Chinese Masochism

Surprise: Many Chinese Actually Like President Trump, And Hope For His Great Deal
President Trump is the biggest foreign star on Sina’s Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.
By Kenneth Rapoza

President Trump is a top draw on Weibo, China’s leading social network. Many Chinese like President Trump and understand his brand of nationalism. 

If you listen to the common Chinese citizen in Beijing and even in faraway places like Chengdu in Sichuan Province, they actually like President Trump and hope for the “great deal” he mentioned in an interview on Fox News Monday night.

Maybe “like” is too strong a word. 

They understand him. 

They seem to get his brand of nationalism. 

And they like his crass comments in the press. 

President Trump is the biggest foreign star on Sina’s Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter. 

On Tuesday, President Trump was the 15th hottest topic overall on a day when populist novelist Louis Cha Leung-yung passed away and dominated Chinese socials. 

President Trump was the No. 1 non-Chinese story being shared on the massive social network because of his trade and immigration banter.

“I think that we will make a great deal with China,” President Trump told Laura Ingraham on Fox News yesterday before taking a swipe at China for helping dismantle much of the manufacturing labor in the country. 

He said he would like to make a deal before the end of the year, but said China was not ready for one.

More tariffs are in the works. 

Investors are warily moving from $250 billion in tariffs as a base-case scenario to tariffs on around $500 billion worth of goods.

President Trump is often the No. 1 trending foreign news on Sina’s Weibo social networking platform in China. His abrasiveness remains popular with many locals, despite his anti-China rhetoric. 

Word in China is that the U.S. is using the trade tariffs as a form of economic warfare. 

They believe the U.S. is behaving unilaterally. 

They prefer to settle things through the World Trade Organization, an organization which has done much to favor China and global corporations’ love for abundant, low-cost labor and lackluster regulations.

The official view in Beijing is that they are being victimized by President Trump. 

But much like President Trump, government officials from the Foreign Affairs ministry use similar language in saying they want a “great deal for two "great" peoples.”

For years, the U.S. China Business Council has pressured Washington to sign a bilateral trade agreement with Beijing. 

In a best-case scenario, President Trump’s end game is such a treaty. 

Meanwhile, U.S. companies on the ground largely feel like they are one step behind the Chinese and are forced to play by different rules. 

Companies have been willing to play by Beijing’s rules due to the size of the Chinese market, a market that continues to grow quickly and does not resemble anything in any other developing nation.

We are experiencing trade tensions, say the Chinese. 

Not a trade war.
America’s international trade has accelerated, and the deficit with China is not going down. 

Savvy exporters are switching numbers on U.S. Commerce Department trade codes that identify the product type in order to make it look like something else and avoid tariffs. 

Steel is coming into the country and being made to look like it is coming from Vietnam, for instance, trade sources told me on Tuesday.

Other workarounds are being employed, as well.
The U.S and China are the engines of global trade.
Total trade between them expanded 13.5% in the 12 months to August 31 versus 2016 to reach $4.16 trillion, according to Panjiva Research, the trade-data unit of S&P Global Market Intelligence. 

U.S. companies are building inventory to avoid imports in the event of a worsening trade war.
U.S. goods and services trade with China totaled an estimated $710.4 billion in 2017. 

Exports were $187.5 billion and imports were $522.9 billion, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. 

The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with China was $335.4 billion in 2017, but most of that is due to goods. 

China is the U.S.’ largest goods trading partner with $635.4 billion in total two-way trade last year. 

It will be even higher this year thanks to a stronger U.S. economy and inventory build.
Goods exports to China totaled $129.9 billion while goods imports totaled $505.5 billion, which is what President Trump wants to hit in full.
The trade deficit has been one of President Trump’s key reasons for going after China.

Containers sit stacked next to gantry cranes at the Yangshan Deep Water Port in Shanghai on July 10, 2018. China has the biggest ports in the world and has benefited greatly from globalization or, as China says, its “opening up.” 

China likes to point out that President Trump misleads on the trade gap. 

They say that the services trade is growing with the U.S. and China has a deficit there. 

But last year, trade in services—exports and imports both—totaled around $75 billion. 

Services exports to China hit $57.6 billion, leading to a services trade surplus with China of $40.2 billion last year compared to a goods trade deficit of more than $370 billion. 

The two are light years apart.
Despite the relatively mousey approach to President Trump, China continues to retaliate, and Beijing plans to to retaliate further if President Trump imposes more duties.
China could shift to export controls and currency devaluation. 

This last option is less likely as it would violate their agreements with the International Monetary Fund. 

The Chinese yuan is part of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights currency basket along with the major free-floating currencies of the advanced economies.

Some investment banks worry that China’s central bank will adopt a competitive monetary devaluation policy in retaliation to tariffs on all Chinese exports to the U.S. 

BNP Paribas estimates that full-blown tariffs would knock as much as 0.4 percentage points off U.S. GDP growth with the possibility of a sharp correction in the stock market. 

A one percentage point decline is plausible in China.
President Trump’s “America First” campaign prioritizes protecting domestic labor related to trade, investment, intellectual property and core infrastructure (think ports).
On the other side of the Pacific Ocean, Xi Jinping’s Made in China 2025 policy emphasizes domestic content of core materials (think high-tech properties and robotics), and developing advanced systems such as 5G telecom. 

Gone are the days when China made your Happy Meal toys and there were sew-and-stitch factories for Nike and Ralph Lauren.
The risks to the baseline scenario of no full-blown tariffs are about 50-50 at this point, BNP Paribas economists led by Bricklin Dwyer in New York and chief China strategist Xingdong Chen in Paris wrote in a ten-page report titled “The Long Haul, published on October 15.
A potential meeting between President Trump and Xi at the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires next month could help restore some trust. 

The perception that the two leaders are still “friends,” as Trump claims, could either give investors hope for a “great deal” or have them shelve the idea for a while longer.

The Desperate Kowtowing

Facebook Is Trying Everything to Re-Enter China—and It’s Not Working

Since regulators blocked the service in 2009, Mark Zuckerberg has hired well-connected executives, developed censorship tools and taken a ‘smog jog’ in Beijing—but the company has made no headway.
By ALYSSA ABKOWITZ in Beijing, DEEPA SEETHARAMAN in San Francisco and EVA DOU in Wuzhen, China

Mark Zuckerberg’s 2016 ‘smog jog’ in Tiananmen Square. 

Facebook Inc.’s chances of getting back into China appeared to take a rare turn for the better when an employee noticed an official posting online: Beijing authorities had granted it a license to open a representative office in two office-tower suites in the capital.
Such permits typically give Western firms an initial China beachhead. 

This one, which Facebook won in late 2015, could have been a sign Beijing was ready to give the company another chance to connect with China’s roughly 700 million internet users, reopening the market as the social-media giant’s U.S.-growth prospects dimmed.
There was a catch. 

Facebook’s license was for three months, unusually short. 

Facebook executives found the limitation unexpected and frustrating, people familiar with the episode said.
Facebook never opened the office. 

The official posting disappeared and now exists as a ghost in cached versions of the government website. 

“We did, at one point in time, plan to have an office,” said Facebook spokeswoman Charlene Chian, “but we don’t today.”
The episode is part of Facebook’s running tale of woe in China, where it has been trying to set the stage for a return. 

Blocked on China’s internet since 2009, Facebook has courted Chinese officials, made Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg more visible in China, hired a well-connected China-policy chief and begun developing technology that could cull content the Communist Party deems unacceptable.

It has made no visible headway. 

And as time passes, Facebook is watching from the outside as Chinese social-media giants mop up the market that might have been its own. 

Weibo, along with Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat and QQ, are now dominant in China, and it may be too late for Facebook, said industry executives including Kai-Fu Lee, Google’s former China head and now CEO of Innovation Works, a Chinese incubator.
“At this stage and time with WeChat, Weibo and other products, it’s hopeless,” Mr. Lee said.
Facebook also faces a wary central government, which blamed social media for stirring ethnic unrest in 2009 and remains uneasy with Facebook’s ability to be a dissidents’ megaphone, said industry executives and others who deal with Beijing regulators. 

And government censorship would be a prerequisite, under Chinese law, for Facebook to re-enter China.
“It’s important for Facebook to respect the laws and regulations of China,” said Guo Weimin, vice minister of the State Council Information Office. 

Zuckerberg, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has said he considers China crucial to Facebook’s future. 

“Obviously you can’t have a mission of wanting to connect everyone in the world and leave out the biggest country,” he told analysts in 2015. 

“Over the long term, that is a situation we will need to figure out a way forward on.”
His drive has had fits and starts. 

He scored a high-profile board seat at one of China’s top universities to build inroads with Chinese officials but didn’t attend the body’s meeting last year.
“We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country,” Facebook spokeswoman Debbie Frost said. 

“However, we have not made any decision on our approach to China.”
Prospects were brighter in 2005, when Facebook registered “www.facebook.cn.” 

It launched a Chinese-language version of its website in 2008 and was a serious contender in China. A Facebook page purporting to be of then-premier Wen Jiabao had tens of thousands of “likes.”

Locked out
Things changed in 2009, when regulators blocked Facebook and Twitter in an information lockdown after riots in China ’s Muslim Xinjiang region. 

State media said riot leaders used social media to stir unrest.
China had previously blocked social-media sites temporarily during political unrest, and many assumed it would eventually back off this time. 

Instead, it continued blocking Facebook and Twitter. 

Some tech-savvy users found ways around the “Great Firewall,” but Facebook was effectively banned.
Zuckerberg maintained his intense interest in China, studying Mandarin and hosting Chinese officials at his Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. 

He traveled to China to meet business leaders and government officials to maintain communication.
Facebook in a 2012 federal filing said it continued to “evaluate entering China” but faced “substantial legal and regulatory complexities.” 

It shifted focus to wooing Chinese advertisers, with teams in Hong Kong and Singapore pitching the network as a way for Chinese businesses to reach customers outside the mainland.

Facebook Vice President Vaughan Smith at a 2014 internet conference in China.

Over about the past two years, Facebook has stepped up its China groundwork, said current and former Facebook executives and employees. 

Since at least 2014, the task of coordinating the company’s China initiative has fallen to Vaughan Smith, vice president of mobile, corporate and business development, who helped negotiate dozens of Facebook’s earliest acquisitions, they said. 

In December, China’s elite Tsinghua University announced Smith would co-teach a class on innovation. 

He declined to be interviewed.
To deploy a Hong Kong-based field commander, Facebook in 2014 hired Wang-Li Moser, who spent more than a decade at Intel Corp. in China, where former colleagues said she made her name as a quiet fixer. 

She helped Intel navigate Chinese bureaucracy to build a $2.5 billion factory and strengthen government relations.
Born in 1954 in China’s Henan province and now a U.S. citizen, Moser was among the first wave of Chinese to go to college in China after the Cultural Revolution, according to her writings. 

She earned an M.B.A. from Rider University in New Jersey. 

She declined to be interviewed.
“Her role,” said Facebook’s Chian, “is to help us understand and learn more about China.”
That includes building more face-to-face relations with government officials. 

In a 2011 essay, she called arranging meetings with Chinese officials a “long, trivial and pressing” task.
“She makes a point to understand who she’s dealing with,” said Tan Wee Theng, former president of Intel China, who worked with her at Intel and now runs a business-advisory firm.
Her hiring appeared to bear fruit in December 2014, when she accompanied Zuckerberg in a meeting with Lu Wei, then China’s top internet regulator, at Facebook headquarters. 

She accompanied the CEO in March 2016 Beijing meetings with Lu and the Communist Party’s ideology chief Liu Yunshan.
Last fall, she was at China’s World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, an invitation-only event hosted by the Cyberspace Administration of China, the regulator that determines, among other things, which websites are blocked. 

She steered Smith by the arm, striking up conversations with well-placed Chinese friends and acquaintances.

Zuck’s ‘Smog jog’
Zuckerberg has made himself visible in China, joining the board of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in 2014, a high-profile group that includes Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein and Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook.
In 2015, he gave a 22-minute speech in Mandarin at the university. 

Last spring, he posted a photo of himself jogging through Tiananmen Square on a smoggy day without the pollution mask many wear around the city, causing a stir online.
During Xi Jinping’s 2015 Seattle trip, Zuckerberg was among American business leaders to meet the Chinese.

Zuckerberg met Xi Jinping in Washington state in 2015.

Facebook has rapidly expanded its sales teams in Singapore and Hong Kong in anticipation of more business in Asia, particularly in China, people familiar with the teams said.
Amin Zoufonoun, Facebook’s head of corporate development who has helped drive some of its largest acquisitions, is eyeing potential deals including joint ventures that could help jump-start Facebook’s China growth should it be allowed to return, said people familiar with Facebook. 

Zoufonoun, who declined to be interviewed, joined Zuckerberg on his "Love China, Love Tank" Tiananmen “smog jog.”
Over the past year, Zuckerberg has directed engineers at Facebook to start building and adapting products that can be used in China, according to people familiar with the effort. 

Facebook has been working on technology that could block content in China, said people briefed on the effort. 

The New York Times previously reported that Facebook is working on a tool to allow a third party to block content.
The circumstances Facebook faces are different from a decade ago when Moser made her reputation as an Intel fixer. 

Then, China’s tech sector was weak, and officials were eager for outsiders’ factories to employ thousands and advance China’s technology. 

Now China champions its own rising stars, and Facebook can’t promise the level of job creation offered by hardware makers such as Intel and Apple.
It was Moser’s name on Facebook’s application to open the Beijing office, filed with the Beijing Municipal Administration of Industry and Commerce. 

The agency didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Chinese law would demand more, and censorship is a price that has led Western internet companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google to abandon the market.

Facebook executives worry that agreeing to heavy censorship could create a backlash among the site’s 1.8 billion active users, said people familiar with the company.
Another obstacle for Facebook may be the aftermath of Google’s departure. 

In 2010, Google said it would stop censoring its search engine after concluding Chinese hackers were attacking human-rights activists’ Gmail accounts.

It pulled its engine from the mainland, redirecting users to its Hong Kong site. 

After Google’s departure and declarations about human rights, government officials publicly called Google “unfriendly” and “irresponsible.” 

Within Facebook, said people familiar with the company, the view is Chinese leaders remain wary that, were they to grant Facebook access, the company might leave after deciding it can’t tolerate censorship after all—that Facebook, said one, might “pull a Google.”
While Facebook can’t be a social network in China just now, its top executives continue to urge Chinese companies to use it as an advertising platform. 

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg met with a small group of advertising clients at a swanky Beijing hotel last summer. 

Turnout appeared light, said one attendee. 

A person familiar with Facebook said the event was intended it to be small. 

Sandberg declined to comment.

Amanda Chen, who oversees Facebook’s small-business advertising in China, at a 2016 e-commerce conference in Guangzhou.

A few months later, Facebook’s Amanda Chen appeared at a regional e-commerce convention in Guangzhou. 

Singapore-based Chen, who oversees small-business advertising in China, told attendees how Facebook could help Chinese businesses chu hai, or “go out to sea,” and increase international sales by buying ads on Facebook. 

She declined to be interviewed.
Participants swarmed Chen after her presentation. 

They asked her to connect with them on WeChat, China’s preferred networking method. 

They couldn’t ask to friend her on Facebook in China.

China's Strong Sense of Customer Service

Flight Attendant Caught Performing Oral Sex On Airline Passenger, Leaked Photos Go Viral
www.malaysiandigest.com

BEIJING -- A flight attendant recently gave new meaning to the description of 'service with a smile' that cabin crew are trained in taking care of passengers onboard.
However, extra service which this flight attendant is pictured offering has caused a furor on social media.
A lewd photo showing a Chinese female cabin crew of Shenzhen Airlines who performed oral sex on a passenger, resurfaced again on the internet when it went viral on the social media platform Weibo recently, a local viral news blog reported.
It is understood that the cabin crew has been identified as Liu Ruiqi. 

A search online showed that the stewardess is active on Chinese social media channels, frequently sharing selfies and some rather more explicit personal photographs on Weibo, buzzy.ph reports.
The sex act performed openly in what appears to be the aisle inside a passenger aircraft has sparked off strong condemnation among netizens and triggered heated discussion online about the duties and morality of the cabin crew, with many reeling from shock and shame.
Social media users have been expressing their shock at the shameless public display with some netizens speculating that the cabin crew was paid for the "extra service".
However, the additional media exposure appears to be a double-edge sword for the airline with its name and logo splashed all over social media but with netizens warning "better not fly with Shenzhen Airlines".
This isn't the first time the China airline company has made headlines. 

In December, one of its cabin crew was named the world's most beautiful.

Liu Miaomiao says goodbye to passengers when the plane arrives at Beijing International Airport, on Nov 28, 2016.

Liu Miaomiao, a Shenzhen Airlines' stewardess, was named the world's most beautiful stewardess in a competition held in Shenzhen city, South China's Guangdong province, in June 2016.
Unfortunately, now the airline is not only known for its attractive cabin crew but also for the 'extra' oral service provided.

China's blowjob airline

Per un pugno di renminbi

Facebook could pay heavy price if it censors news to please China

By Sherisse Pham

HONG KONG -- Facebook's latest signal that it's willing to play ball with China? 

It has quietly built a censorship tool that would keep certain posts out of people's news feeds, according to The New York Times.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made no secret of his desire to get the giant social network unblocked in the world's most populous nation.
He has traveled to China repeatedly, meeting with the country's propaganda chief during a visit earlier this year and taking heat on social media for "pandering" to the government by jogging through polluted Beijing streets without a face mask. 

He is even studying Mandarin.
And now his company has apparently developed software that stops posts from appearing in users' news feeds in specific geographic regions, a move specifically aimed at helping the company get into China, The New York Times reported, citing current and former Facebook employees.
A Facebook spokeswoman did not deny the report, saying only that the company has "not made any decision on our approach to China."
"We have long said that we are interested in China, and are spending time understanding and learning more about the country," she said.
The report comes at a sensitive time for Facebook. 

Zuckerberg insists he does not want to play the role of an editor, yet he recently announced plans to help prevent fake news being shared on Facebook just days after playing down the problem.
Analysts say the U.S. tech giant could have a lot to lose by compromising with China, where some other big internet platforms like Twitter and Google are also blocked.
For one thing, censorship alone is unlikely to be enough. 

Facebook would have to give China access to its servers to be allowed in the country, said Qiao Mu, professor of communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
"You have a deal with a monster," Qiao said.
Facebook would have to comply with China's tough legal requirements for handing over user information to authorities. 

American businesses have criticized a new Chinese cybersecurity law, warning its requirements for data sharing could expose personal information.
Creating a censorship program to appease China could also undermine the trust of non-Chinese users.
"It has potential to call into question the ethics of the company, call into question whether if you're doing that (in China) ... what are you doing with my content?" said Mark Natkin, managing director at market research firm Marbridge Consulting in Beijing.
By making such a tool available in China, Facebook could face pressure from other governments around the world to implement it elsewhere.
Even if Facebook does enough to satisfy the Chinese government, it would face huge competitive hurdles.
Facebook clones like Renren and Kaixin have already long gone out of fashion China. 

The dominant players now are WeChat and Weibo, both hugely popular social networking sites with hundreds of millions of users.
Facebook, the world's largest social network, would in theory offer Chinese users the possibility of connecting with people all around the globe. 

WeChat and Weibo haven't been able to replicate their success outside of China.
But Chinese internet users who really want to get on Facebook can already do so through a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, which enables them to skirt China's huge censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall.
"I don't think people even care," Natkin said. 

He summed up the likely response from many Chinese people as, "You came to China, good for you. I'm not going to use you anyway."