Cybersecurity experts warn that hundreds of thousands of computer users across the globe remain vulnerable following a large-scale virus attack in recent days. The so-called ‘ransomware’ virus struck governments and companies around the world, as Henry Ridgwell reports from London.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping says countries participating in the two-day Belt and Road Forum have agreed to an action plan with a list of 270 goals

Speaking at the end of the forum, China’s leader said the 30 heads of state who attended the summit in Beijing and nearby Yanqi Lake signed a communiqué to promote an open global economy, rebalance globalization, and deepen trade liberalization. 

Xi’s Belt and Road development initiative focuses on connectivity and cooperation among countries primarily China and the rest of Eurasia.  It includes the land-based “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the oceangoing “Maritime Silk Road”. 

The strategy underlines China’s push to take a bigger role in global affairs.  Xi stressed China would not base cooperation on ideology or use the Belt and Road to pursue a political agenda, allaying concerns of critics who have highlighted the massive project’s possible geopolitical impact.

“We have every reason to have full confidence in the prospects for the Belt and Road initiative,” Xi said.  “At the same time, the Belt and Road initiative is an expansive project and the road ahead is very long and cooperation is key.” 

Expansive Belt and Road 

Although many of the more than 100 countries and organizations participating in the summit welcome China’s efforts to boost trade and to play a bigger role in global affairs, participation in the forum was mixed.  Some countries sent representatives, but have yet to officially back the project.

The forum included representatives from the United States and North Korea. 

Countries such as the United States and Germany have emphasized the need for transparency and a level playing field. 

“Germany as a country has not asked to be a part of the initiative, but German companies have asked to be part of it,” said Brigitte Zypries, German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy, who attended the forum.  “It is obviously relevant to know what is going to be built and the procedures to take part in this building are the same for every company and every country.” 

“The Belt and Road Initiative originates from China, but it belongs to the world,” Xi said, in remarks before the leaders’ summit Monday.  “The Belt and Road construction spans different regions, development phases and civilizations.  It is an open and inclusive cooperation platform.” 

Sunday, Xi outlined his vision for the plan and pledged to use development to fight a wide range of problems from terrorism to poverty.  Xi’s plan involves the creation of six economic corridors that would link China to 65 countries.  The participation of those countries would account for 60 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of global GDP. 

An estimated $900 billion would be spent on connectivity projects across land and sea, making the Belt and Road initiative the most expensive development plan in history, several times larger than the U.S. Marshall Plan that was used to rebuild Europe after World War II. 

China has offered to shoulder a big slice of the responsibility, pledging $124 billion, which is double of what the World Bank lent in 2016.  Analysts said Beijing can easily bear the burden.  China has foreign exchange reserves exceeding $3 trillion.  Last year, Chinese companies invested $170 billion in overseas projects. 

Empire building 

Xi offered to establish 50 scientific laboratories with participating countries, train 5,000 foreign scientists and invited 500 foreign research groups to visit China.   The plan will also launch 100 “happy home” projects, 100 poverty alleviation projects and 100 health care and rehabilitation projects in countries along the Belt and Road, he said.  

But based on how the project has been outlined, China appears to be trying its hand at a new form of economic colonization, said Mohan Malik, a professor at the Institute of Asian Security in Hawaii. 

“China is in an empire-building mode: an empire of exclusive economic enclaves that would create a Sino-centric unipolar Asia,” Malik said in an emailed response.  “Chinese officials, in jest, talk of buying off smaller countries instead of invading them.” 

Malik adds that with its slowing economy, China risks “imperial overreach” with such a massive venture. 

David Kelly, director of research at the private China Policy consultants said if successful the outcome could be a positive thing, but the Belt and Road is swiftly becoming a measure of China’s global standing. 

“But if it doesn’t work, if it runs into problems, if it’s impractical, if it’s too costly, if it falls over, it will cost China’s standing in the world.  And that is what worries people because it is essentially an educated bet, an educated gamble,” Kelly said.
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Anheuser-Busch is upgrading its U.S. breweries and plans to build two new distribution centers as it adapts to an increasingly fragmented beer market.

The maker of Budweiser, Corona, Stella Artois says the upgrades and new distribution centers in Los Angeles and Columbus, Ohio, will allow it to store a greater variety of products and get them to customers faster. The measures are part of the $500 million that the company said Monday it will invest in its U.S. operations this year, marking an increase compared with recent years. It’s a portion of the $3.7 billion in global capital expenditures that the Belgian company had already budgeted for 2017.

Anheuser-Busch has struggled to boost sales volumes as craft beers grow increasingly popular in an already crowded marketplace. In 2016, total volume at Anheuser-Busch declined 2 percent, including a 1.6 percent volume decline in North America.

The same thing is happening with non-alcoholic drinks. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi has said the industry is becoming more “niche,” and that PepsiCo needs to learn how to thrive amid that growing complexity.

The investment announced Monday by Anheuser-Busch includes upgrades to breweries in Fort Collins, Colorado, and St. Louis, Missouri. The company did not say how many new jobs it expects this year’s U.S. investments to create. It has added around 2,500 jobs since 2013, the company said. Anheuser-Busch employs more than 17,000 people in the U.S.

In 2015, Anheuser-Busch had said it expects to invest $1.5 billion from that year to 2018. The Monday announcement was an update, with the company saying it is spending $2 billion from this year through 2020.
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Dubai plans to develop a 6.3 billion dirham ($1.7 billion) tourist resort on two man-made islands it will build on either side of the Burj Al Arab, its luxury sail-shaped hotel.

It is the latest development planned by the emirate as it aims to attract 20 million visitors a year by 2020 when Dubai will host the World Expo 2020 exhibition.

Spanning 4 million square feet, Marsa Al Arab will be made up of two islands, one dedicated to entertainment and family tourism and the other featuring luxury villas and a private marina, state news agency WAM reported Monday.

Dubai is already one of the world’s most visited cities, although its hotels, shopping malls and state-owned airline, Emirates, have been buffeted by a strong U.S. dollar which has made the emirate pricier for many overseas visitors. The United Arab Emirates pegs its dirham to the dollar.

Around 4.6 million tourists visited Dubai during the first quarter, up by 11 percent compared to the same period of last year, according to Dubai Tourism data.

Marsa Al Arab will feature 140 villas, a marine and water park, and a theatre with capacity for 1,700 people to host Cirque du Soleil, local media reported. Work on the project will break ground in June and be completed by late 2020, WAM said.

The agency did not mention how the project would be funded.

Dubai is working on several big projects due for completion in the next few years and being funded by debt.

It is building the World Expo 2020 exhibition site, an extension to Dubai’s Metro system and Al Maktoum International Airport, a new airport being developed on the edge of Dubai, which will serve up to 146 million passengers by 2025.

Marsa Al Arab will add 2.2 km (1.4 miles) of beach to the emirate’s coastline, WAM said.

Dubai’s most famous artificial island, Palm Jumeriah, is home to several hotels, villas and apartments. But other islands it planned to develop were stalled or scaled back after the emirate’s 2009 debt crisis.

Palm Jebel Ali, which began construction in 2002, has yet to be completed, while plans for Palm Deira have been reworked to create a scaled-down project called Deira Islands.

Another man-made archipelago, The World, a 300-island chain laid out in the shape of the world’s continents, has only been partially developed.
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Historic rivals China and Vietnam are working on substantive agreements that could cover trade, investment and maritime resource sharing despite a bitter sovereignty dispute that had snarled relations less than a year ago.

The Communist neighbors are inching toward new trade and investment ties that analysts say would help shore up overall relations. Some believe the two might later approach stickier topics such as joint use of disputed waters or humane treatment of each other’s fishermen. The two countries still contest sovereignty over tracts of the vast, resource-rich South China Sea east of Vietnam and southwest of Hong Kong.

Prospects of some kind of agreement came into focus during Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang’s visit to China, which ends Monday. He suggested the two sides work on complementing each other’s trade and investment advantages with a view toward improving overall relations, state media from Hanoi said.

“President Quang is in China, and China promised a lot,” said Yun Sun, senior associate with the East Asia Program under Washington-based think tank the Stimson Center. “From an economic point of view, it is certainly practical and beneficial for Vietnam to have some sort of deal, but then again I think this still relatively early to tell.”

In a meeting with Quang Thursday, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for more cross-border economic cooperation zones and joint infrastructure building, according to  China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported. China pledged to “mitigate” its trade deficit with Vietnam and increase direct investment, Sun said.

“Talking probably does help lower tensions and improve the odds of things happening,” said Alaistair Chan, an economist covering China for Moody’s Analytics.

The Vietnamese president suggested China finalize rules on opening the Chinese market for farm products, dairy and seafood, media outlet vietnamnet.vn said. He also called on China to make more “preferential loans” and urged a working group to develop renewable energy investment projects that play on China’s strengths and demand in Vietnam, the Vietnamese news report said.

On Friday companies from both countries signed agreements on milk distribution, tourism and rice processing.

China is the largest trade partner of Vietnam, with imports and exports worth about $72 billion last year. Vietnam also calls China one of the top 10 investors in the country.

But both countries are likely to hedge on letting outsiders invest in infrastructure, a possible source of direct investment, Chan said. “If they can get there purely on trade and stay away from investment, a touchy subject in both countries, I think that’s probably where they can get their quickest gain,” he said.

China and Vietnam stepped up dialogue after July 2016, when a world arbitration court ruled that Beijing lacked a legal basis to claim more than 90 percent of the sea, a boon to rival claimants in Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. China responded to the ruling by seeking one-on-one dialogue with each country. Vietnam was one of the most hostile toward China before the court ruling.

Beijing and Hanoi dispute sovereignty over much of the 3.5 million-square-kilometer sea, including two chains of tiny islets. Beijing’s go-ahead for a Chinese oil rig in contested waters set off a clash in 2014. The two countries also still face distrust fanned by centuries of political rivalry as well as a border war in 1979.

Both countries stake their fast-growing economies on export manufacturing. Vietnamese companies resent China for using their larger production scales to sell goods in bulk at relatively low prices.

Relations got a lift in September when the Chinese premier and Vietnamese prime minister agreed to manage maritime differences. Vietnamese Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong visited China in January to help smooth relations.

Another boost came as China emerged last year as the top single-country source of tourism for Vietnam. About 2.2 million Chinese visited Vietnam from January to October. Chinese tourists have reshaped the economies of Hong Kong and Taiwan over the past decade.

Agreements on managing disputed tracts of the South China Sea may come later if the two sides keep getting along, experts say.

Vietnam and China have agreed to an “informal” median line in the tract of sea where their claims overlap, said Carl Thayer, Southeast Asia-specialized emeritus professor of politics at The University of New South Wales in Australia. They might eventually work on expanding joint exploration for oil under the seabed and a way to ensure “humane” treatment of fishermen, he said.

“It’s to stop the ramming, boarding, seizing fish catches and radio equipment and in the old days taking them hostages for money,” Thayer said. Under a human treatment agreement, he said, “If you find them, you report them to the other side and return them rather than bash them up and take everything.”
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Saturday after meeting with officials from the world’s other industrialized democracies that he thought they were more at ease with Donald Trump’s economic policies.

“People are more comfortable today, now that they’ve had the opportunity to spend time with me and listen to the president and hear our economic message,” Mnuchin said after a two-day meeting in Bari, Italy, with members of the Group of Seven, industrialized nations commonly known as the G-7.

Officials from the G-7 countries hoped to learn more about the U.S. president’s plans, which they feared would revive protectionist policies and result in a global regression on issues such as banking reform and climate change.

After the meeting, officials from Japan and member European countries remained concerned about the economic shift in Washington, particularly after Mnuchin said the U.S. reserved the right to be protectionist if it thought trade was not free or fair.

“All the six others … said explicitly, and some very directly, to the representatives of the U.S. administration that it is absolutely necessary to continue with the same spirit of international cooperation,” said French Finance Minister Michel Sapin.

Don’t ‘backpedal’ on free trade

Bank of France Governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau said continued uncertainty about U.S. policy could dampen optimism within the G-7 about the global economy’s gradual recovery from the financial crisis that began nearly a decade ago.

De Galhau echoed the sentiments of Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso, who said, “We must not backpedal on free trade, as it has contributed to economic prosperity.”

European officials complained that the U.S. meaning of “fair trade” remained unclear and that the only way to establish fairness was to abide by the multilateral framework developed by the World Trade Organization.

A senior Japanese Finance Ministry official said the most significant question pertained to Trump’s U.S. tax cut proposal that could fuel America’s economic recovery.

Trump has proposed slashing the U.S. corporate income tax rate and offer multinational businesses a steep tax break on overseas profits brought back to the U.S.

The G-7 is composed of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.S.
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A global cyber attack on Friday affected British hospitals, government agencies and companies in 99 countries, with Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan the top targets, security software maker Avast said.

Hacking tools widely believed by researchers to have been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency that were leaked online last month appear to have been leveraged to launch the attacks.

Around 1,000 computers at the Russian Interior Ministry were affected by the cyber attack, a spokeswoman for the ministry told Interfax.

Some of the companies affected:

FedEx Corp

Telefonica SA

Portugal Telecom

Telefonica Argentina
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From the United States and Canada to small islands in Europe and the Caribbean, Chinese are spending billions on new passports and visas to move their families away from their homeland.

China’s middle and upper classes are demanding better schools, cleaner air and a more secure life for their children. And as China gets wealthier, millions of families have the means to purchase a new life elsewhere.

 

Their demand has transformed a once obscure market for immigration by investment. To study China’s impact, the Associated Press collected statistics from 13 countries that offer citizenship or permanent residency for a price.

Here’s a look at AP’s analysis of the market, by the numbers.

China’s favorite programs

Consulting firms in China’s biggest cities hawk investor visa programs in weekly sessions at hotels and on social media. The market leader is the United States, as urban Chinese are widely familiar with American schools and culture.

 

Here are the five countries in the AP’s analysis with the most visas issued to Chinese investors and their families in the last decade:

— 43,448: the United States’ investment visa program, known as EB-5.

— 35,278: Canada’s investment bond programs, including a program offered by the province of Quebec.

— 7,875: Portugal’s “golden visa” program for real estate investors.

 

— 6,405: Hungary’s residence bond program, recently suspended by the government.

— 4,640: Australia’s program for high-dollar “significant investors.”

 

What they buy

Depending on the country, Chinese investors looking for a second home can join business projects, invest in bonds or make an outright payment to the government. Currency conversions are as of May 11.

 

— $250,000: the minimum price of citizenship in Antigua & Barbuda for an investor who donates to the island government’s development fund and pays a $50,000 government fee.

 

— $380,000 (350,000 euro): the minimum value of real estate investors must purchase in Portugal’s “golden visa” program.

 

— $500,000: the minimum business investment in the United States’ EB-5 program, with a “green card” given to investors whose money creates or saves 10 jobs.

 

— $584,000 (800,000 Canadian dollars): the minimum amount of interest-free investment to be made or financed for residence in the Canadian province of Quebec. (Canada closed a similar national program in 2014.)

 

— $3.7 million (5 million Australian dollars): the required investment in Australia’s Significant Investor Visa program in a mix of developing businesses and funds as defined by the government. Australia’s program is by far the most expensive in the AP survey.

 

What they spent

To understand how China has changed the global investor migration market, the AP estimated how much Chinese families have invested at a minimum in foreign countries for a visa or passport. The AP multiplied the number of investors, excluding family members, by the minimum investment level for each year, in each program for the last decade. In some cases, the AP estimated the number of investors with the help of government data or experts on investment migration.  

 

The figures below are an undercount because some investors put in more than what’s required. Investment amounts for each year were converted to U.S. dollars based on the average exchange rate that year. The figures have not been adjusted for inflation.

 

— $7.7 billion: estimated minimum investment in the United States through the EB-5 program.

 

— $6 billion: estimated minimum investment in Australia through its Significant Investor Visa program.

— $4.3 billion: estimated minimum investment in Canada, including Quebec, through its immigrant investor programs.

— $1.96 billion: estimated minimum investment in the United Kingdom through its Tier 1 investor program.

— $1.71 billion: estimated minimum investment in New Zealand through its investor and entrepreneur programs.
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In a move that is likely to give a boost to China’s Belt and Road Forum, the United States has announced that it will participate in meetings on the initiative beginning this weekend in Beijing.

The decision to attend is part of a 100-day plan and new deal between Washington and Beijing that was initially hammered out when President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping met early last month in Florida.

The interagency delegation from Washington will be led by Matthew Pottinger, a top adviser to the Trump administration and National Security Council senior director for East Asia. China is pleased with the decision.

“We welcome all countries to attend. And we welcome the United States’ attendance as the world’s largest economy in the relevant activities of the Belt and Road initiative,” said Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao.

Fact and fiction

China has long been playing up the global benefits of its ambitious trade project, but analysts note that the plan is opaque and vague. Besides, the economic benefits for developed nations such as the United States are still unclear.

For many, the project still seems largely China-centric. It boasts six economic corridors, all of which are to enhance links with China through connectivity and trade infrastructure. Those include connections between China and Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

“It’s about making China great again — in Trumpian terms — and making China great on the international stage,” said Tom Miller, author of China’s Asian Dream: Empire Building Along the New Silk Road.

Domestically, China’s leaders present the project as part of their attempt at the grand rejuvenation of the Chinese people. Internationally, Beijing is trying to convince the world that it is a cooperative win-win plan that will equally benefit all participants.

So far the response has been mixed, but Beijing hopes that its forum on Sunday and Monday, which will include heads of state from 29 countries and official delegations from several other countries, will bring more clarity.

For starters, there is no official map of the grand plan, and the scope of the project continues to balloon. Beijing is entirely in the driver’s seat and the direction of the initiative is fuzzy at best, analysts said.

“What actually gets built will depend on what deals Chinese companies make with other countries abroad or on the deals that Chinese government makes with other governments abroad, and no one knows exactly what those are going to be,” Miller said.

Bumps on China road

There are also the geopolitical implications of the project.

Many developing countries along the route will obviously welcome and be eager and open to receive Chinese investment, infrastructure and development, said Paul Haenle, director of the Beijing-based Tsinghua-Carnegie Center for Global Policy.

In addition to communicating with developing countries, China needs to proactively engage with developed nations such as the United States and others as well.

China “should explain fully what the objectives are for the initiatives,” Hanele says. “And if it doesn’t do a very good job, I think then China risks these nations projecting their worst fears onto the Belt and Road initiative.”

While China-backed infrastructure projects could bring many benefits to developing countries, they could also make them reliant on Beijing’s largesse.

“The more power that China gains economically, [the more] it will have a geopolitical impact,” Miller said. “And in that sense, you can say that it does equate to a double win for China.”

Critical eye

Having developed countries such as the United States, Germany and Britain participate in the meeting could help make it more transparent.

Other developed European countries and the United States are right to look at Chinese behavior that is opaque and poorly defined with a critical eye, Haenle said.

He added Washington’s decision to attend and not shun the gathering, as it did during China’s formation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) two years ago, is a better approach.

The United States would do well “to ask about what the rules will be and what the purpose is behind this, but at the end of the day, the U.S. should not have a hostile attitude,” Haenle said.

Friday’s last-minute announcement has raised questions about whether the United States may reverse former President Barack Obama’s decision to stay away from the AIIB and join. The bank is hosting a special press conference on Saturday to announce new members.
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Like thousands of other small-business entrepreneurs in India, Charanjit Yadav saw his sales of generator sets and batteries plummet in the weeks after the government’s surprising move to scrap 86 percent of the country’s currency last November.

Six months on, as business booms, Yadav only recalls the currency ban when he looks at the crisp new notes that have replaced the old ones. “Everything is back to normal. It is absolutely OK for my work,” he said, glancing at the orders placed on another busy day.

But less than a kilometer from the bustling market where his shop is located in the business hub of Gurugram, near New Delhi, the massive cash crunch that India faced for more than two months has left its mark.

Braving sizzling summer temperatures of 44 degrees C (111 degrees F), a group of construction laborers had waited since dawn at a junction where contractors normally come to hire daily wage workers.

Fewer opportunities

Dhani Ram left for his village in January after work dwindled as cash shortages stopped many real estate projects. He returned a month ago, hoping that finding work would be easier. That has not happened.

“I hardly get work for 15 days in a month,” he said. “Earlier, I used to get work for about 25 days a month.”

Unable to eke out a living from his tiny farm in Uttar Pradesh state, Gajinder Singh and 11 others in his village came to the city with a contractor who promised them work. But after four days, he had not been placed anywhere.

“I sleep at night under the rail station, I don’t know what to do,” he said in despair.

Six months after India’s fast-growing economy was disrupted by the radical currency ban, growth is back on track in most sectors and stock markets are surging. But many poor people still scramble to find work as the country’s vast informal sector continues to struggle.  

Growth last year is estimated to have been around 7 percent — less than the 7.9 percent recorded in the previous year, but not as severely dented as many economists had feared. Indian officials say these numbers give the lie to grim warnings that the drastic move, meant to flush out untaxed money, would put a grinding brake on the economy.   

“It was clearly not doomsday. Looks like it was a blip, a banknote blip,” said chief economist D.K. Joshi at Crisil research and consultancy in Mumbai.

Auto sales jump

Many indicators support that. Automobile sales have jumped in recent months as serpentine lines outside banks to exchange old notes vanished. Automakers have lined up new launches as shoppers again open their purses.

Projections that the economy is poised for stronger growth has led stock markets to hit a record high in the past week. The rally has drawn tens of thousands of new middle-class investors into the market amid optimism that growth is rebounding.

Economists say most sectors of the economy are back to normal except those that depend heavily on cash transactions, such as real estate.

N.R. Bhanumurthy at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy in New Delhi said it would take more time to assess the full impact of the currency ban on the economy. But he said he was optimistic it did not erode confidence as was widely feared.

He pointed to India’s strengthening currency — the rupee is at a nearly two-year high and has gained about 5 percent against the dollar in recent months.

“While other currencies in the world are depreciating because of the strengthening of the U.S. dollar, ours is the only major currency that is appreciating. So that shows that the foreign investor seems to be betting heavily on the Indian growth story,” he said.

‘Devastating’ for many

However, while it is largely business as usual for the middle class and formal sectors, economists say the impact on tens of millions of people who depend on the informal sector — hawkers, vegetable sellers and laborers in cities and small farmers in remote villages — has been much harder. India’s informal sector accounts for 40 percent of gross domestic product but employs as much as 75 percent of the country’s workforce.

Calling the move “devastating” for the informal sector, economist Kaushik Basu wrote this week in the Indian Express newspaper that “the brunt of the pain of demonetization has been shouldered by the poor and the lower middle class.”

While the full impact on them may not yet have been reflected in statistics, the mood of despondency among those waiting for work in Gurugram gave support to such assessments.
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Apple says it will give $200 million to Corning Inc. so it can invest in a Kentucky plant that makes glass screens for iPhones and iPads.

The California-based company says the money will come from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund. It has pledged to spend $1 billion on US-based companies to create “innovative production and highly skilled jobs.”

Corning has had a facility in Harrodsburg for 65 years. The company has collaborated with Apple for the past 10 years by making scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass for Apple’s products. The companies say their partnership has sustained 1,000 jobs, including 400 in Harrodsburg.

Apple Chief Operating Officer Jeff Williams, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks, and U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell are scheduled to formally announce the spending during a 2 p.m. news conference in Harrodsburg.
…

U.S. consumers bought more cars and hardware, and stepped up online purchases in April, after two months of sluggish sales.

Friday’s report from the Commerce Department says retail sales rose four-tenths of a percentage point in April, and sales were a bit better than first reported the previous month.

The data show even stronger growth for online retailers, while sales at traditional “bricks and mortar” stores sagged half a percentage point.

Investors and economists watch retail sales closely because consumer demand drives more than two-thirds of economic activity in the United States, which is the world’s largest economy.

A separate study by the Labor Department shows U.S. inflation rose 2.2 percent in the year ending in April, with a gain of two-tenths of a percent for the month. Some analysts say that makes it likely that the U.S. central bank will raise interest rates slightly at their next scheduled meeting in June.

The Federal Reserve is supposed to promote stable prices and full employment. When inflation threatens to rise a modest level, they may raise interest rates to cool economic activity and keep prices from rising so fast they disrupt economic growth.
…

A sweeping trade agreement, ranging from banking to beef, has been reached between Washington and Beijing, the U.S. Commerce Department announced on Thursday.

“It was pretty much a Herculean accomplishment to get this done,” said U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. “This is more than has been done in the whole history of U.S.-China relations on trade.”

The breakthrough results from an agreement U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping made during their meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, on April 6.

Trump “was briefed more or less every single day” as negotiations progressed since then, Ross said.

Beef imports

Following one more round of “technical consultations,” China has agreed to allow U.S. beef imports no later than July 16, consistent with international food and animal safety standards, Ross told reporters at the White House.

The United States Cattlemen’s Association applauded the agreement, saying market access to China is crucial for its members.

“Success in this arena will drive the U.S. cattle market and increase demand for U.S. beef” in China, association president Kenny Graner told VOA.

In exchange, Washington and Beijing are to resolve outstanding issues that would allow imports to the U.S. of cooked poultry from China “as soon as possible,” according to the Commerce Department.

Another significant breakthrough will see American liquefied natural gas (LNG) going to China. Under the agreement Chinese companies will be permitted “at any time to negotiate all types of contractual arrangement with U.S. LNG exporters, including long term contracts,” according to the Commerce Department.

This is “a very big change,” said Ross, noting China is trying to wean itself off coal at a time “it doesn’t produce enough natural gas to meet its needs.”

Financial, other business services

Among other action listed in the 100-Day Action Plan:

* China is to allow, by July 16, “wholly foreign-owned financial services firms” to provide credit ratings services and to begin licensing procedures for credit investigation.

* U.S.-owned suppliers of electronic payment services (EPS) will be able to apply for licensing in China under new guidelines.

* China is to issue bond underwriting and settlement licenses to two qualified U.S. financial institutions by July 16.

* China’s National Biosafety Committee is to meet by the end of this month to conduct science-based evaluations of all eight pending U.S. biotechnology product applications “to assess the safety of the products for their intended use.” Those that pass the tests are to get certificates within 20 working days.

The outcome of the joint dialogue will also see a United States delegation attending China’s Belt and Road Forum in Beijing next week.

A U.S.-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue will be held this summer, according to the Commerce Department, to deepen engagement on these and other issues.

“There are probably 500 items you could potentially discuss” in the wider one-year plan for bilateral trade, Ross added.
…

Kongkaew Vonusak smiles when he recalls the arrival of Chinese investors in his tranquil village in northern Laos in 2014. With them came easy money, he said.

The Chinese offered villagers up to $720 per hectare to rent their land, much of it fallow for years, said Kongkaew, 59, the village chief. They wanted to grow bananas on it.

In impoverished Laos, the offer was generous. “They told us the price and asked us if we were happy. We said okay.”

Elsewhere, riverside land with good access roads fetched at least double that sum.

Three years later, the Chinese-driven banana boom has left few locals untouched, but not everyone is smiling.

Experts say the Chinese have brought jobs and higher wages to northern Laos, but have also drenched plantations with pesticides and other chemicals.

Last year, the Lao government banned the opening of new banana plantations after a state-backed institute reported that the intensive use of chemicals had sickened workers and polluted water sources.

China has extolled the benefits of its vision of a modern-day “Silk Road” linking it to the rest of the world – it holds a major summit in Beijing on May 14-15 to promote it.

The banana boom pre-dated the concept, which was announced in 2013, although China now regards agricultural developments in Laos as among the initiative’s projects.

Under the “Belt and Road” plan, China has sought to persuade neighbors to open their markets to Chinese investors. For villagers like Kongkaew, that meant a trade-off.

“Chinese investment has given us a better quality of life. We eat better, we live better,” Kongkaew said.

But neither he nor his neighbors will work on the plantations, or venture near them during spraying. They have stopped fishing in the nearby river, fearing it is polluted by chemical run-off from the nearby banana plantation.

Chinese frustration

Several Chinese plantation owners and managers expressed frustration at the government ban, which forbids them from growing bananas after their leases expire.

They said the use of chemicals was necessary, and disagreed that workers were falling ill because of them.

“If you want to farm, you have to use fertilizers and pesticides,” said Wu Yaqiang, a site manager at a plantation owned by Jiangong Agriculture, one of the largest Chinese banana growers in Laos.

“If we don’t come here to develop, this place would just be bare mountains,” he added, as he watched workers carrying 30-kg bunches of bananas up steep hillsides to a rudimentary packing station.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was not aware of the specific issues surrounding Chinese banana growers in Laos, and did not believe they should be linked directly to the Belt and Road initiative.

“In principle we always require Chinese companies, when investing and operating abroad, to comply with local laws and regulations, fulfil their social responsibility and protect the local environment,” he told a regular briefing on Thursday.

Laos’ Ministry of Agriculture did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment for this article.

China is the biggest foreign investor in Laos, a landlocked country of 6.5 million people, with over 760 projects valued at about $6.7 billion, according to Chinese state-run media.

This influence is not only keenly felt in the capital Vientiane, where Chinese build shopping complexes and run some of the city’s fanciest hotels. It also extends deep into rural areas that have remained largely unchanged for decades.

Banana rush

Lao people say Chinese banana investors began streaming across the border around 2010, driven by land shortages at home.

Many headed to Bokeo, the country’s smallest and least populous province.

In the ensuing years, Lao banana exports jumped ten-fold to become the country’s largest export earner. Nearly all of the fruit is sent to China.

For ethnic Lao like Kongkaew, Chinese planters paid them more for the land than they could earn from farming it.

For impoverished, hill-dwelling minorities such as the Hmong or Khmu, the banana rush meant better wages.

At harvest time, they can earn the equivalent of at least $10 a day and sometimes double that, a princely sum in a country where the average annual income was $1,740 in 2015, according to the World Bank.

They are also most exposed to the chemicals.

Most Chinese planters grow the Cavendish variety of banana which is favoured by consumers but susceptible to disease.

Hmong and Khmu workers douse the growing plants with pesticides and kill weeds with herbicides such as paraquat. Paraquat is banned by the European Union and other countries including Laos, and it has been phased out in China.

The bananas are also dunked in fungicides to preserve them for their journey to China.

Switching crops

Some banana workers grow weak and thin or develop rashes, said Phonesai Manivongxai, director of the Community Association for Mobilizing Knowledge in Development (CAMKID), a non-profit group based in northern Laos.

Part of CAMKID’s work includes educating workers about the dangers of chemical use. “All we can do is make them more aware,” she said.

This is an uphill struggle. Most pesticides come from China or Thailand and bear instructions and warnings in those countries’ languages, Reuters learned. Even if the labeling was Lao, some Hmong and Khmu are illiterate and can’t understand it.

Another problem, said Phonesai, was that workers lived in close proximity to the chemicals, which contaminated the water they wash in or drink.

In a Lao market, Reuters found Thai-made paraquat openly on sale.

However, some workers Reuters spoke to said they accepted the trade-off. While they were concerned about chemicals, higher wages allowed them to send children to school or afford better food.

There is no guarantee the government’s crackdown on pesticide use in banana production will lead to potentially harmful chemicals being phased out altogether.

As banana prices fell following a surge in output, some Chinese investors began to plant other crops on the land, including chemically intensive ones like watermelon.

Zhang Jianjun, 46, co-owner of the Lei Lin banana plantation, estimated that as much as 20 percent of Bokeo’s banana plantations had been cleared, and said some of his competitors had decamped to Myanmar and Cambodia.

But he has no plans to leave. The environmental impact on Laos was a “road that every underdeveloped country must walk” and local people should thank the Chinese, he said.

“They don’t think, ‘Why have our lives improved?’ They think it’s something that heaven has given them, that life just naturally gets better.”
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Ideas were flying at a brainstorming session to create a slogan for a group of North Carolina Democrats when Catherine Cloud blurted out a phrase that made a colleague’s eyes light up: “Because this is America.”

The words were quickly scrawled on a notepad, and the New Hanover County Democratic Party in Wilmington began its scramble to own the phrase. It applied days later for a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

From President Donald Trump’s dash to own “Keep America Great” for his 2020 re-election campaign — even before he took office — to a rush by a foundation for the victims of the September 11 attacks to claim “Let’s Roll” just days after New York’s Twin Towers were reduced to rubble, Americans are rushing to trademark catchy phrases.

There were 391,837 trademark applications filed last year, with the number growing an average of 5 percent annually, government reports show. The USPTO does not break out how many of those applications were for phrases.

‘That’s Hot’

The surge is the result of headline-grabbing cases like socialite Paris Hilton’s winning settlement of a lawsuit over her trademarked catchphrase “That’s Hot” from her former television reality show, said trademark attorney Howard Hogan of Washington.

“It can’t help but inspire others,” Hogan said. “It feels good to get recognition of something you feel you have created.”

Trademarks can mean cash from everything from bumper stickers to thongs printed with the protected phrase. More important for some, however, is claiming ownership of a powerful message.

” ‘Because this is America’ is a rallying cry that focuses on what we have in common, rather than what divides us,” Cloud said.

The phrase is the tagline in a commercial that was set for online release Thursday about the New Hanover Democrats’ key issues: “Clean water. Because this is America,” “Quality education for every child. Because this is America,” and “No matter your ethnicity, you are welcome here. Because this is America.”

Mindful that the slogan that could easily be employed by rival Republicans, the county Democratic committee filed to trademark it just 18 days after Cloud said it.

Trump looks ahead

Two days before Trump’s inauguration on January 20, Donald J. Trump for President Inc. applied to trademark the phrase he said he intends to use for his 2020 re-election campaign: “Keep America Great,” both with and without an exclamation point. The campaign committee already owns the trademark for Trump’s 2016 slogan: “Make America Great Again.”

Just 15 days after Todd Beamer inspired fellow airline passengers to overwhelm hijackers above a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, the Todd M. Beamer Memorial Foundation applied to trademark his rallying cry, “Let’s Roll.”

Three days after “Nasty Woman” grabbed headlines when Trump used it to describe his opponent Hillary Clinton in an October 19, 2016, debate, entrepreneurs across America started filing trademark applications for the phrase. There are at least 11 applications pending to trademark “Nasty Woman” for the sale of products as wide-ranging as pillows, wine, firearms, scented body spray, mugs, backpacks and jewelry.

Typically it takes about 18 months for the Patent Office to grant a trademark.

But it can take much longer, as cartoonist Bob Mankoff of The New Yorker learned when he tried to trademark the caption to a 1993 cartoon. Two decades passed before he was allowed to register it on January 19, 2016.

Ironically, the phrase aptly describes Mankoff’s anticipated payday from the sale of merchandise, bearing the words that first appeared under his cartoon of a businessman trying to schedule a meeting: “How about never — is never good for you?”
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The head of the U.S. Small Business Administration urged American businessmen and entrepreneurs to enter the global market, telling the United Nations on Thursday that just 1 percent of small businesses are currently exporting overseas.

Linda McMahon said the nearly 29 million small businesses in America “are the engine of our economy” and create two out of three new jobs — but she stressed that exporting is a key component of small business growth.

“Businesses that export are less likely to go out of business and more likely to grow faster,” she told the Small Business Knowledge Summit.

“That’s because 96 percent of all of the world’s consumers and over three-quarters of the world’s purchasing power are outside of the United States,” she said. “Yet right now, only 1 percent of all of America’s small businesses are exporters.”

McMahon conceded that becoming an exporter, especially for small businesses, isn’t easy.

“Small businesses are challenged by access to information, capital and barriers to market entry,” she told several hundred government and business officials and diplomats at the summit organized by the International Council for Small Business.

McMahon said the Trump administration and her agency are committed to ensuring equal access for small businesses to international markets, expanding export opportunities, and reducing or eliminating “trade and investment barriers that disproportionately impact small businesses.”

She said small businesses are hardest hit trying to finance trade deals and by compliance challenges.

“Globally over half of all declined trade finance requests to banks were submitted by small businesses,” McMahon said. “In the United States, over one-third of all of our small businesses find trade finance hard to obtain for foreign sales.”

She said the Small Business Administration works with banks to try to address this challenge and find “tailored, trade finance products” so that small businesses can finance foreign growth when the private sector is unable or unwilling to provide loans.
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The sister of White House adviser Jared Kushner won’t be attending an investor conference in China this weekend as reported after she was criticized for trying to raise money there last weekend, using the lure of a U.S. visa program.

Nicole Kushner Meyer, who had been representing her family’s company in China, came under fire for what critics said was an attempt to attract investors using the family’s ties to the White House.

Meyer mentioned her brother at a conference in Beijing on Saturday. Marketing materials for the event also promoted her as Jared’s sister and cited the Kushner family’s “celebrity” status.

The family real estate company, Kushner Cos., later apologized. It said Meyer had not meant to attract investors by using her brother’s name.

The Kushner Cos. said Thursday that no representative would be attending conferences in China this weekend. The Washington Post earlier reported that a Chinese website had listed Meyer as planning to attend an event in Shenzhen on Saturday.

The family company is trying to raise money to help build a 79-story apartment building in Jersey City, New Jersey, called One Journal Square. The company is seeking 300 wealthy Chinese to invest a total of $150 million.

Anchor tenant bows out

The building is facing difficulty. Office-sharing company WeWork confirmed this week that it was canceling plans to lease space as an anchor tenant. And the Jersey City mayor recently came out against awarding a valuable tax break for the building.

The EB-5 visa program offers a path to citizenship for wealthy investors willing to put at least $500,000 in rural areas or places with high unemployment in the United States. After as little as two years, participants can then apply for a fast-track green card and later U.S. citizenship.

The Kushner Cos. has used the program to finance other projects, including another building in Jersey City. That one, Trump Bay Street, is in a licensing deal with President Donald Trump’s company.

Jared Kushner, who stepped down as CEO of Kushner Cos. to assume his White House role, is married to Trump daughter and White House adviser Ivanka Trump.

Critics say the EB-5 program has not helped the downtrodden areas of the country enough and has become a way for developers to essentially sell visas in exchange cheap financing.

At a press briefing earlier this week, White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Jared Kushner had no involvement in the One Journal Square project. An attorney for Jared Kushner said he had sold his stake to a trust benefiting other members of the Kushner family and would recuse himself from related policy matters while serving as an adviser to Trump.
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Iraq and Algeria support the extension of oil production cuts by OPEC and non-OPEC producers through the end of the year to try to boost prices, they said in a joint statement Thursday.

The oil ministers of the two countries held a press conference in Baghdad where Iraqi Oil Minister Jabar Ali al-Luaibi said “there might be new ideas to be presented” at an OPEC meeting on May 25, without providing further details.

In late November, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed to cut production by 1.2 million barrels a day, the first such reduction agreement since 2008. The following month, 11 non-OPEC oil-producing countries pledged to cut an additional 558,000 barrels a day, reaching an overall reduction of 1.8 million.

In March, OPEC announced the possibility that such cuts would be extended.

Iraq – OPEC’s second-largest producer and a country that relies on oil revenues for nearly 95 percent of its budget – committed to reduce daily production by 210,000 barrels to 4.351 million.

News of a possible extension of the OPEC cuts and reports that U.S. crude stockpiles have dropped by 5.2 million barrels last week slightly boosted worldwide oil prices.

Crude oil sold for over $100 a barrel in the summer of 2014, before bottoming out below $30 a barrel in January 2016. Brent Crude, used to price international oils, now trades at around $50 a barrel in London.
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Uber is launching its private ride-hailing service in the Myanmar commercial capital of Yangon on Thursday, aiming to tap into one of the world’s youngest and fastest-growing online markets.

The launch follows Singapore-based GrabTaxi’s debut by about two months.

Uber is one of the world’s largest on-demand transportation platforms. It is seeking an alliance with the government to smooth acceptance of the use of private vehicles for commercial transport.

A taxi ride in Myanmar usually involves negotiating prices, no use of meters and a lack of air conditioning or seat belts. Using a ride-hailing app is still a relatively new concept, though the practice has been gaining in popularity.

Local travel services start-up Oway and Hello Cabs, a rival service run by a construction and auto dealership tycoon, also provide ride-hailing services. 

“I definitely want to try Uber,” said Nyan Zay Htet, 26, a company worker who was haggling with a driver over a fare on a downtown street in Yangon. “I welcome having international companies come in because it can be more convenient for us if we don’t have to bargain over prices and can just hop in and go.”

More than two-thirds of Southeast Asians are younger than 40 and the number going online to buy goods and services is soaring. A recent research report by Google and the Singaporean investment arm Temasek put the potential ride-sharing market in six larger regional markets at $13 billion by 2025, up from $2.5 billion in 2015.

With more than 50 million people, Myanmar is growing fast and its public transport networks are not keeping up. Taxis are plentiful in Yangon, with local media reporting authorities estimate there are more than 50,000 on the city’s jammed roads. The industry is something of a free-for-all, with non-licensed drivers turning their cars into taxis as they please. But the government has said it intends to crack down on that.

Incomes for most people are still low, so price competition may be key.

An online Uber fare estimator put the base fare in Yangon at 1,500 kyats (pronounced chuts) ($1.09) with a minimum charge of 1,800 kyats ($1.31).

Uber has faced trouble from regulators in various markets, including China, France, Spain and Mexico. But generally they target services transporting paying customers using private vehicles that are not registered for public transport, not ride-hailing that uses smartphone apps to call licensed taxis.
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Housing foreclosure activity in the United States dropped to the lowest level since 2005 last month, according to a business research group.

ATTOM Data Solutions tracks default notices, auctions and bank repossessions across the nation and says the number of actions dropped 23 percent from a year ago. That means more than 77,000 homeowners missed payments, and banks took some kind of action to encourage the repayment of their loans.

Severe problems in the U.S. housing market, and sales of securities backed by sometimes-faulty mortgages, played a key role in the financial crisis, which is one reason that investors and economists watch the housing market closely.

Seattle, a city in the Pacific Northwest state of Washington, did the best in this study, with the number of foreclosure notices dropping 38 percent from the same time a year ago. Atlantic City, New Jersey, had the worst foreclosure problem in this study, with one out of every 237 housing units getting a notice of some kind.
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China’s President Xi Jinping initiated the ambitious Belt and Road development plan but it has become a world plan not tied to his presidency, the Commerce Ministry said Wednesday, days before Xi hosts a global forum on the initiative.

The forum in Beijing next week will draw heads of state to discuss Xi’s plan to expand trade links between Asia, Africa and Europe through billions of dollars in infrastructure investment.

Representatives from more than 100 countries will attend China’s biggest diplomatic event of the year, though only one leader from the Group of Seven (G7) industrialized nations, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, is set to join.

China says that between 2014 and 2016, its businesses signed projects worth $304.9 billion along inland and maritime corridors of the plan, also known as the New Silk Road. But some of the projects could be in development for years.

Judging by recent precedent in China’s political system, Xi is slated to step down from the presidency in early 2023 at the end of his second five-year term.

Asked what guarantee the world had that the initiative would go on after Xi’s second term, Vice Minister of Commerce Qian Keming told a news briefing that its vitality lay in countries’ hopes for development and not in the idea of “who proposed it or what term in office there is later.”

“The Belt and Road initiative was proposed by President Xi in 2013, but this initiative is not an individual proposal, or merely left at a proposal level. Rather it is an initiative that has been widely received by the whole world. It is jointly owned by everyone,” Qian said.

China has repeatedly rebuffed concern that the plan is part of a grand strategy to expand its economic interests for selfish gain and to seek global dominance, saying that anyone can join the plan to boost common prosperity.

Xi has used the initiative to help portray China as an open economy, distinct from a rising wave of global protectionism.

However, the government has faced criticism from foreign business groups and governments alike, who say it has done little to remove discriminatory policies and market barriers that favor Chinese companies.

Foreign business groups have questioned whether multinational companies would be able to compete with Chinese firms through the plan in transparent bidding processes.

Zhang Xingfu, an official from the Commerce Ministry’s cooperation department, played down such concerns.

“Chinese enterprises conducting investment and cooperative business in countries along the Belt and Road initiative will … actively participate in project bidding, and cooperate and compete with international enterprises in the same industries on the same platform,” Zhang said.
…

Analysts at a liberal research institution in Washington say U.S. employers are stealing $15 billion a year from workers by failing to pay legally required minimum wages.

The Economic Policy Institute says the wage theft hits nearly one-fifth of low wage workers in the 10 largest U.S. states. The study’s authors say affected workers lose an average of $64 a week, or $3,300 a year out of their modest salaries.

Young people, women, minorities and immigrants are often stuck in low-level jobs and thus are most likely to be affected by wage theft. EPI says the shortfall obviously hurts workers, but also slows demand for goods and services, which can crimp economic growth.

On Thursday, government officials will look at the job market from a different angle, when the weekly jobless claims are published.  Economists track the number of Americans who sign up for unemployment assistance to gauge the health of the market.

A survey of economists shows most experts expect the number of such layoffs to rise slightly but still remain at a relatively low level consistent with a strong job market. A separate study produces the U.S. unemployment rate, which was just 4.4 percent in April, less than half the rate during the worst of the recession. Some analysts say with fewer unemployed workers seeking jobs, employers may have to boost wages to attract and keep staff members.  

Higher wages could contribute to inflation, and so could rising prices of imports, including oil. Friday, officials will report the latest data on price changes at the retail level with the Consumer Price Index. Experts predict the study will show inflation rose about 2 percent over the past year, a moderate level.  

U.S. central bank officials are supposed to guide the economy in ways that keep prices stable and unemployment low. They try to cool inflation by raising interest rates, but do so cautiously to avoid stalling the economy and hurting job growth. That is why experts quoted in the financial press say the Federal Reserve will raise rates again, slightly, at their June meeting.
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Yemen’s planning minister says 60 percent of the country’s population is in dire poverty more than two years since the Shi’ite rebels forced the country’s internationally recognized government and president out of the capital.

 

Mohamed El-Saadi says 22 million Yemenis are in need of humanitarian relief, a figure that exceeds the U.N.’s recent estimate that 19.8 million in Yemen need assistance.

El-Saadi spoke during a meeting on Wednesday in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, attended by the Gulf Cooperation Council and international organizations.

 

He warned that the “general security, political and humanitarian situation has witnessed an unprecedented decline.”

 

A Saudi-led coalition has been battling Yemen’s Houthi rebels March 2015. The war has killed more than 10,000 civilians and pushed a large portion of the population to the brink of famine.

 
…

In August, 2014, planners in the northeastern Chinese city of Hunchun argued in state media that it should be included in the “One Belt, One Road” project, Beijing’s vision laid out the previous year of a new Silk Road across Asia to Europe.

In 2015, the official Xinhua news agency ran stories about how Hunchun was accelerating its “OBOR” plans, and early in 2016, China’s cabinet released a list of Chinese cities included in “OBOR:” Hunchun was on the map.

The fact that the list came about slowly, and that some cities felt moved to lobby to be included, underlines how the pet project of Chinese President Xi Jinping is as amorphous as it is ambitious.

The challenge of defining exactly what OBOR means will come to the fore later this month, when heads of state and senior officials from around the world gather in Beijing for the first major summit dedicated to the project.

“Frankly, I don’t really know what the belt and the road are. The reason being that I think Beijing doesn’t know either,” said Tom Miller of Gavekal Dragonomics, who recently wrote a book on the New Silk Road.

Reality is complicated

In theory, incentives for cities, companies and countries to be involved are strong: hundreds of billions of dollars are expected to be spent on roads, railways, pipelines, ports and industrial zones stretching from Sri Lanka to Djibouti.

But as Hunchun shows, the reality of OBOR can be complicated and requires buy-in from other countries.

The city’s position at the apex of Russia, North Korea and China is a blessing and a curse. While Russia is gradually opening up to more trade, North Korea has stalled.

Tantalizingly close to the sea but without a sea port after Russia’s annexation in 1860, local businesses said they wanted to ship more goods via Rason, a nearby North Korean port earmarked as an export hub to China, Japan, South Korea and beyond.

That would open a shipping route to southern China, but with sanctions in place against Pyongyang, global tensions rising over its arms programme and Rason developing slowly, expectations of progress are low.

“We currently transport goods by rail to southern China. We’d like to ship from Rason, but at present that’s not happening,” said Wang Hai, general manager of Guanghai Import and Export Trading Company in Hunchun, a small firm with 12 staff, both Chinese and Russian. “Hunchun is a hub for northeast Asia, so in theory it should play a big role in ‘One Belt, One Road,’ but for now it hasn’t been able to get its act together.”

Russia more promising?

North Korea remains largely shut to the outside world, and China, while remaining its main economic and diplomatic backer, has signed up for tough U.N. sanctions against it.

But China said on Tuesday that North Korea would be sending a delegation to the upcoming OBOR summit.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will also attend, reflecting his country’s importance in China’s OBOR strategy; in Hunchun, some enterprises are already seeing benefits from mutual trade.

Xingyang Seafood, for example, imports 90 percent of its seafood from Russia and 10 percent from North Korea, said chairman Zhao Yang.

“The main advantage of being in Hunchun is that we are close to Russia,” Yang told Reuters. The company is headquartered in northern China’s Shandong province, but in 2015 it opened a branch in Hunchun to exploit its proximity to Russia.

“How does North Korea help us? It doesn’t help us at all, they have hardly any seafood left there.”

Trade with Russia

Hunchun’s spokesman Hao Qiang declined to comment about the city’s relationship with North Korea, because of the “current political situation,” and would not say how many North Koreans were working in the city. “But we can talk about Hunchun’s trade with Russia, the city’s clean air and successful tree-planting initiatives,” he said.

In addition to oil and gas export opportunities between Russia and China, Putin has spoken of roads and bridges being built to strengthen links.

Russia has struggled, however, to lure enough people to sparsely populated regions bordering China’s northeast, and there are concerns among Russians of creeping colonization if too much land is leased to the Chinese.

“They [Chinese] will live there, their relatives will come, they will deepen their roots there, they will take Russian women as wives,” firebrand opposition politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky said in 2015, when proposals to lease Russian land to Chinese farmers were put forward. “We will only have problems. I see no advantages.”

For Hunchun, OBOR is the latest in a series of development programs aimed at revitalizing Jilin province and China’s northeast.

Benefits of investments are clear

In the 1990s, the United Nations backed the Tumen River Area Development Project, which became the Greater Tumen Initiative linking China, Mongolia, South Korea and Russia.

The benefits of large-scale state investment are clear. From 25th place among smaller cities in Jilin in terms of economic growth, Hunchun now stands third. Foreign trade has doubled since 2011, according to city statistics.

Whether OBOR can add value over the longer term is uncertain, Peter Cai wrote in a report for the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank.

“If the Chinese government fails to connect its domestic projects with overseas components, OBOR will be little different from other domestic infrastructure programs, greatly diminishing its economic and strategic value.”
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