disparity in supply and demand, and some global incidents that added uncertainty to commodity supply.
China, despite its status as the World’s Factory and the foremost buyer of a long list of commodities from iron ore and crude, to copper and corn, does not have much power to dictate their prices.
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said the recent spike in producer prices indexes, prices measured at factory gates, would inevitably affect the consumer price index at a press conference in mid-May.
Pushed up by a rise in global commodity prices, China’s April PPI grew 6.8 percent year-on-year, the fastest in three and a half years.
However, the NBS said the condition to maintain stable consumer prices remains.
Analysts cautioned about the potential ris of the rapid inflation in commodity sectors to the Chinese economy, with some even warning that if the matter goes unchecked, the still nascent domestic recovery of the world’s second-largest economy in the wake of the pandemic’s onslaught could be at stake.
China’s economic recovery seen from the consumption aspect is still lackluster, in both people’s willingness and their ability to spend, Wan noted.
“Given that, an around-all price hike at the consumer end could potentially send the country into de facto stagflation – a situation when consumption is weak but prices for goods inflate,” Wan said.
A marked inflation in China could saddle policymakers with the dilemma of having to choose between an interest rate hike as a response to inflation, and maintaining the due course of a relatively neutral monetary policy, according to Wan.
Wan said China’s swift measures to rein in runaway steel prices highlighted China’s responsible take of the matter and projected a positive influence on helping stabilize commodity prices.
However, some Chinese economists, including Cao Heping, an economist at Peking University, told the Global Times that a moderate price hike for commodities is a very good thing, indicating that the Chinese economy has fully recovered.
But Cao noted China has to take note of the monopoly of certain resources by a handful of countries, as in the case of Australia’s monopoly of iron ore.
Long road to re-normalization
Wang Ji, a manager of Tangshan Xunzhuo Steel Trading Company, a company that exports steel products to Southeast Asia and Africa, told the Global Times on Wednesday that he believes steel prices will enter a stabilizing phase as the central government has made it clear that sharp rise and falls are not acceptable and “a stabilization could arrive in the third and fourth quarter.”
“The first step,” Wang said, “should be guaranteeing domestic manufacturers re-gain access to steel products at reasonable prices and not let them collapse under high costs and capital strain.”
Wang predicted that there will be further adjustments in export rebates for steel products, or even export tariff levies to increase to cost of steel exports “so as to deny imported inflation.”
Johnson Choi Biz 