Despite His Tough Talk on Trade Donald Trump Still Has Lots of Face at This Chinese Factory
"What will Trump mean for South East Asia?"
Hannah Beech / Shenzhen @hkbeech
Jan. 15, 2017
Trump has vowed to slap hefty tariffs on Chinese imports when he assumes the American presidency, but workers at one Chinese factory aren't worried about a potential trade war with the U.S.
[You Tube for embed, bit longer]
Seven days a week — 10 hours a day, if she’s doing overtime — Huang Liyan spends her time with her fingers up Donald Trump’s nose. Occasionally, she arranges his orange hair. Then she plucks skin tags from his slightly less orange face.
Huang is one of 30 workers manufacturing a best-seller from the bowels of a southern Chinese workshop: latex masks .. http://time.com/4349301/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-mask-china/ .. of U.S. President-elect Trump. Her employer, Molezu Co., which operates in the factory hub of Shenzhen, also makes Halloween-ready rubber cadavers and bloodied limbs. But Trump is Molezu’s top product. So far, the company has sold 200,000 Trump masks, mostly to customers in the West, for $9.50 each.
Every day, Molezu employees lug buckets of liquid latex and pour the viscous, white slop into molds of inside-out Donald Trump faces. After the masks take shape, they are peeled out and placed on drying racks. Workers then apply layers of orange spray-paint before polishers like Huang trim imperfections. Sometimes, like when reporters from TIME come nosing about, the factory hands wear thin masks. But mostly they breathe in the latex and paint fumes. Exhaust fans in the wall remain idle; electricity is expensive. Workers are paid more than $400 a month, not bad for a factory job in southern China.
Trump — the man, not the mask — has vowed to slap hefty tariffs .. http://time.com/4385989/donald-trump-trade-china-speech/ .. on Chinese imports when he assumes the American presidency. He has said he will label China a currency manipulator on his first day in office. Unlike other successful presidential candidates, who dialed down their tough trade talk .. http://time.com/4591500/donald-trump-tariffs-congress-republicans/ .. after the polls, Trump has appointed economist Peter Navarro .. http://time.com/4440711/donald-trump-economic-advisors/ , author of a book called Death By China, as the head of a new White House National Trade Council. “China is both the biggest trade cheater in the world and that country with which the U.S. runs its largest trade deficit,” went a Trump campaign white paper Navarro co-wrote. “The elaborate web of unfair trade practices includes illegal export subsidies, the theft of intellectual property, the aforementioned currency manipulation, forced technology transfers and a widespread reliance upon both ‘sweat shop’ labor and pollution havens.”
At the Molezu factory — a sweatshop and pollution haven by some standards — workers I speak to aren’t worried that a trade war .. http://time.com/money/4564190/trump-trade-war-tariffs/ .. could slow their production line. Mostly, they are intrigued by Trump’s reputation as a successful businessman. “As a rich guy himself, Trump will make the American people rich,” says Fan Zhenzhu, as he wields a paint spray-gun. “I know Trump will focus on the economy and bring jobs back to the U.S. But it won’t affect us. China is a big country, and we have huge consumption power of our own.”
Inside the Chinese Factory That's Already Sold 500,000 Trump and Clinton Masks
A worker checks a mask of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at Jinhua Partytime Latex Art and Crafts Factory in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China, May 25, 2016. 1 of 10
For Huang, an elementary-school graduate who lives in a cramped dorm room with three other factory workers, politics don’t enter her mental calculation. “I don’t know who the president of China is,” she says, snipping off bits of excess latex from Trump’s face. “I don’t watch the news.” Factory work is harder to get in southern China’s Guangdong Province these days, as China’s economy cools. Huang is grateful for her $430-a-month salary, even if she only sees her six-year-old daughter once a year during Chinese New Year.
Yet worker discontent is also rising in China, as income inequality yawns and housing grows increasingly unaffordable in the big cities. Labor protests have proliferated. China’s economic weight is shifting from manufacturing to services. As factories decelerate, part of China’s “floating population” — roughly 275 million internal migrants who have traded rural lives for urban hustle — has had no choice but to return home to fallow land. Some manufacturing jobs have even fled to lower-cost parts of Asia. It’s precisely the kind of labor exodus that troubles many Trump supporters in America.
Still, the enterprise and ambition of Chinese workers, who have powered what is now the world’s second-largest economy, have not changed. Xu Sumei is Molezu’s production manager in charge of churning out 3,000 masks a day. She stands amid piles of Donald Trump masks and exchanges factory gossip with other workers. During her five years at the company, Xu has watched salaries for entry-level workers double. Trump’s rhetoric that Chinese laborers are stealing jobs from the American rust belt mystifies her. “Aren’t U.S. workers willing to work for 3,000 to 4,000 yuan a month?” she asks, figures that convert to between $430 and $580. “Here, that’s a good salary.” In China, perhaps. But what American would take those wages for a chance to polish Donald Trump’s face seven days a week, 10 hours a day?
Man tipped for US ambassador role in NZ a former nude model who supports waterboarding Former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown talks with media at Trump Tower in November. As a 22-year-old in 1982 Scott Brown won Cosmopolitan magazine's America's Sexiest Man contest, posing nude in the centrefold. Feb 18, 2017 [...] Last year avid cyclist Brown told GQ magazine "I've always wanted to go to New Zealand or Scotland or Wales and just ride 100 miles, hit a pub, drink, eat, sleep, do some exploring, and then get up, ride another 100 miles, do that for a couple weeks." [...] Also a keen triathlete, he's filled in time after losing out on a further Senate bid by working as a bike mechanic. He is also a Fox News contributor - Trump's channel of preference - and lists guitar playing on his Twitter biography. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11803361
.. this one even more dated posted basically for the timeline .. SOD, i hate friggin' sites which keep reloading! .. anyway, got here .. grrr...
South China Sea Dispute Timeline: A History Of Chinese And US Involvement In The Contested Region
By Christopher Harress @Charress On 10/27/15 AT 2:27 PM
The US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sails in the Pacific Ocean in a photo provided by the U.S. Navy. The U.S. Navy sent a guided-missile destroyer within 12 nautical miles of artificial islands built by China in the South China Sea on Oct. 27, 2015, a U.S. defense official said, in a challenge to China's territorial claims in the area. Photo: Reuters/US Navy/CPO John Hageman
Tensions over the South China Sea, a body of water at the center of an international territorial tussle, reached new highs Tuesday Oct. 2015] after a U.S. Navy ship sailed through contested waters .. http://www.ibtimes.com/south-china-sea-dispute-us-ambassador-summoned-beijing-after-american-ship-sails-2158252 .. near the chain of Spratly Islands. The long-disputed islands, which are occupied by Vietnam, Taiwan, Philippines, Malaysia, China and Brunei, started getting some new, unwanted neighbors last year after Beijing began building artificial islands in the Sea to house military bases.
China’s aforementioned regional rivals, including Taiwan, claimed that the man-made islands were a way to exert control over international shipping lanes, the rich fishing grounds and possible energy reserves under the seabed. On Tuesday, the U.S. launched an operation in order to demonstrate the right to navigate in the area, which the United Nations has designated as shared, international waters.
While the history of occupation on islands in the South China Sea goes back hundreds of years, it wasn't until 1974 that China began strongly exerting itself in the region when it killed dozens of Vietnamese troops that were stationed on a small group of islands in the wider Paracel Islands range, which is just north of the Spratly Islands.
Below is a retrospective of the most significant moments in the dispute, beginning in 2001 and using information provided by the Center For New American Security, a bipartisan global security think tank based in Washington, D.C.
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Los Angeles Times @latimes
An angry China is warning the U.S. not to “create trouble” after patrol in South China Sea http://lat.ms/1PQCvEb 2:09 AM - 28 Oct 2015 -
* April 2001: A U.S. Navy intelligence aircraft and Chinese J-8II fighter jet collided in midair approximately 70 miles away from China's Hainan Island, killing one Chinese pilot and forcing the U.S. aircraft to land on Hainan Island, where U.S. crew members were detained.
* Aug. 2002: Vietnamese troops fired warning shots at Philippine military reconnaissance planes flying overhead near a Spratly Islands islet.
* March 2009: A Chinese Bureau of Fisheries vessel shined a high-powered spotlight on the USNS Victorious, forcing the ship to stop. Later that month, five Chinese vessels surrounded and harassed the USNS Impeccable approximately 75 miles south of Hainan Island in the South China Sea.
* June 2009: A People’s Liberation Army Navy submarine followed the USS John S. McCain destroyer and was suspected of colliding with and damaging the ship’s sonar equipment.
* May 2009: Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei claimed the continental shelf attached to their land should be extended so they could claim the economic rights to large areas of the South China Sea, including any energy discovered. China protested the claims.
* Feb. 2011: A Chinese warship allegedly fired warning shots at a Philippine vessel after ordering it to leave the area near Jackson Atoll in the Spratly Islands.
* May 2011: Philippine President Benigno Aquino III warned the visiting Chinese Defense Minister Liang Guanglie of a possible arms race in the region if tensions worsened over disputes in the South China Sea.
* July 2011: Chinese soldiers reportedly assaulted a Vietnamese fisherman and threatened crew members before expelling them from waters near the disputed Paracel Islands.
* March 2012: Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs indicated its sovereignty claim over the entire South China Sea.
* April 2012: Filipino surveillance aircraft identified Chinese fishing vessels at Scarborough Shoal, causing the Philippine Navy to deploy its largest warship, newly acquired from the U.S, to the area. In response, China sent surveillance ships to warn the Philippine Navy to leave the area.
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The Japan Times @japantimes
As U.S. eyes South China Sea patrols, will Japan play a role? http://jtim.es/TFfzh 9:00 PM - 21 Oct 2015 -
* Aug. 2013: Malaysia suggested that it might work with China over their South China Sea claims and ignore the other claimants, with Malaysian Defense Minister Hishamuddin Hussein saying that his country had no problem with China patrolling the South China Sea.
* Jan. 2014: China imposed a fishing permit rule in the South China Sea, defying the objections of the U.S., the Philippines and Vietnam.
* Aug. 2014: American Boeing P-8 Poseidon was harassed by Chinese Shenyang J-11. Rear. Adm Zhang Zhaozhong of the Chinese Navy calls on fighters jets to "fly even closer to U.S. surveillance aircraft."
* April 2015: China was in the middle of transforming Mischief Reef and Fiery Cross Reef into artificial islands, in addition to creating other small islands in the region. According to the U.N., artificial islands do not afford the occupying nation territorial waters.
* Sept. 2015: China completed a 3,125 meter runway on the newly created Fiery Cross reef.
Trump just forfeited in his first fight with China .. and .. Paul Ryan and Trump see 2 fundamentally different US economies — and one is a fantasy .. and .. Is Trump ready for war in the South China Sea, or is his team just not being clear? .. all worth reading .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=128099745
Fury in Cambodia as US asks to be paid back hundreds of millions in war debts
"What will Trump mean for South East Asia?"
Lindsay Murdoch March 11 2017
Half a century after United States B-52 bombers dropped more than 500,000 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia's countryside Washington wants the country to repay a $US500 million ($662 million) war debt.
The demand has prompted expressions of indignation and outrage from Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh.
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