China

China has passed the US as the world’s biggest trading nation as measured by the sum of exports and imports in 2012. It’s a position the US has held for over six decades.

­US exports and imports of goods last year amounted to $3.82 trillion, the US Commerce Department said last week. China’s trade in goods was $3.87 trillion, according to the country’s customs administration report in January.

While the US recorded a surplus in services of $195.3 billion last year and a goods deficit of more than $700 billion, according to Bureau Economic Analysis, China’s 2012 trade surplus, measured in goods, totalled $231.1 billion.

 

"The main reason for this growth is the Chinese government policy directed at stimulating domestic demand, which improves imports to growth,” Andrey Shenk, an economic expert at Investcafe, told RT. He said China increased its import volumes 5 fold in the last five years, and that allowed it become the biggest trading nation.

“For so many countries around the world, China is rapidly becoming the most important bilateral trade partner,” Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs’s asset management division and the economist who bound Brazil to Russia, India and China to form the BRIC investing strategy, told Bloomberg. And that can even “disrupt regional trading blocs,” for instance, “Germany may export twice as much to China by the end of the decade as it does to France,” O’Neill added.

 

The figures indicate the trend that China is already outpacing the US, the world’s biggest economy, in some respects. According to various estimates, China has the world’s biggest new car market, is the biggest energy user, and holds the largest foreign currency reserves. China became the world’s biggest exporter in 2009, and its GDP growth rate has averaged 9.9% a year since the 1970s. In 2011 China’s GDP growth rate stood at 9.20%, compared to 1.80% in the US during the same year. 

 

In November last year China surpassed the US as the world’s leading trade partner, with 124 countries considering China their largest trading partner and only 76 having that relationship with the US. This was a major shift since 2006, when the US was the larger trading partner for 127 countries, while China dominated among 70.

 

Some historical allies of the US now consider China their top trading partner, including Australia and South Korea. Trade with China was on average 12.4% of GDP for its foreign partners in 2012, compared to only 3% in 2002 – a rate that is higher than trade with the US has been in the past 30 years.

 

The US dominated as the world’s main trading power since after WWII, but as the recession hit US businesses hard, China’s growth continued, and its pace has already recovered from seven straight quarters of decline, reaching 7.9% in 4Q 2012.

 

Still, the US economy is double the size of China’s, according to World Bank data. In 2011, the US GDP reached $15 trillion while China’s totalled $7.3 trillion. In 2012 China’s nominal gross domestic product was $8.3 trillion, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics’ report.

 

However, the US remains the biggest importer, taking in $2.28 trillion in goods last year compared with China’s $1.82 trillion of imports. The US exports innovative products in the automobile industry, aerospace, medicine, computers, finance and pharmaceuticals. 

 

At the same time, a significant portion of China’s trade involves importing raw materials and parts to be assembled into finished products and re-exported, an activity that provides “only modest value added,” Eswar Prasad, a former International Monetary Fund official, now a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, told Bloomberg.

 

There are just days to go before Chinese New Year, the biggest celebration on China's calendar, when the entire country shuts down for a few days of food, fireworks … and family.

Many enjoy the holiday, but millions of unmarried people merely endure it.

In the basement of an office tower in downtown Beijing, a cloud of gloom hovers over the canteen at lunch time. Groups of young women huddled over large bowls of noodles look depressed when asked about the February's impending Chinese New Year holiday.

"I'm pretty old - I'm almost 30 - but I'm still single," explains Ding Na, a woman hailing from China's northeast.

"I'm under lots of pressure. My sisters and my relatives all ask me why I'm not married. When they call me, I'm scared to pick up the phone."

Twenty-somethings in China - young women especially - face a strict societal deadline to find a husband before they turn 30.

According to Zhou Xiaopeng, a consultant with Baihe.com, one of China's biggest dating agencies, the pressure for singles to settle down crescendos around Chinese New Year.

"Picture a scene where people sit around a table," Ms Zhou says.

"Chinese people love to get together for dinner. On New Year's Eve, everybody is sitting in pairs, your brother with your sister-in-law, your sister with your brother-in-law, and so on. If you're the only one left behind, you can imagine the pressure and frustration."
Kiss for $8

Luckily for some, China's most popular online marketplace, Taobao, offers a band-aid solution: the rental of fake boyfriends.

For as little as $50 (£32) a day, dozens of classified adverts promise to provide a male companion for the holidays, pretending to be a single woman's plus-one.

Some postings list a full menu of possibilities - charging $5 an hour to accompany a girl to dinner and $8 for a kiss on the cheek. If the fake boyfriend stays overnight with his client's family for Chinese New Year, he charges $80 a night to sleep in his own bed, and $95 to sleep on the couch.

Sex is not even an option on the list.

Li Le, an agricultural products salesman from Tianjin, has put himself up for hire on Chinese New Year. Sounding a little embarrassed, Mr Li admits this is the first year he has attempted to work as a fake boyfriend instead of travelling home to see his own family in China's central Hebei province.

He insists he is not doing it for the money. Instead, he has more noble pursuits.

"It's an exciting thing to do," he says. "I might find someone who shares my interests and it would make both of us happy."

Thirty women have contacted Li so far, but he says its tough to find someone who trusts him enough to invite him home for Chinese New Year.

Ironically, Li says he is still waiting for that special someone to answer his advert, admitting, "the best result would be for me to find someone to marry through this".

A crazy idea? Maybe, but even Chinese pop culture has cottoned on to the possibility that a fake boyfriend could morph into a real one.

The hit Chinese TV series "Renting a Girlfriend for Home Reunion" stages the Hollywood romance between a single Chinese man and his fake girlfriend.

Yes, Chinese men hire stand-ins too - often gay men who haven't come out to their families. But Zhou Xiaopeng, the dating consultant, says women are really under the gun to find husbands. Though, eventually, even that might change.

"When people born in 80s or 90s become parents, they won't want to apply the same pressure they endured when they were young," she predicts. "It'll probably take 20 to 30 years."

That means that China's entrepreneurial escorts still have decades to perfect their craft. In Li Le's case, he still has time for the fake girlfriend of his dreams to hire him for the holidays.
 

(By Celia Hatton BBC News, Beijing)

 

China and Turkey are responsible for biggest numbers of labor migrants to Kazakhstan, KazTag reports, citing the country’s Ministry of Labor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Chinese navy frigate has locked its weapon-targeting radar on a Japanese ship, Tokyo says, amid mounting tensions over a territorial row.

Japanese Defence Minister Itsunori Onodera said the incident happened on 30 January near islands claimed by both nations in the East China Sea.

He said this had prompted Tokyo to lodge a formal protest with Beijing.

The row, over islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, has escalated in recent months.

Taiwan also claims the island chain (known as Diaoyutai in Taipei), which is controlled by Japan.

Last week, tensions between Tokyo and Beijing appeared to be easing after a Japanese delegation met senior Chinese leaders and both sides later expressed hopes that relations could improve, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo reports.

But on Monday China sent patrol ships back in to the disputed waters around the islands, our correspondent adds.

'Dangerous situation'

"On 30 January, something like fire-control radar was directed at a Japan Self-Defence Maritime escort ship in the East China Sea," Mr Onodera told reporters on Tuesday.

The minister said Japan's Yuudachi vessel and the Chinese frigate were about 3km (two miles) apart at the time, Japan's Kyodo News reports.

Asked about the delay in filing the protest, Mr Onodera said it took the ministry until Tuesday to determine that a fire-control radar had indeed locked on the Japanese ship.

He added that a Japanese military helicopter was also targeted with a similar type of radar by another Chinese frigate on 19 January.

"Directing such radar is very abnormal. We recognise it would create a very dangerous situation if a single misstep occurred," he said.

Radars use radio waves to detect the intended target and then guide missiles or other weapons.
China's UN move

Also on Tuesday, the Chinese ambassador to Japan rebuffed an earlier protest over continuing Chinese patrols off the disputed islands, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.

Ambassador Cheng Yonghua said the islands and the surrounding waters were China's "inherent territory".

The dispute over their ownership of the islands has continued for years, but it reignited in 2012 when the Japanese government purchased three of the islands from their private Japanese owner.

The move triggered diplomatic protests from Beijing and Taipei, and sparked small public protests in China, affecting some Japanese businesses operating in the country.

Chinese government ships have since sailed many times through what Japan says are its territorial waters around the islands.

Late last year, a Chinese government plane also flew over the islands in what Japan called a violation of its airspace.

In response, Tokyo has moved to increase military spending for the first time in a decade.

The eight uninhabited islands and rocks lie close to strategically important shipping lanes, offer rich fishing grounds and are thought to contain oil deposits.

In December, Beijing submitted to the UN a detailed explanation of its claims to the disputed islands.

A UN commission of geological experts will examine China's submission but does not have the authority to resolve conflicting claims.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Disputed islands

• The archipelago consists of five islands and three reefs
• Japan, China and Taiwan claim them; they are controlled by Japan and form part of Okinawa prefecture
• Japanese businessman Kunioki Kurihara owned three of the islands but sold them to the Japanese state in September
• The islands were also the focus of a major diplomatic row between Japan and China in 2010