The Sino-Africa relations have peaked in the last 10 years, resulting in tremendous growth of trade, which soared from 10 billion U.S. dollars in the year 2000 to 166.3 billion dollars in 2011. Meanwhile, China's investment in Africa currently hit 15.3 billion dollars, 30 times more than 10 years ago.
S. Korea's IT exports retreat for 5 months in July
2012-08-13
SEOUL, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- South Korean exports of information technology (IT) products retreated for five straight months last month due to sluggish global demand and rising production of handsets in overseas factories, a government report showed Monday.
Exports of locally-manufactured IT products reached 12.79 billion U.S. dollars in July, down 1.6 percent from a year earlier, according to the Ministry of Knowledge Economy. For the first seven months of this year, the exports amounted to 86.04 billion dollars, down 4.7 percent from the same period of 2011.
The exports in the IT industry contracted for five months in a row in July, but the pace of contraction continued to slow from a 9.4 percent drop in April to a 3.1 percent decline in May and a 2. 5 percent fall in June respectively.
The ministry attributed the July decline to slowing demand for locally-made IT products caused by Europe's debt crisis and growth in production of handsets in overseas factories.
Despite the faltering exports, trade surplus in the sector reached 6.43 billion U.S. dollars in July, more than doubling the surplus of 2.75 billion dollars for all industries. It was due mainly to steeper drop in IT imports that came to 6.36 billion U.S. dollars, down 4.9 percent from a year before.
Among three major export items, memory chips and handsets showed underperformance last month, but display panels logged a double-digit growth. System chips, rechargeable batteries and table PCs saw their shipment grow last month.
Handset exports tumbled 34.2 percent on-year to 1.43 billion dollars in July. South Korea ranked first in terms of global market share of smartphone for five straight quarters in the second quarter, but mobile phone exports dropped over 20 percent for 10 straight months last month due to local firms' expansion in overseas production.
Exports of semiconductors edged down 0.6 percent on-year to 3. 94 billion dollars in July. Shipments of memory chips dropped 18.1 percent, but it was offset by solid demand for system chips, of which exports jumped 18.2 percent, logging the on-year export growth for 35 months in a row.
Shipments of display panels jumped 10.3 percent on-year to 2.78 billion dollars last month, a turnaround from a 4.0 percent decline tallied in the previous month. The turnaround was attributed to global panel price stabilization and improved conditions for supply and demand as well as subsidy provision for TV purchase in China.
Exports of computer and computer-related products such as printers and monitors expanded 9.1 percent to 730 million dollars last month. The exports maintained its on-year growth trend thanks to robust overseas demand for solid state disks (SSD), tablet PCs and laptops.
Outbound shipments of TVs plunged 32.4 percent on-year to 580 million dollars in July amid weak demand for TV globally, but exports of rechargeable batteries jumped 10.4 percent to 440 million dollars due to smartphone-related demand.
By country, exports to China, including Hong Kong, grew 3.0 percent on-year to 6.56 billion dollars in July, with shipments to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) expanding 18.3 percent to 1.38 billion dollars.
Shipments to Japan advanced 11.6 percent on-year to 840 million dollars last month, but exports to the United States and the European Union (EU) declined 19.2 percent and 11.6 percent each over the cited period.
Chongqing laptop output rises six-fold in Q1
2012-04-26
CHONGQING, April 26 (Xinhua) -- The number of laptops produced in southwest China's Chongqing in the first quarter of this year exceeded 11 million, up more than six times year-on-year, local authorities said Thursday.
Chongqing assembled 11.006 million laptops valued at 25.54 billion yuan (4.05 billion U.S. dollars) between the start of January and the end of March, 617 percent more than that in the same period of last year, according to figures released by the Chongqing Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization.
The majority of the devices were exported, with an export value at 22.18 billion yuan, up 7.8 times from a year ago.
It is estimated that laptop output from the municipality in the second quarter will reach 13 million units, bringing the number produced in the first half of 2012 to 24 million, thanks to a projected surge in orders, according to the commission.
Chongqing is building itself into a major center for laptop assembly, with its output of the computers estimated to account for 14% of the world's total.
Chongqing will soon open a new international air cargo route to link the metropolis with the United States and Australia and facilitate delivery of its IT products to the North American and Australian markets.
Chongqing
April 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/15/china.china
Welcome to the largest city in the world. Migrant workers flood in and skyscrapers rise up. But what is the real cost of rapid industrialisation? Jonathan Watts investigates.
Li Zhiguan, also known as Spiderman, perches perilously on the side of a towerblock. "I've seen a very big change in the city. From up here, you can notice the difference in the space of a week." For the rich, Chongqing is 'a place of dreams.' However, the majority here live below the poverty line by doing back-breaking work. With the population set to double to 20 million by 2020, worries about the environment and workers welfare are put to one side. Nothing, it seems, is going to stop the industrial revolution of the 21st Century.
http://www.66express.com Chongqing is in the central part of China and is one of the most population density provincial city in China. It is famous for its great mountain view,huge list of dilicous food and gorgeous girls in China.
http://www.kammu.com
http://youtu.be/xL5KPuLMuvE
http://www.atimes.com/
Muhammad Cohen, an American writer long-based in Asia. On last weekend’s TDM Talk Show, Cohen shared some of his tips on how to improve one’s writing and how to become an author.
http://www.macaudailytimes.com.mo/macau/26903-Writers-must-know-their-message.html
Chongqing: Invisible City - China
http://youtu.be/HMZEazYXXuY
In "Chinatown, Africa", Vanguard correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to Angola to investigate China's rapidly growing presence in Africa. While many welcome China's investment, others see reason for concern. Chinatown, Africa is revealing look at a growing superpower's adventures abroad.
"Vanguard," airing Mondays at 9/8c on Current TV, is a no-limits documentary series whose award-winning correspondents put themselves in extraordinary situations to immerse viewers in global issues that have a large social significance.
VIEW more Vanguard & SUBSCRIBE to the YouTube Playlist here...
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=99EA424C68B5EB55
http://www.atimes.com
SPEAKING FREELY
China, Europe export gangsters
and low wages to Africa
By Emanuele Scimia
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.
Africa is a battleground for the geopolitical interests of China and Europe. But despite Beijing's and Brussels' claims about the distinctive features of their respective approaches to developing countries, Chinese and European companies treat African workers badly in equal measure. Meanwhile, transnational crime syndicates and criminal gangs are spreading from the Old Continent and the Middle Kingdom to many African regions.
Thirty-four miners shot dead by police at a British-owned platinum mine in South Africa; a Chinese manager killed by local workers
at a coal mine in Zambia. Alongside the emerging heft of "Made in China" criminality in Africa's Chinatowns are the dramatic advances of criminal organizations from Europe throughout the African continent. Notwithstanding theoretical disputes over distinctions between Western colonialism and Chinese neo-colonialism, it seems that Europe and China alike are exporting to Africa some of their worst pathologies.
Demands for better pay
At the Marikana platinum mine in Rustenburg, South Africa, miners were killed during a strike over pay on August 16, while asking for an increase in their minimum wage from US$545 to $1,500 a month. The strike had begun a few days earlier and 10 people, including two police officers, had already died after fierce clashes.
The Marikana mine is owned by London-based Lonmin, the world's third-largest platinum producer. South Africa is the largest platinum producer and its mining sector is worried that the latest unrest could affect the national output in the short run. Apart from the Marikana situation, Johannesburg-based Anglo American Platinum, the world's top producer of the metal, is also grappling with demands for pay raises. Similar pleas have come from workers at the Royal Bafokeng platinum mine just north of Rustenburg.
It is worth noting that the crisis blasting South Africa's mining sector also springs from uncertainty surrounding the domestic political situation, notably infighting between two trade unions, the National Union of Mineworkers, which cultivates strong ties with the ruling African National Congress, and the recently formed Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union.
The Chinese supervisor at the Collum coal mine in Sinazongwe, Zambia, which is run by a private company from Jiangxi province in China, was killed in August by mineworkers during a strike, again over wage demands. In 2011, the government in Lusaka dismissed charges against two Chinese managers who had fired on miners at the Collum mine in the wake of an earlier salary quarrel. In his successful campaign for the Zambian presidency last year, Michael Sata seized on the popular discontent over the nature and measure of Chinese investments in the country.
South African and Zambian mineworkers are asking for the same thing: better working and living conditions. Speaking to the European Parliament on February 21, the European Union's high representative for foreign affairs, Catherine Ashton, underscored EU support for the "Zambian government's commitment to ensure compliance with domestic labor laws", not least with regard to the mining sector.
Baroness Ashton was bluntly referring to the activities of Chinese mining companies in Zambia. However, looking at the latest events in South Africa, it would appear that the EU had better focus on its own back yard as regards the implementation of international and European labor regulations. In reality, even in the case of a stricter oversight of Brussels' institutions over corporate social responsibility practices by enterprises from the Old Continent, a British company like Lonmin might make a narrow escape if the Euro-skeptic Tories in the British cabinet succeed in restoring an opting-out from EU social policy, which is part of Britain's efforts to renegotiate the terms of its membership in the European Union.
Ashton co-chaired on August 24 the 11th Ministerial Political Dialogue between the EU and South Africa. The European foreign-policy chief expressed deep sorrow at the deaths of South African mineworkers and police officers, but she had no word against Lonmin for what happened at the Marikana mine. Indeed, it is business as usual for the EU, which is the main trading partner of Pretoria (overall trade worth US$49 billion in 2010), the first foreign investor in the country (77.5% of foreign direct investment) and its most prominent development partner (70% of all external assistance).
Exported gangsters and traffickers
In addition to reproducing in Africa the labor environment characterizing its own mining sector, with low wages and hard and dangerous working conditions, much as elsewhere in the world, not least in Europe, China is witnessing a growing expansion of its home-made crime syndicates across the African continent - an unintended consequence apparently inherent in the global projection of modern powers.
Angola recently extradited to Beijing 37 Chinese nationals under allegations of extortion, kidnappings, hold-ups, prostitution and pimping. China's Ministry of Public Security sent a special police team to Luanda in July to help investigate Chinese criminal gangs, the British Broadcasting Corp reported on August 25.
However, the most dangerous challenge for Africa in terms of foreign criminal penetration is coming from Europe. The organized crime groups in Italy provide Somali warlords and pirates with small arms in exchange for permission to dump waste off the coasts of Somalia, Sudan and Eritrea, according to French criminologist Michel Koutouzis. The EU special envoy for Somalia, Alexander Rondos, would be looking into the case, the EUobserver reported on June 20.
But there is much more. The 'Ndrangheta, at this moment the most powerful crime syndicate in Italy (and perhaps in the world), has large interests in the trafficking of coltan (a metallic substance used in mobile phones) in Congo and diamonds in South Africa, as well as in controlling - along with the Colombian drug cartels - the transit routes in West Africa, which couriers use to smuggle Latin American cocaine into Europe.
The US Drug Enforcement Agency is training an elite unit of counter-narcotics police in Ghana, and similar units will be created in Nigeria and Kenya as well, the International Herald Tribune reported on July 21. But Jeffrey Breeden, the chief of the DEA section for Europe, Asia and Africa, remarked that US security forces would not play a greater operational role in Africa against drug smuggling and that this task might be up to European police forces for historical reasons.
To minimize financial and political losses, Washington sees the African continent as a promising field for the outsourcing of security duties to Europe. Yet the first testing ground for this strategy, intervention in the war in Libya, laid the EU's military unpreparedness bare. Furthermore, there is yet another problem: In light of the elusive nature of criminal organizations, the fight against transnational organized crime in Africa could prove a much more complex job than a military campaign against a diplomatically isolated dictator such as Muammar Gaddafi.
Emanuele Scimia is a journalist and geopolitical analyst based in Rome.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.
(Copyright 2012 Emanuele Scimia.)
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