Latest News Clips 2017.07.03

                         

1.      Trump Meets India’s Leader, a Fellow Nationalist Battling China for His Favor

The New York Times    June 27, 2017

President Trump, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Mr. Trump’s wife, Melania, outside the White House on Monday.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, two nationalist leaders with a shared passion for social media, met Monday as India sought to vie with China for Trump’s favor in the region.

Trump lavished praise on Modi, calling him a “true friend” with ambitious plans to fight corruption and cut taxes. The two men also share a devotion to Twitter and Facebook to bypass the media and reach their publics directly.

The display of warmth, a senior White House official said, was at least partly aimed at President Xi Jinping of China, who has disappointed Trump in recent weeks by failing to impose more pressure on neighboring North Korea to curb its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Pointedly, Trump noted that India had helped the United States enforce sanctions on North Korea. “The North Korean regime is causing tremendous problems,” he said, “and it’s something that has to be dealt with — and probably dealt with rapidly.”

Modi returned the favor, praising Trump’s “vast and successful” business experience, which he predicted would galvanize relations between the United States and India. He also invited Trump’s daughter Ivanka to a conference of entrepreneurs in India.

Yet the mutual admiration masked a more complicated dynamic between India and the United States. While ties between the two have grown steadily closer over the last two decades, India faces new uncertainties with Donald Trump, who has shown less interest than his predecessors in maintaining a web of trade and security alliances in Asia.

India, like other countries in the region, has watched Trump’s cultivation of Xi with concern. His trade and immigration policies, particularly limits on visas commonly used by technology workers from India, have added to the jitters, as did his decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord.

“India would like to continue to deepen its friendship, but Trump can only be an object of concern, even if he tweets lovely compliments after dinner,” said Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University. “India might get a good deal, or not a bad deal, or a bad deal, or no deal. Who can say?”

For now, the United States and India are finding common cause in pushing back against China’s maritime ambitions. Before Modi’s visit, the Trump administration approved the sale of 22 surveillance drones to India, which New Delhi can use to eavesdrop on Chinese naval movements in the Indian Ocean. Trump also spoke about a huge joint naval exercise in the Indian Ocean that will involve Japanese, Indian and American warships.

India has its own deep-rooted suspicions of China. Xi’s marquee development project — known as One Belt, One Road — seeks to knit together China, South and Central Asia, and Europe through a vast array of ports, roads and railways, mostly funded by China. India views the project as a threat to its historically dominant position in South Asia.

The sale of the Guardian drones builds on years of deepening cooperation between the United States and India on maritime security, as India searched for ways to track Chinese submarines entering the Indian Ocean.

Though India is traditionally wary of military alliances, the two countries have explored ways to create a naval network that would balance China’s maritime expansion. Among the proposals are joint naval patrols in the South China Sea, an idea India has so far rejected.

The drones, which have never before been sold to a non-NATO country, could be especially valuable if they are flown over the Andaman and Nicobar islands, giving India control of a choke point that is one of China’s greatest marine vulnerabilities.

They could be used with India’s fleet of Poseidon surveillance aircraft, which it acquired from the United States beginning in 2013, said David Brewster, a visiting fellow at the National Security College of Australian National University. The Poseidon “sub-hunters” can also be staged from the Andaman and Nicobar island chain.

2.      As Trump, South Korea's president meet North Korea and free trade on front burner

• President Donald Trump has been critical of the free trade deal with South Korea, calling it "unacceptable."
• President Moon Jae-in is set to meet Trump in two-day summit amid a rift over the THAAD anti-missile system.
• Trump once suggested Seoul should pay more for US troops stationed in South Korea to protect against North Korean threat.

CNBC   28 Jun 2017

President Donald Trump's mixed messages to Seoul leave little doubt that there's likely to be some intense discussions behind the scenes this week during South Korean President Moon Jae-in's two-day summit in Washington.

"Both of them are going to work very hard to put a positive public face on it," said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian Washington think tank. "But the South Koreans are quite nervous."

Moon, who took office in May, begins the summit Thursday and is likely to hear Trump's demands on renegotiating a U.S.-South Korea free-trade deal and the administration's latest approach to the nuclear and ballistic missile threat from North Korea, including ongoing efforts to get China to pressure Pyongyang. And Moon's push back on the U.S.-supplied THAAD tactical missile defense system is likely to be another hot-button issue for discussion.

At the same time, during the presidential campaign Trump indicated Seoul should spend more money on its own defense, suggesting that if they didn't he would be prepared to pull out the roughly 28,000 U.S. forces stationed in South Korea.

"The South Koreans need the United States a lot to help defend against the north," said Thomas Henriksen, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank at California's Stanford University. "So that tempers any sort of extreme views that the South may have toward President Trump."

Moon, a former human rights lawyer, has been seen as more liberal in his approach to North Korea than his predecessor and open to engagement with the hermit regime. The new South Korean president could turn back the clock to the days when the so-called Sunshine Policy by Seoul allowed funds to go to Pyongyang from a Kaesong joint factory complex located in North Korea.

Ironically, if Moon gets his way and reopens the Kaesong factory, it could turn back the clock to the early 2000s when Seoul had policies seen as softer to the North and had to contend with a more hardline stance from another Republican in the White House.

"We could sort of see a replay like we had when George W. Bush was president and there was more of a hardline [policy] on North Korea," said Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based conservative think tank. "That was one of our less coordinated periods of U.S.-South Korea relations."

Kaesong, a duty-free zone, opened in 2004 and at one time employed more than 50,000 North Koreans but was closed by Moon's conservative predecessor in 2016. More than 120 South Korean companies had participated in Kaesong and it represented around $2 billion in trade with North Korea.

Reopening Kaesong could put Moon at odds with the Trump administration, which has been tightening economic sanctions against Pyongyang and pushing for more action by the United Nations' Security Council.

Then again, some experts suggest the Trump administration may let Moon's more pro-engagement policy with the North to play out because Seoul may ultimately get its fingers burned in the process and then draw back to a more conservative approach in step with Washington.

"The South Korean president might get mugged by reality," said Henriksen. "The North Korean regime is very hard to deal with."

Added Henriksen, "Even though things are going along fairly smooth, then they'll [North Korea] just change their mind. They've broken so many agreements that this makes everyone a little bit wary of entering into a treaty or into some sort of deal with them."

3.      How Chinese Rule Has Changed Hong Kong Since 1997

The Bloomberg      July 29, 2017

On July 1, 1997, the Chinese national flag was raised over Hong Kong for the first time, ending 156 years of British rule and beginning an unusual experiment in democracy by Beijing. As President Xi Jinping visits the city for the 20th anniversary, he’s facing new questions about China’s commitment to the handover deal and human rights in general.

1. Why is 20 years a big deal?

Every year the anniversary generates emotional responses from both celebrants of China’s post-colonial resurgence and protesters worried about Hong Kong’s future as a beacon of capitalism, free speech and the rule of law. This year carries special significance because China only promised to leave Hong Kong’s “high degree of autonomy” intact for 50 years. In 2022, when the city’s incoming chief executive Carrie Lam’s term expires, that promise will have more days behind it than ahead of it.

2. What will happen July 1?

Xi is making his first visit to Hong Kong since taking power in 2012. It’s the first presidential inspection tour since pro-democracy protests shut down parts of the city in 2014 and helped spawn a more confrontational independence movement. Thousands of police have been training for months to prepare for a huge annual protest march and any flare-ups of civil disobedience.

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3. Why is Hong Kong so important?

Hong Kong’s status as a top financial center rests in part upon its reputation as a safe place to put your people and investments. More broadly, the city shows how well Beijing adheres to agreements such as the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which in 1984 set out the terms of Hong Kong’s return. that document enshrines principles like democracy and independent courts that are hard to reconcile with China’s one-party system.

4. What exactly was Hong Kong promised?

Hong Kong’s charter, known as the Basic Law, preserves British common law and other colonial tenets such as property rights, free speech and an independent judiciary under a framework called “one country, two systems.” The biggest fights have focused on a provision that says the city’s chief executive must eventually be chosen by “universal suffrage.” 

5. Has China kept its side of the bargain?

Two decades on, Hong Kong’s leader is still chosen by a committee of 1,200 political insiders. China’s most significant attempt to enact the universal suffrage clause failed in the legislature in 2015 after months of protests by democracy advocates, who argued the take-it-or-leave-it proposal would ensure only proven Beijing loyalists became candidates.

6. How autonomous is Hong Kong really?

Zhang Dejiang, the Communist Party’s No. 3 official, said in May that China’s relationship with Hong Kong was based on a “delegation of power, not power-sharing” and warned the city against confronting Beijing. China has shown an increasing willingness to assert its authority in Hong Kong, especially over what it views as threats to national security. Last year, China told the U.K. government to “stop interfering” after it criticized the abduction of Hong Kong booksellers critical of Communist Party leaders. In November, China’s top legislative body made the unprecedented decision to intervene in a Hong Kong court case and instruct judges on how to interpret local law. The move led to the ouster of two pro-independence lawmakers and paved the way for similar actions against eight more.

7. What’s the impact on the local economy?

While foreign businesses say they’re watching for any erosion to Hong Kong’s rule of law, the city routinely ranks among the world’s top business destinations. Still, China’s efforts to boost economic ties with Hong Kong are putting pressure on locals and foreigners alike, driving up property prices to world-beating levels and crowding out Wall Street banks from the local initial-public-offering market.

8. Where does Hong Kong go from here?

Just 30 years before China’s guarantees expire, there’s little prospect of a political breakthrough between Hong Kong’s feuding factions. A continued hiatus may begin to weigh on long-term financial decisions as the 2047 deadline approaches. While Lam, the next chief executive, has promised to heal divisions, she faces pressure from Beijing to take a hard line and resolve lingering political debates. In April, the mainland’s top legal affairs official in Hong Kong warned that the government would consider scrapping “one country, two systems” if the concept became a threat to China.