Global Daily Watch Aug. 8, 2020 -
Main Page: https://quandiemvietnam.blogspot.com/2020/06/us-china-politics-chinh-tri-hoa-ky_18.html
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U.S. Treasury Says Vietnam Deliberately Weakened Currency
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/u-treasury-says-vietnam-undervalued-014524212.html
(Bloomberg) -- An investigation by the U.S. Treasury Department found that Vietnam deliberately undervalued its currency by about 4.7% against the dollar in 2019, according to a letter sent to the U.S. Commerce Department.
The State Bank of Vietnam, the nation’s central bank, facilitated net purchases of about $22 billion worth of foreign exchange last year, which had the effect of undervaluing the dong in a range of 4.2% to 5.2%, according to the letter. The purchases were estimated to have pushed down Vietnam’s real effective exchange rate by 3.5% to 4.8%.
The Treasury’s assessment is part of an investigation by the Commerce Department into alleged subsidies on passenger vehicle and light truck tires from Vietnam. A new federal rule published this year in the U.S. allows the Commerce Department to treat currency undervaluation as a factor in determining countervailing duties on a trading partner.
Vietnam’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs didn’t immediately respond to an email request for comment, while a representative for the central bank wasn’t immediately available to comment.
The Ho Chi Minh Stock Index fluctuated on Wednesday and was up 0.2% as of 1:50 p.m. in Hanoi. The dong was little changed at 23,175 per dollar.
The Treasury’s move is a sign that the U.S. could cite Vietnam for a second violation in a semi-annual report on foreign exchange policies of major trading partners.
In the January release of that report, Vietnam was judged to have violated just one of three criteria that the Treasury uses to assess a currency manipulator -- namely, it had a bilateral goods surplus of $47 billion, the sixth-highest among the U.S.’s major trading partners. Economies with at least two violations are added to a monitoring list.
(Updates with currency in fifth paragraph.)
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Former CIA officer charged with providing secrets to China in case out of 'spy novel'
https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-cia-officer-charged-providing-194434890.html
A former CIA officer has been charged with providing secrets to China over the course of a decade in a case that a top Justice Department official describes as coming straight from a "spy novel."
The former CIA officer who was also a FBI linguist, Alexander Yuk Chung Ma, a 67-year-old resident of Hawaii, was arrested Friday in Hawaii and charged with conspiring to communicate national defense information to aid a foreign government, the Justice Department said. He faces up to life in prison if convicted.
An FBI affidavit alleges an 85-year-old Los Angeles man, a relative of Ma's and also a former CIA officer, acted as a conspirator but was not charged because he suffers from a “debilitating cognitive disease.”
“This case demonstrates the persistence of Chinese espionage efforts,” said John Demers, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department's national security division. “It shows the willingness to betray one’s adopted country and colleagues. … And it reads like a spy novel.”
Ma, who was being held pending a hearing in federal court, could not be reached for comment.
The arrest is the latest in a series of criminal cases brought by the Justice Department against current and former U.S. government officials accused of supplying secrets to the Chinese government. At least four U.S. government officials have been sentenced to prison in the last two years for providing sensitive information to the Chinese government.
Court papers reveal a years-long effort by Ma to provide secrets to China's government. Born in Hong Kong in 1952, the affidavit says, Ma came to the U.S. in 1968 and eventually became a naturalized citizen. He joined the CIA in 1982 and became a case officer stationed overseas. He left the agency in 1989.
Ma's spying started in 2001, the FBI affidavit says, when he and his Los Angeles-based relative met in a Hong Kong hotel room with Chinese operatives and handed over “a substantial amount of highly classified national defense information," including details about CIA operations and sources.
The FBI affidavit said the bureau possessed a videotape of the meeting. The video captured Ma counting $50,000 in payment from the Chinese operatives while his relative continued to provide classified information, the affidavit said. The FBI did not disclose how it obtained the video.
Ma kept in touch with his Chinese handlers and applied to be an FBI agent in the hopes of handing over more information, the affidavit alleges. But he was told he was too old to be an agent, so Ma changed plans and applied to become a contract linguist for the bureau in Hawaii. A day before starting the FBI job in 2004, he called a suspected accomplice and said he would be working for “the other side,” the affidavit alleges.
Over the next six years, he downloaded, swiped and photographed sensitive information, the affidavit alleges. The handlers also sent him a photograph of five sources it wanted to identify. Ma forwarded the photo to his relative, who identified two of the sources, the FBI alleged.
Ma left the FBI in 2010. It is not clear why the FBI waited until January 2019 to conduct its sting operation. But the affidavit suggested the FBI had been tracking Ma’s activities for years, likely while he was still at the bureau.
In January of last year, an undercover FBI agent met with Ma. The agent was posing as a Chinese operative conducting an audit of how his government treated the former CIA officer and and how he had been compensated. To prove his bonafides, the affidavit said, the agent played a videotape of the 2001 Hong Kong meeting. Ma bought the ruse, the affidavit said, and confirmed he had handed over classified information to the Chinese operatives in 2001 and had continued to work for them.
They met again two months later, with the undercover agent giving Ma $2,000 “to acknowledge his work on behalf of China.” Ma confirmed "he had provided multiple items of valuable U.S. government information" to Chinese operatives when he worked for the bureau, the affidavit says.
At a meeting Aug. 12, the affidavit alleges, the undercover agent gave Ma another $2,000. Ma counted the cash before putting it in his pants pocket. He told the undercover agent that he “wanted ‘the motherland’ to succeed," the affidavit said, and would be willing to continue to work for the Chinese government, “perhaps as a consultant."
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Filing: Kansas prof's prosecution criminalizes job disputes
https://www.yahoo.com/news/filing-kansas-profs-prosecution-criminalizes-135835017.html
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| FILE- This undated file photo provided by the University of Kansas shows researcher Franklin Feng Tao. Tao, of Lawrence, Kansas, was indicted last year for not disclosing on conflict-of-interest forms work he was allegedly doing for China while employed at the University of Kansas. Defense attorneys, on Friday, Aug. 14, 2020, have filed a motion seeking to throw out the charges. (Kelsey Kimberlin/University of Kansas via AP, File) |
ROXANA HEGEMAN and ERIC TUCKER
BELLE PLAINE, Kan. (AP) — The prosecution of a Kansas researcher ensnared in a U.S. government crackdown on Chinese economic espionage and trade secret theft opens the door to criminalizing workplace disagreements, his attorneys argued Friday in a motion asking a court to throw out the charges.
Feng “Franklin” Tao is charged with not disclosing on conflict-of-interest forms work he was allegedly doing for China while employed at the University of Kansas — something federal prosecutors have portrayed as a scheme to defraud the university, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.
In their request to dismiss the case, defense lawyers Peter Zeidenberg and Michael Dearington wrote that the government seeks to use Tao's prosecution as a potential new model for the Justice Department to prosecute professors “without having to produce evidence of intellectual property theft or export control violations.”
The motion takes aim at the broader China Initiative announced by the Justice Department in 2018 to counter the threat of Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft, including on American college campuses. Since then, federal prosecutors have charged Chinese academics across the country of failing to disclose foreign sources of funding and lying about their links to China.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has escalated its rhetoric against Beijing and taken steps to confront China, including by shutting down the Chinese consulate in Houston and through executive actions that ban dealings with the Chinese owners of TikTok and WeChat. FBI Director Chris Wray said in a speech last month that the bureau opens a new counterintelligence case linked to China about every 10 hours.
The indictment against Tao alleges that the Lawrence man's motive was to help China by participating in its “talent plan,” which prosecutors contend is designed to encourage the transfer of original ideas and intellectual property from U.S. universities to Chinese government institutions.
Prosecutors accuse Tao of not informing the University of Kansas that he was selected for the Changjiang Professorship or the salary for his appointment to Fuzhou University in China.
In their motion, his lawyers warn that the case would open the door to criminalizing employment disputes that are better resolved by a human resources department. Tao faces 10 counts, including seven counts of wire fraud, based on two conflict-of-interest forms he submitted to the university.
“The Department of Justice is not the Ministry of Truth, and it lacks authority to regulate routine, private miscommunications between employees and employers regarding employee activities," the motion says.
The motion presents hypothetical scenarios in which an employee who misleads an employer could wind up prosecuted, rather than simply reprimanded or fired by an employer. It raises questions about whether a doctor’s office employee in Missouri who falsely calls in sick from his home in Kansas could be charged with wire fraud if he continues to collect his salary, or prosecuted with false statements if the office receives Medicaid reimbursements from the federal government.
“This is because the Indictment equates dishonesty in the workplace with fraud, merely because all employees receive salary from their employers, and false statements, merely because an employer receives federal funding,” the lawyers wrote.
“If the Court permits this Indictment to proceed to trial, it would open the floodgates to a vast range of federal prosecutions for garden-variety employment disputes that otherwise would have, at most, subjected the employee to administrative discipline at work," they added. "This government overreach would not be limited to university professors.”
Tao, an associate professor of engineering, was born in China and moved to the United States in 2002. He has been employed since August 2014 at the University of Kansas' Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis, which conducts research on sustainable technology to conserve natural resources and energy.
Justice Department prosecutors in recent years have been particularly focused on Chinese government initiatives that recruit professors in specialized areas in the United States to work in China.
A professor who has worked at the University of Arkansas was indicted last month on charges of wire fraud and passport fraud for allegedly failing to disclose ties to the Chinese government and Chinese companies when he received grant money from NASA.
Also last month, a rheumatology professor and medical researcher who worked at schools including Ohio State University was charged with using millions of dollars in grant money from the U.S. government to help China develop expertise in rheumatology and immunology.
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Tucker reported from Washington.
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World
US cabinet member lauds Taiwan's democracy during historic visit
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US cabinet member lauds Taiwan's democracy during historic visitUS Health Secrtary Alex Azar (L) met with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen (R) on a visit China has slammed as a threat to peace |
A US cabinet member heaped praise on Taiwan's democracy and its success in battling the coronavirus as he met the island's leader on Monday during a historic visit that China has slammed as a threat to peace.
Health Secretary Alex Azar is in Taipei for a three-day visit billed as the highest level visit from the United States since it switched diplomatic recognition from the island to China in 1979.
His trip comes as relations between the United States and China are in tumult, with the two sides clashing over a wide range of trade, military and security issues, as well as the coronavirus pandemic.
Authoritarian China insists Taiwan is its own territory and vows to one day seize it.
On Monday morning, Azar met President Tsai Ing-wen, who advocates the island being recognised as a sovereign nation and is loathed by China's leaders.
"Taiwan's response to COVID-19 has been among the most successful in the world, and that is a tribute to the open, transparent, democratic nature of Taiwan's society and culture," Azar told Tsai.
Tsai thanked the US for supporting its bid to be part of the World Health Organization (WHO), a body Beijing keeps the island frozen out of.
"Political considerations should never take precedence over the rights to health," Tsai said, calling Beijing's refusal to let Taiwan join "highly regrettable".
Soon after the meeting Taipei's defence ministry said Chinese fighter jets had made a brief incursion across the median line in the Taiwan Strait that the two sides have long treated as a boundary.
Chinese warplanes routinely fly into Taiwan's defence zone to put pressure on the island but crossings of the median line are much rarer because it is such a sensitive area.
"China has always firmly opposed official exchanges between the US and Taiwan," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters on Monday afternoon.
- Warming ties -
Azar brushed off China's criticism when asked about Beijing's anger over his visit.
"The message that I bring from the US government is one of reaffirming the deep partnership the United States has with Taiwan in terms of security, commerce, health care and shared common values of democracy, economic freedom and liberty," he told reporters before his meeting with Tsai.
Azar has previously been critical of Beijing's response to the coronavirus, which began in central China, as well as the WHO.
It was a theme he repeated on Monday saying Taiwan was wise "not trust some of the assertions" coming from Beijing or the WHO
As well as meeting Tsai, Azar will hold talks with his counterpart Chen Shih-chung and Foreign Minister Joseph Wu.
Taiwan has become a poster child for defeating the coronavirus thanks to a well-honed track and tracing programme as well as firm border controls.
Despite its proximity and economic links to China it has recorded fewer than 500 infections and seven deaths.
In contrast the US has recorded the most deaths in the world with more than 160,000 fatalities.
Critics have accused US President Donald Trump of ramping up criticism of China as a way to divert from growing public anger over his administration's coronavirus response, especially as he fights for re-election in November.
Washington remains the leading arms supplier to Taiwan but has historically been cautious in holding official contacts with it.
Throughout the 1990s the United States sent trade officials to Taiwan with regularity.
Douglas Paal, a former head of the American Institute in Taiwan, Washington's de facto embassy, said the Trump administration was still paying heed to China's red line -- that no US official handling national security visit Taiwan.
The difference this time, he said, is the context, with Azar travelling at a time when relations between Washington and Beijing have hit a new low.
"The fact that they didn't choose to send a national security advisor or someone else suggests they are trying to come as close as possible to China's red line but don't want to cross it."
But Washington has described Azar's visit as the highest level trip made by a senior administration official since the diplomatic switch.
aw-jta/mtp
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Politics
U.S. imposes sanctions on Hong Kong officials
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