Tag: China

Free trade and a praying PM: Canada is front page news in China

I’ve travelled to a lot of spots around the world covering Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s international travels and I cannot recall him ever generating the kind of positive press he’s getting in this morning’s China Daily, the English-language state-run daily newspaper here. Continue reading Free trade and a praying PM: Canada is front page news in China

Canada in the middle of Chinese anger over luxury cars for officials

Canada’s ambassador to China, David Mulroney, is whisked around the streets of Beijing in his official government car, a Toyota Camry that cost less than $30,000. Hardly any news there. The Camry is a relatively modest vehicle and was purchased and is operated entirely within the federal government’s “Fleet Management Directive”.

But when Mulroney blogged about the car he is assigned, it sparked a wave of reaction from Chinese readers, garnering more than 1,000 comments and more than 3,000 ‘shares.’ Why the interest? Canada’s modesty when it comes to official vehicles is being compared to the gross immodesty of Chinese government officials. And China’s citizenry are angry. Continue reading Canada in the middle of Chinese anger over luxury cars for officials

Another knock on the greenback?: Tokyo and Beijing Agree on Currency Pact

The Wall Street Journal reports:

… during a visit to China by Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, which ended on Monday, China and Japan announced a series of deals that promote the use of the yuan in trade and investment between the world’s second- and third-largest economies, which would limit somewhat the use of the dollar in Asia, the world’s fastest growing region. Specifically, the two countries agreed to promote direct yuan-yen trade, rather than converting their currencies first to dollars, and also for Japan to hold yuan in its foreign-exchange reserves, which are now largely denominated in dollars.

Japan “seems to be acknowledging implicitly that there will be a single dominant Asian currency in the future and it won’t be the yen,” said Barry Eichengreen, a University of California at Berkeley economic historian. Harvard University economist Jeffrey Frankel said that “this hastens a multicurrency world, but this is just one of 100 steps along the way.”

[Read the whole piece: Tokyo and Beijing Agree on Currency Pact – WSJ.com.