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Tag: china

  • Trump: We are not in trade war with China

    President Donald Trump tweeted that the U.S. was not in “a trade war with China,’’ hours after Beijing announced tariff hikes on 50 billion dollars worth of U.S. products.

    “We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent people, who represented the U.S.,” Trump said.

    Beijing’s announcement followed Washington’s publishing of a list of 50 billion dollars worth of Chinese imports that could be subject to punitive tariffs.

    “Now, we have a trade deficit of 500 billion dollars a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another 300 billion dollars. We cannot let this continue!” Trump tweeted.

    Also China hit back on Wednesday at the Trump administration’s plan to slap tariffs on 50 billion dollars in Chinese goods, retaliating with a list of similar duties on key U.S. imports including soybeans, planes, cars, whiskey and chemicals.

    Beijing’s list of 25 per cent additional tariffs on U.S. goods covers 106 items with a trade value matching the 50 billion dollars targeted on Washington’s list, China’s commerce and finance ministries said.

    The effective date will depend on when the U.S. action takes effect.

    The announcement triggered further heavy selling in global stock markets and commodities, with U.S. stock futures sliding 1.5 per cent, soybean futures plunging 3.7 per cent and the dollar briefly extending early losses.

    Hours earlier, the U.S. government unveiled a detailed breakdown of some 1,300 Chinese industrial, transport and medical goods that could be subject to 25 per cent duties, ranging from light-emitting diodes to chemicals and machine parts.

    Washington’s move, broadly flagged in March, is aimed at forcing Beijing to address what Washington says is deeply entrenched theft of U.S. intellectual property and forced technology transfer from U.S. companies to Chinese competitors, charges Chinese officials deny.

    Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman, Geng Shuang, said China had shown sincerity in wanting to resolve the trade dispute through negotiations.

    “But the best opportunities for resolving the issues through dialogue and negotiations have been repeatedly missed by the U.S. side,” he told a regular briefing on Wednesday.

    “We regret that soybeans are on the list. We have done everything to prevent this from happening, but we are still calling for a resolution,” said Zhang Xiaoping, China Director of the U.S. Soybean Export Council said.

    dpa/NAN

  • BBC launches new company for content creation

    The BBC has launched a new company named BBC Studios heralding what it called “a new chapter” for the its content creation.

    The newly created studio, the merger of BBC Worldwide and the old BBC Studios, brings the BBC Group into line with the rest of the industry to ensure the creative and commercial success of the organisation in face of increasing competition for viewers.

    According to a statement, the new studio, officially, will see content through the full life cycle of development, commissioning, production and co-production, sales and distribution and will underpin the creation of new BBC-owned intellectual property.

    Following the March announcement to set up a production office in Sydney, Australia, the new company is developing new production opportunities in Beijing, China.

    The move follows a series of productions such as “The Blue Planet II” which went viral in China last year.

    Award-winning executive producer Matthew Springford, who has over 20 years’ experience in factual program-making, will be based at its office in Beijing alongside the company’s distribution team.

    It will be working with Chinese TV stations and digital platforms to co-develop and co-produce original content and new formats across all factual genres.

    Leading a staff of around 3,000 and overseeing an annual turnover of 1.4 billion pounds (1.96 billion U.S. dollars), CEO Tim Davie said: “BBC Studios has what it takes to create and export quality British programs in this new age of content.”

    Xinhua/NAN

  • China can teach the West an important lesson about innovation

    From the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, Western countries attributed their economic growth to the discoveries of “scientists and navigators.” A country needed only the “zeal” to develop “obvious” commercial applications, and build the facilities to meet demand for new products.

    Until recently, the Chinese believed the same thing. But now, Chinese business people and entrepreneurs are increasingly showing not only the entrepreneurial drive to adapt to new opportunities, but also the desire and capacity to innovate for themselves, rather than simply copying what’s already out there.

    Indeed, more and more Chinese companies are realizing that they must innovate in order to get – and stay – ahead in the global economy. Several companies – notably Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent – made breakthroughs, by offering digital-age infrastructure that facilitates innovative activity. And industrial firms have recently moved into robots and artificial intelligence.

    Tencent's rise
    Tencent’s rise

    For its part, China’s government is evidently supportive of Chinese businesses developing a capacity to produce indigenous innovations. It no doubt recognizes that such innovations are all the more valuable when innovation remains weak in the West, where growth in total factor productivity ( TFP ) has continued its long slowdown.

    In recent years, China’s government has introduced initiatives aimed at increasing both entrepreneurship and innovation. It has shortened dramatically the process for forming a new company. It has built a vast number of schools, where Chinese children learn more about the world they will face.

    And it recently facilitated the entry of foreign experts to work on new projects in the business sector.

    The authorities have also recognized the importance of allowing more competition in the economy. Individuals should be freed up to start new companies, and existing companies should be freed up to enter new industries. Competition solves a lot of problems – a point that is increasingly lost on the West.

    At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Chinese officials discussed basic reforms that the government introduced two years ago to increase competition. Under the new policy, excess capacity now signals that supply should be allowed to contract and prompt redundant firms to exit the market. Of course, excess demand signals that supply should be allowed to increase, leading to the entry of new firms.

    The key insight is that when existing enterprises are protected from new market entrants bearing new ideas, the result will be less innovation and less “adaptation” to a changing world, to use Friedrich Hayek’sterm.

    Another argument can be made. In any modern economy, virtually every industry operates in the face of a largely unknowable future. The more companies an industry has thinking about a problem, the more likely a solution is to be found. A company that has been kept out of an industry might know something that all the companies in the industry do not. Or some unique experience may have furnished an individual with “personal knowledge” that is impossible to transmit to others who have not had the same experience. Whatever the case, society benefits – through lower prices, more jobs, better products and services, and so forth – when outsiders with something to add are free to do so.

    All of this was known to the great theorists of the 1920s and 1930s: Hayek, Frank Knight, and John Maynard Keynes. And now it is known to the Chinese, who understand that a country benefits when companies – each with its own thinking and knowledge – are free to compete.

    The West seems to have forgotten this. Since the 1930s, most Western governments have seen it as their duty to protect established enterprises from competition, even when it comes from new firms offering new adaptations or innovations. These protections, which come in myriad forms, have almost certainly discouraged many entrepreneurs from coming forward with new and better ideas.

    History is rife with evidence of the value of competition. In post-war Britain, into the 1970s, industries were controlled by exclusive clubs within the Confederation of British Industry, which barred new entrants. By the time Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, TFP had stagnated. But Thatcher put a stop to the Confederation’s anti-competitive practices, and Britain’s TFP was growing again by the mid-1980s.

    We are now seeing something similar in China. By 2016, China’s TFP growth rate had been slowing for a number of years. But since the reforms that year, it has been increasing.

    The West must address its great TFP slowdown, which has lasted since the late 1960s. Ending protection of incumbents from new entrants possessing ideas for new adaptions and innovations is a good place to start.

    Source: World Economic Forum

  • China says North Korea pledges denuclearisation during friendly visit

    North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pledged to denuclearise and meet U.S. officials, China said on Wednesday after an historic meeting with President Xi Jinping, who promised China would uphold its friendship with its isolated neighbour.

    After two days of speculation, China and North Korea both confirmed that Kim had visited Beijing and met Xi during what China’s Foreign Ministry called an unofficial visit to China from Sunday to Wednesday.

    The China visit was Kim’s first known trip outside North Korea since he assumed power in 2011 and is believed by analysts to serve as preparation for upcoming summits with South Korea and the U.S.

    North Korea’s KCNA news agency made no mention of Kim’s pledge to denuclearise, or his anticipated meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump that is planned for some time in May.

    Beijing has traditionally been the closest ally of secretive North Korea, but ties have been frayed by Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and China’s backing of tough UN sanctions in response.

    China’s Foreign Ministry cited Kim in a lengthy statement as telling Xi that the situation on the Korean peninsula was starting to improve.

    This, he said is because North Korea had taken the initiative to ease tensions and put forward proposals for peace talks.

    “It is our consistent stand to be committed to denuclearisation on the peninsula, in accordance with the will of late President Kim Il Sung and late General Secretary Kim Jong Il,” Kim Jong Un said, according to the statement.

    He said North Korea is willing to talk with the U.S. and hold a summit between the two countries.

    “The issue of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula can be resolved, if South Korea and the U. S. respond to our efforts with goodwill, create an atmosphere of peace and stability while taking progressive and synchronous measures for the realisation of peace,” Kim said.

    Kim Jong Un’s predecessors, grandfather Kim Il Sung and father Kim Jong Il, both publicly promised not to pursue nuclear weapons but secretly continued to develop the programs, culminating in the North’s first nuclear test in 2006 under Kim Jong Il.

    The North had said in past failed talks aimed at dismantling its nuclear programme that it could consider giving up its arsenal if the U. S. removed its troops from South Korea and withdrew its so-called nuclear umbrella of deterrence from South Korea and Japan.

    Many analysts and former negotiators believe this still constitutes North Korea’s stance on denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and remain deeply skeptical Kim is willing to give up the nuclear weapons his family has been developing for decades.

    At first wrapped in secrecy, the announcement of Kim Jong Un’s visit soon became the third-most discussed topic on China’s Twitter-like Weibo microblogging site, although many state media outlets blocked their comments sections.

    Widely read Chinese state-run newspaper the Global Times praised the meeting as proving naysayers about Beijing-Pyongyang relations wrong.

    “China and North Korea maintaining their friendly relations provides a positive force for the whole region and promotes strategic stability in northeast Asia,” it said in an editorial.

    Billed as an unofficial trip, Kim’s appearance in Beijing contained almost all the trappings of a state visit, complete with an honor guard and banquet at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

    Kim and Xi also met at the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where Kim Il Sung planted a tree in 1959 that still stands.

    China briefed Trump on Kim’s visit and the communication included a personal message from Xi to Trump, the White House said in a statement.

    “The U. S. remains in close contact with our allies South Korea and Japan.

    “We see this development as further evidence that our campaign of maximum pressure is creating the appropriate atmosphere for dialogue with North Korea,” the White House said.

    A top Chinese diplomat, Politburo member Yang Jiechi, will brief officials, including President Moon Jae-in, in Seoul on Thursday about Xi’s meeting with Kim Jong Un, according to the presidential office in Seoul.

    Kim told a banquet hosted by Xi the visit was intended to “maintain our great friendship and continue and develop our bilateral ties at a time of rapid developments on the Korean peninsula”, according to KCNA.

    Xi had accepted an invitation “with pleasure” from him to visit North Korea, KCNA said.

    However, China’s statement made no mention of Xi accepting an invitation, saying only that Xi pledged to keep frequent contacts with Kim through the exchange of visits and sending special envoys and letters to each other.

    China had largely sat on the sidelines as Pyongyang improved its relations with Seoul, prompting worry in Beijing that it was no longer a central player in the North Korean issue, reinforced by Trump’s subsequent announcement of his proposed meeting with Kim Jong Un in May.

    Improving ties between North Korea and China would be a positive sign before the planned summits involving the two Koreas and the United States, a senior South Korean official said on Tuesday.

    Kim Jong Il met then-president Jiang Zemin in China in 2000 before a summit between the two Koreas in June that year.

    That visit was seen at the time as reaffirmation of close ties with Beijing. (Reuters/NAN)

  • Buhari congratulates Xi Jinping on re-election

     

    President Muhammadu Buhari has congratulated the Chinese President Xi Jinping on his re-election as the President of the Peoples Republic of China.

    In a letter personally signed by him, the Nigerian leader praised his Chinese counterpart for his wisdom and vision.

    “On behalf of the Government and people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, I congratulate you most sincerely on your re-election as the President of the Peoples Republic of China.

    “Your re-election is an indication of the trust and confidence reposed in you by the people of China on your ability to bring your vision and wisdom to bear in the conduct of national and global affairs,” he said.

    President Buhari also looked forward to increased cooperation between China and Nigeria on one hand and China and Africa on the other hand.

    “It is my firm belief that your re-election will also bolster the existing mutually benefiting partnership between the Peoples Republic of China and Nigeria.

    “I look forward to meeting Your Excellency at the forthcoming Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Beijing Summit in September 2018. I am confident that it will be a great success and good opportunity to draw up new levels of partnership between Africa and China,” President Buhari said.

     

  • Africa seems oblivious whilst US sounds the alarm on China

    Former US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, visited Nigeria this week after issuing a warning about the dangers of Chinese loans to African countries. It seems rich coming from the top US envoy in the era of Donald Trump’s “America First” and considering that nearly two-third of Africans take a positive view of China in Africa according to a recent Afrobarometer survey. Tillerson’s intervention should not be lightly dismissed. The pessimistic picture he and others paint of China’s expanding footprint in Africa is admittedly a skewed one. Still, they point to well-founded concerns about some unhealthy habits underpinning Sino-Africa relations.

    Well-meaning Africans should welcome Chinese investments. Nowhere is the need more apparent than in Africa’s strategic power sector where current levels of investment significantly lag fast growing needs. Nevertheless, a closer reading of this sector also exposes how China instrumentally tailors its investments to further narrow advantages whilst ignoring inconvenient truths about sustainability and the environment. Deconstructing the Chinese-Africa “partnership” on energy offers a much-needed corrective to both the distorted lens that Beijing employs to view its own Africa role and Mr Tillerson’s thinly disguised anxiety over China’s growing influence there.

    First, it is useful to distinguish between China’s commitment of capital to the energy (upstream) and power (downstream) sectors in Africa. The latter usefully focuses on the power generation and distribution opportunities that Africa needs to upscale towards unleashing its latent productive capacities whilst capturing more of the local energy resources into domestic value chains. It contrasts with the upstream energy sector investments which primarily aim to open up resources for export to China and other global markets.

    Angola’s case is illustrative here. It attracted a miniscule share of China’s $22.3bn loan to African power projects (out of a total $34.8bn investment committed to energy as a whole since 2000). China’s investment into Angola has been predominantly through the China Sonangol “Queensway” syndicate, which is heavily focused on upstream oil extraction. In what is perhaps the most iconic of these new Chinese “partnerships” in Africa, the world’s manufacturing powerhouse and Africa’s second largest energy producer have failed to translate their growing engagement into any appreciable improvement in Angola’s manufacturing capacity. Little wonder then that the country continues to import more than 70% of its consumer goods needs, with little in the way of domestic production capacity even for the most basic of consumables.

    The second point relates to the first, and is clearly reflected in the hydro-electric bias in Chinese power investments in Nigeria, Uganda and others. Hydro is admittedly a clean source of energy, but research suggests that it is decreasingly price competitive relative to other greener sources such as solar. Hydro requires huge capital outlay, with potentially serious fiscal implications for countries taking on concessional Chinese loans that need to be repaid in future. Also, China’s significant capacity and know-how is being rolled out in Africa at a rapid pace that belies the Asian giant’s pivots to greener energy technology such as solar and fuel cells in its home market. It has in some reckoning recently overtaken the US in clean energy technology. This lends credence to those who fret that China avails Africans of power sector loans to find outlet for its own overcapacity in dam building. Typically, there is an overwhelming reliance on Chinese workers and very low absorption of African labour into most such Chinese-funded hydro projects.

    Third, with the increasing water stress such as along Africa’s Nile basin, which is stoking tension between Egypt and Ethiopia for example, critics argue that China’s dam-building activities pay scant regard to environmental impact. This mirrors the criticisms of China’s own giant Three Gorges dam and the attempts to replicate it in Africa such as through the Ethiopian Grand Renaissance dam that is also Chinese-funded. Such a major water-intensive project has the potential to provoke serious environmental challenges, not to mention the stoking of geopolitical tension with neighbours also dependent on the Nile waters.

    In Nigeria, Chinese state lenders have shown serious interest in major dam-building projects such as in the Mambilla pleateau of central Nigeria where inter-communal clashes over arable and pastoral lands led to the killing of 20 persons in just one single incident in early March 2018. China is responsible for providing 85% of the $5.8bn cost of the Mambilla hydroelectric project. It is interesting that this significant investments in Nigerian hydro schemes occur against the backdrop of China’s relative lack of success in dominating Nigeria’s oil and gas production on the same scale it has managed in Angola for instance. Beijing should show more interest in gauging externalities even whilst continuing to demonstrate strong commitments to supporting development-oriented projects across Africa. Unlike the Obama-inspired US Power Africa initiative which aims to deliver an additional 30,000 megawatt of electricity to Africa through primarily green sources (now currently championed by Mr Tillerson’s State Department), China is far from committing unequivocally to back Africa’s transition to the green energy that China itself now covets.

    The import of all of these is not to deny the potential or even the concrete benefits that China’s energy partnership can unleash in Africa, especially at a time that western backed lenders have drastically scaled down their own financial support to key projects. The real urgency is that African leaders must become less supine, pushing for a more equal relationship, and nudging current and future deals to deliver more for Africa. This should help to create local jobs even whilst working to reorient China’s overall lending so that Africa ultimately becomes more self-sufficient and primed to participate in emerging clean energy technologies. Here too, Africa has unparalleled potential from abundant sunshine to wind to the platinum required for fuel cell catalyst, etc.

    Beijing and its African partners urgently need to appreciate the folly of rehashing the west’s historical failure and parochialism in Africa. A new Africa-China orientation requires a coherent pushback by African governments against the lop-sidedness highlighted by the China sceptics such as Secretary Tillerson. He has been scathing in his assessment of China’s Africa engagement on his latest tour of African capitals. China for all its protestation will do well to heed such advice, regardless of the provenance. Unless fundamentally revamped, China’s investments as currently structured will fail disastrously to strengthen African partners or lay the foundation for local ownership and long-term sustainability. A relationship of intertwined futures and equal partnership – of the type that China trumpets – must meet these key tests at the very least.

    By: Dr Ola Bello, Executive Director, Good Governance Africa (GGA). He holds MPhil and doctoral degrees from the University of Cambridge

  • U.S, China and Africa: Issues in Tillerson’s visit

    Before his departure on his current five-nation African tour, U.S Secretary of State, Mr. Rex Tillerson delivered a lecture at George Mason University, Virginia on the outline of the vision and issues of Africa-U.S cooperation. Among many other issues, he grudgingly admitted that “Chinese investment does have the potential to address Africa’s infrastructure gap” but added a curious caveat that “its (China) approach has led to mounting debt and few, if any jobs in most countries”.

    Not only does this fly in the face of reality, it leaves one wondering if Tillerson was adequately or properly briefed on issues of China-Africa cooperation.

    Last year, in June 2017, a prestigious U.S –based global management consulting firm, Mckinsey & Co issued a report of its elaborate filed research on China/Africa with a title of Dance of the Lion and dragons: How are Africa and China emerging, and how will the partnership evolve? On page 40 of the highly rated report, it observed that “a walk through China factory or construction site almost anywhere in Africa will confirm what our research finds,” that “Chinese enterprises overwhelming employ local workers. At the more than 1,000 companies we surveyed, 89 percent employees were African, adding up to more than 300, 000 jobs for African workers. Scaled up across the more than 10,000 Chinese firms in Africa, these numbers suggest that Chinese-owned business employ several million Africans.”

    Continuing, the report said “private companies and SOEs across industries in the eight countries we studied had majority-local workers. In trade, for example, the workforce is 82 percent African, in manufacturing, it is 95 percent African, and comparing public and private enterprises, SOEs employ an 81 percent African workforce, and private enterprises employ a 92 percent African workforce.” According to Mckinsey & Co, “the reason for the bias toward local labour is not hard to understand; employing Africans lead to lower overall cost” and referring to one Chinese construction company supervisor it interviewed, the report quoted as saying that “even though Chinese workers tend to be more productive, it is now five times more expensive to bring a Chinese worker to Africa than it is to hire locally.”

    This report of a foremost and prestigious American consulting management firm would not have escaped the attention of the meticulous and intelligent U.S Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and his horde of advisers in the U.S state department. For why Tillerson chooses to disparage facts in favour of ideological hankerings is best known to the former oilman who is not at all, a stranger to Africa in his “former life,” as he put it at the George Mason University speech, hawking outright lies and slander to tarnish China-Africa cooperation is not new and hardly makes any impression in Africa.

    In 1991, a former U.S Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in a New York Times report accused China of using convict labour in the Republic of Benin and later it was picked up by the British Daily Mail report in 2008. Without any foundation in fact, the report was a sheer fabrication and evidently did not to harm soaring China-Africa relations.

    As Secretary of State, Tillerson pointed out, U.S-Africa relations is longstanding and has been buoyed by former President Jimmy Carter visits to Liberia and Nigeria in 1978 where he announced that “our nation has now turned in an unprecedented way toward Africa”. And in contemporary times, according to Secretary Tillerson, “that turning continues” as “our country’s security and economic prosperity are linked with Africa’s like never before,” and “will only intensify in the coming decades.”

    As he sees it, Africa by the year, 2030, will represent about one-quarter of the world’s workforce. And by the year 2050, the population of the continent is expected to double to more than 2.5 billion people – with 70% of them under the age of 30.” And secondly, according to him, Africa is experiencing significant growth. The World Bank estimates that six of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world this year will be African,” and narrowing to down to Nigeria, Mr Rex Tillerson said that “for context, by the year 2050, Nigeria will have a population larger than the United States and an economy larger than Australia’s” and added that “to understand where the world is going, one must understand that Africa is a significant part of the future. African countries will factor more and more into numerous global security and development challenges, as well as expansive opportunities for economic growth and influence.”

    With such robust view and understanding of the strategic potential of Africa, the United States of America whose state department or foreign ministry created its Africa Bureau in 1958, should readily mean business by engaging Africa more productively than into a battle-ground for ideological contestations by the unsolicited and false alarm of so-called China’s “predatory practices”. As former Head of State, Murtala Muhammed affirmed in 1976 that “Africa has come of age, and it’s no longer under the orbit of any extra continent power,” in response to the earlier letter of the U.S President, Gerald Ford on how Africa should steer clear of the former USSR and Cuba influence on the matter of then, Angolan independence. The Nigerian leader warned then, that “for too long has it been presumed that the Africa needs outside “experts” to tell him who are his friends and who are his enemies,” and affirmed that “the time has come when we should make it clear that we can decide for our self, that we know our own interests and how to protect those interests; that we are capable of resolving African problems without presumptuous lessons in ideological dangers, which, more often than not have no relevance for us, nor for the problem at hand.”

    Tillerson’s current anti-China rhetoric is more likely to meet the same fate as former President Gerald Ford’s in 1976. The fact is that Africa is open to partnership with any country or region in the world that shows respect to her.

    China-Africa relations is not perfect but is working and delivering tangible results. It is a work in progress and has established a mechanism for routine consultations and dialogue. Through the mechanism of dialogue and consultation, instituted in the Forum on China-African Cooperation (FOCAC), both sides express their concerns and work through consultation and consensus to drive a process of mutual benefits and win-win cooperation.

    China has also offered another meaningful platform and mechanism, the Belt and Road International Cooperation to engage global development and build a community of shared future for all mankind. The United States with her numerous advantages of a lone super-power, can leverage the Belt and Road mechanism to deepen her engagement to the core global developmental issues which are of concern to Africa, but whose neglect are the reasons for the security concerns which Washington seems perennially obsessed.

    On the occasion of the U.S Secretary of State visit to Africa, Washington should burnish its solid Africa credentials after all, it has a sizeable population of Africa-origin and engage more usefully in sectors that are mutually productive and meaningful to both sides.

    China has consistently said it is keen to engage other interested international partners in Africa and therefore, the U.S does not need to revive the outdated Cold War rhetoric about China in Africa but to engage in a framework that brings about mutual benefits to all parties.

     

    • Onunaiju is Director, Centre for China Studies, CCS, Utako, Abuja.

     

  • France 2018: Falconets draw Germany, China, Haiti

    France 2018: Falconets draw Germany, China, Haiti

    Nigeria’s Under 20 girls, Falconets have been drawn in the same pool as perennial foes Germany, China and Haiti in Group D of the 9th FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup taking place in France from August 5 to 24.

    At the Draw Ceremony held inside the Opera House, Rennes yesterday, Africa’s other flagbearers Ghana were thrown into the same Group A as hosts France, New Zealand and The Netherlands.

    Group B is headed by Korea DPR and also has England, Mexico and Brazil, while USA, Japan, Paraguay and Spain will battle it out in Group C.

    Two -time runners up Falconets begin their campaign with a huge test, against Germany at the Stade de Marville in Saint-Malo on August 6. Germany edged Nigeria to lift the trophy the two times Nigeria got to the championship final- in 2010 in Germany and 2014 in Canada.

    Chris Danjuma’s maidens will then be up against Haiti three days later at the same venue, before moving to Dinan-Léhon, where they play China at the Stade du Clos Gastel on August 13.

    Ghana will go up against hosts France in the tournament’s opening match in Vannes August 5. Concarneau is the other city that will host matches during the championship.

    Nigeria’s Group D opponents Haiti will be taking part in their first ever FIFA women’s tournament, and FIFA General Secretary Fatma Samoura said: “I’d like to send my regards and warmly congratulate Haiti, who just qualified for their first ever FIFA women’s tournament, on their remarkable road to France. Well done, girls, for taking this huge step.

    “It’s so encouraging to see these young girls pointing the way forward through football. For FIFA, increasing the participation of women in football is an imperative. The development of women’s football is at the top of our list of priorities in our strategy ‘FIFA 2.0: The Vision for Future’.”France will also host the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup finals.

     

  • China, UNAIDS launch zero discrimination social media campaign

    China, UNAIDS launch zero discrimination social media campaign

    The United Nations has launched its “Zero Discrimination” social media campaign in China this year, hoping to raise awareness of discrimination in the country.

    Nicholas Rosellini, UN Resident Coordinator in China, is encouraging Chinese citizens to participate in the campaign, by using drawings, pictures, gifs, audio and video to show support for the campaign in his speech at a news conference organised by UNAIDS China.

    “Everyone has the right to live a life free from discrimination regardless of HIV status, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion, nationality, ethnic origin, other personal characteristics or identification,’’ Rosellini said.

    Shen Jie, Deputy Secretary-General of the China Association of STD and AIDS Prevention and Control, called on governments, society and communities to “speak out for love” to help AIDS patients, especially children, to become braver and better embrace life.

    According to the National Centre for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention under the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, China recorded a total of 747,000 people with HIV as of September 2017.

    As of the end of June, about 542,000 HIV-positive people had received medical treatment and mortality was notably reduced.

    Xinhua/NAN

  • Iran to produce higher enriched uranium

    Iran to produce higher enriched uranium

    Iran said on Monday it could produce higher enriched uranium within two days if the United States quit a 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and six major powers, Tehran’s Arabic language al-Alam TV reported.

    “If America pulls out of the deal … Iran could resume its 20 per cent uranium enrichment in less than 48 hours,” Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, told al-Alam TV.

    Uranium refined to 20 per cent fissile purity is well beyond the 5 per cent normally required to fuel civilian nuclear power plants, though still well short of highly enriched, or 80 to 90 per cent, purity needed for a nuclear bomb.

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    Kamalvandi said the deal, under which Iran curbed its uranium enrichment to help ensure it was for peaceful purposes only and secured an end to financial sanctions in return – is not re-negotiable, as demanded by the United States.

    The deal’s European signatories – Germany, Britain and France, as well as Russia and China – are committed to preserving the agreement.

    The Iranian nuclear deal, internationally known as JCPOA, was signed in 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 (Russia, China, the U.S., Britain, France and Germany).

    Trump has threatened to scuttle the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal unless amendments are made to it.

    NAN