Koon Yew Yin 23 May 2020
When Donald Trump was elected as US President, I thought he would be able to make America great again with his long experience in doing business. All the recent past US Presidents were not businessmen. Managing a country is like managing thousands of business operations and conglomerates all over the country. Unless the management is efficient the company cannot make profit which is like blood to a human body. Without blood the body dies and without profit the company dies.
To reduce trade deficit, Trump immediately declared a trade war with China and imposed higher tariff on all import from China. Unfortunately, he did not realise that he was actually taxing the American consumers because most of the products sold in the super market such as Walmart and Kmart are Chinese made. While the trade dispute is still going on, he is finding other ways to punish China. His latest trick is to delist Chinese control companies from New York stock Exchange.
To make matter worse for China, the Senate overwhelmingly approved legislation Wednesday that could lead to Chinese companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc. being barred from listing on U.S. stock exchanges amid increasingly tense relations between the world’s two largest economies.
The bill, introduced by Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, and Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, was approved by unanimous consent and would require companies to certify that they are not under the control of a foreign government.
U.S. lawmakers have raised red flags over the billions of dollars flowing into some of China’s largest corporations, much of it from pension funds and college endowments in search of fat investment returns. Alarm has grown in particular that American money is bankrolling efforts by the country’s technology giants to develop leading positions in everything from artificial intelligence and autonomous driving to internet data collection.
Alibaba Group Holding Limited is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology with an annual revenue of US$56 billion in 2019.
Baidu, Inc. is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence, headquartered in Beijing’s Haidian District. It is one of the largest AI and internet companies in the world with more than 100 billion CNY annual revenue.
Shares in some of the biggest U.S.-listed Chinese firms, including Baidu and Alibaba, plunged as soon as the announcement was made. Trump is actually hurting the shareholders who are mostly Americans.
Xingquan delisted from Bursa
This reminds me of Xingquan International Sports Holdings delisted from Bursa Malaysia for noncompliance with SC listing rules. The company failed to submit audited annual report. CIMB was the underwriter at Rm 1.60 for its IPO and the company raised more than Rm 100 million. CIMB invited me to visit its factories in Xiamen, China. I have more than 100 million shares and I have engaged a legal firm called Chan & Associates to recover my loss. Unfortunately, this is another one of my bad investments.
Trump has lost his way. He is like a blind man groping in the dark.
More than 100,000 coronavirus cases were reported to the World Health Organization in the previous 24 hours, “the most in a single day since the outbreak began,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 20th May 2020. Currently there are 5,234,000 Covid 19 cases and 335,730 deaths in the world and these 2 figures are increasing at an alarming rate.
Malaysia has 7,137 cases and 115 deaths. Based on our population of 32.3 million, we have one of lowest cases per capita.
China has 82,971 cases and 4,634 deaths. The daily death toll is less than 10.
Currently the Covid 19 virus is spreading like wild fire in America. US has the largest number, 1,623,400 Covid 19 cases and 96,523 deaths in the world. The daily death toll is about 3,000. Due to lockdown and social distancing, the jobless claims keep climbing to hit 38.6 million since lockdowns began.
Trump is so desperate that he continues to blame China for spreading the virus to America. In view of the coming November election, Trump has been bashing China to win more votes as most Americans do not like China.
The following is the opinion of Emeritus Professor Wang Gungwu.
Professor Wang Gungwu stepped down as chair of the East Asian Institute in June 2018. He was born in Surabaya, Indonesia on 9 October 1930. He grew up in Ipoh, Perak. After completing secondary school in Ipoh’s Anderson School, he furthered his study at the National Central University in Nanking, China.
Former IJM Corporation Chairman, Tan Sri Ahmad Azizzuddin was a classmate of Professor Wang in Anderson School, Ipoh.
The Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed anti-China and anti-Chinese sentiments around the world. Within China, Chinese nationalist feelings have also risen sharply. How will the world’s perception of China and the Chinese develop after this? How will China see the US and the West?
Most people agree that the Chinese authorities did eventually move fast to control Covid-19 and were remarkably successful in limiting the spread within the PRC. But the world also knows that the system was slow to report the epidemic’s seriousness, that the warnings were late, and valuable time was lost.
People in East Asia were surprised by how poorly some advanced countries in western Europe handled the epidemic. In particular, the confusing developments in the US were truly astonishing. The situation is still evolving. It is not clear how much further the US will politicise the issues to place the blame entirely on China and how much more anti-Chinese feelings that might arouse. Popular anger inside the PRC has sometimes forced Beijing to overreact: that might please some Chinese, but such overreactions do little for China’s efforts to make new friends.
There is little doubt that many Chinese now believe that the West has lost its way and the US is not fit to lead the world. But it does not follow that other countries see China replacing the US in its dominant role. The more nationalistic the Chinese people become, the less attractive their country will become.
