Cuba has big stake in U.S. election after Trump's trashing of detente



By Nelson Acosta, Sarah Marsh




HAVANA (Reuters) - Pensioner Esperanza Chacón, 89, prays every day for Donald Trump to lose the U.S. presidential election. Like many Cubans, her livelihood has been threatened by Trump’s tightening of the U.S. trade embargo on the Communist-run island.


A vintage car passes by the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, October 30, 2020. Picture taken October 30, 2020. REUTERS/Alexandre Meneghini

Chacon’s son in Miami sends her the equivalent of $60 to $100 a month, to supplement her state pension worth just $12. But the Trump administration’s latest Cuba sanction, unveiled last month, looks set to cut off remittances.

“He’s ending my ability to live and feed myself, at this age!” said Chacon. “So I’m praying every day he doesn’t win the elections.”

Cuba has more at stake in the upcoming U.S. election than most countries in Latin America as the Trump administration has focused much of its foreign policy in the region on measures aimed, it says, at bringing about democracy in the country and its socialist ally Venezuela.

Trump unraveled a detente with Cuba started by former President Barack Obama, a Democrat, that had fostered remittances and travel to the Caribbean isle, as well as foreign investment and the private sector.

The Republican president reverted instead to a decades-old U.S. policy of choking the one-party state’s already inefficient state-run economy to force reform.

Democratic challenger Joe Biden - the vice president during Obama’s attempts to engage with Cuba - has promised to promptly reverse Trump policies that “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.”

“The U.S. election results are enormously important for Cuba because they will make the difference between continuing Trump’s policy of trying to starve Cuba into submission and Biden’s policy of restarting engagement,” said William LeoGrande, a Cuba expert and professor of government at Washington’s American University.

The Trump administration has dealt blows to tourism, foreign investment and Cuba’s energy supply by tightening restrictions on U.S. travel, sanctioning oil shipments from Venezuela and activating a law allowing litigation against firms “trafficking” in expropriated properties, among other measures.

“Most the people who stayed at our bed and breakfast were Americans so reservations were down some 40 to 50 percent by the time the pandemic hit,” said Jesus Manuel Rivero. His Casa Flamboyan B&B ranks No. 1 in Havana on Tripadvisor.

Washington has also attacked Cuba’s medical missions in a campaign that saw its allies ousting them, hitting the country’s top source of hard currency. Trump says the Cuban government trafficks in the doctors, keeping them in slave-like conditions. Havana has strongly denied the allegation.

All this has worsened Cuba’s cash crunch. The embargo cost it a record $5.6 billion over the last year, the government has said, and exacerbated shortages of even basic goods like food.

Under Trump, the reduction of the U.S. embassy in Havana to skeletal staffing and closure of the consular office after diplomats complained of a mysterious illness has also made it tough for Cubans to get visas to visit their family in the United States.

A Biden presidency would likely not only reverse Trump’s policies but also resume dialogue on matters of mutual interest like health and security that had fizzled out of late, said Emily Mendrala, who coordinated congressional discussions on Cuba policy during a stint in Obama’s National Security Council and now runs the Center for Democracy in the Americas.

Cuban dissidents, meanwhile, are divided over the U.S. election. Some hope for a Biden win, saying engagement deprives their government of an excuse for its economic woes or repression.

Others, like Jose Daniel Ferrer, leader of the island’s largest opposition group, the Patriotic Union of Cuba, say that too much leniency toward the Cuban government as - in his view - under Obama emboldens it to crack down as it wishes.

“Whoever wins the Nov. 3 elections must listen to the calls for freedom of the Cuban people and other oppressed peoples,” he said.

‘Non-scalable’ fence to be erected around White House before election

Martin Pengelly in New York and Victoria Bekiempis 

Federal authorities were expected to re-erect a “non-scalable” fence around the White House on Monday, a day before a presidential election many fear may lead to mass protest, civil unrest and even armed insurrection

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© Photograph: Cheriss May/Reuters A man holds up his fist at a protest against Donald Trump in Lafayette Square Park across the street from the White House on 5 September 2020.

Amid speculation that the election result will not be immediately known and signs Republicans will either declare victory early or mount legal challenges if Donald Trump appears to have lost, multiple news outlets reported the White House plan, citing anonymous sources.

“The White House on lockdown,” the NBC News White House correspondent, Geoff Bennett, wrote on Twitter on Sunday.

“A federal law enforcement source tells NBC that beginning tomorrow, crews will build a ‘non-scalable’ fence to secure the [White House] complex, Ellipse and Lafayette Square. Two hundred and fifty national guardsmen have been put on standby, reporting to metro police officials.”

The barricade will form a square perimeter around the White House, on 15th Street, Constitution Avenue, 17th Street and H street.

Fencing was put up during the summer, amid national protests against police brutality and systemic racism in the aftermath of the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd, an African American man. According to CNN, the new “unscalable” barricade is the same type of fence.

In the summer, amid protests near the White House at which federal agents confronted and assaulted mostly peaceful demonstrators, it was reported that Trump was taken to a protective bunker under the executive mansion. Trump insisted the visit was brief and for inspection purposes.

The summer protests also saw confrontations between law enforcement and protesters, and widespread looting, in other major cities. As the election looms, stores in New York, Washington and elsewhere have been boarding up windows in case of trouble.

Law enforcement agencies are preparing to deploy. Patrick Burke, executive director of the Washington DC Police Foundation, recently told CNN: “If there’s no winner, you will see significant deployments of officers at all levels across the capital.”

In New York, the police commissioner, Dermot Shea, sent a memo to department members in mid-October, indicating that the majority of officers must report to duty in uniform – and be ready to deploy, including officers not normally in uniform, including detectives. The department said it expected protests could become larger and more frequent into early 2021, NBC New York reported.

The NYPD has told businesses in midtown Manhattan to ramp up security in the event of mass protests, according to the Wall Street Journal. There and elsewhere in New York City, such as the SoHo shopping district downtown, windows were smashed and stores were looted this summer.

Curbed noted that other cities, including San Francisco and Washington, saw businesses boarding up windows as a protective measure.

Thousands continue protests against Indonesia’s new jobs law

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Thousands of workers in Indonesia on Monday continued their protests against the country’s new jobs law that critics say will erode labour rights and weaken environmental protections.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Confederation of Indonesian Trade Unions, or KSPI, said thousands of workers from cities in West Java and East Java provinces representing 32 labour unions took part in a mass rally near the Presidential Palace and constitutional Court in Jakarta.

Protests also took place in other parts of the country, including Yogyakarta, Banda Aceh, Medan and Makassar.

The protest in Jakarta, the capital, ended peacefully after labour union representatives delivered a written statement to the constitutional Court.

“We demand that the constitutional Court conduct a judicial review of the Job Creation Law, to really pay attention to the aspirations that have been voiced by millions of Indonesian workers," KSPI President Said Iqbal said in the statement.

He had said Sunday that the demands are to cancel the new law and continue to see increases in the minimum wage in 2021.

The Job Creation Law, which was approved by Parliament on Oct. 5, is expected to substantially change Indonesia’s labour system and natural resources management. It amended 79 previous laws and is intended to improve bureaucratic efficiency as part of efforts by President Joko Widodo’s administration to attract more investment to the country.

The demonstrators say the law will hurt workers by reducing severance pay, removing restrictions on manual labour by foreign workers, increasing the use of outsourcing and converting monthly salaries to hourly wages.

After the law was passed, workers and students in several cities in Indonesia started demonstrations demanding that Widodo revoke the legislation.

In an interview with The Associated Press in July 2019, Widodo said he would push ahead with sweeping and potentially unpopular economic reforms, including the more business-friendly labour law, because he is no longer constrained by politics in his final term.

Edna Tarigan, The Associated Press

A cafe in Yemen run by women, for women

By Reuters Staff

MARIB (Reuters) - When Um Feras realised there were no leisure spaces for women in her city in Yemen, she founded her own cafe and hopes to change attitudes about women-led businesses.

“There were no places for women to gather comfortably, no places belonging to the female community: where the team from administration to the youngest employee is female,” she said from the Morning Icon cafe she set up in April last year in Marib, central Yemen.

Traditional, conservative attitudes held by many locally against women working outside the home mean her project is new and strange for some people, Um Feras said.

“The word ‘cafe’ can be associated with negative ideas and convictions ... Every new idea will have its supporters and opponents,” she said, adding she wants to lead by example to show that women can run enterprises.

Wadad, a medical student and cafe customer, said she was drawn to the cafe’s internet connection: “There is space for women in general, amid the the poor internet network in Marib and the limited available spaces for female students.”

Marib boomed into a bustling city at the start of Yemen’s almost six-year war as people fled fighting elsewhere. Running a business is not easy in a country battered by conflict, disease and an increasingly severe economic crisis.

Um Feras imports most of her coffee and drinks. Maintaining quality amid rising prices and fluctuating currency rates has been a real challenge, she said. But she aspires to expand into a larger leisure spot for women and children.


Reporting by Nusibah al-Moalimi and Abdulrahman al-Ansi; Writing by Lisa Barrington

How to test Descartes’ evil genius hypothesis in labs

Computer scientists, physicists and neuroscientists are on the verge of creating the empirical conditions to test French philosopher’s famous thought experiment

Alex Lo
Published: 2 Nov, 2020

“I shall then suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity; I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things; I shall remain obstinately attached to this idea, and if by this means it is not in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power [i.e. suspend my judgment], and with firm purpose avoid giving credence to any false thing, or being imposed upon by this arch deceiver, however powerful and deceptive he may be.”

Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation 1, Rene Descartes

Last year, two groups of US neuroscientists independently published two stunning papers that led to sensational news headlines like “Frankenswine” and “Aporkalypse”.

One team at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, assembled fresh brain cells or neurons taken from pigs that had just been killed, and thought they detected coordinated waves of electrical activity that might possibly indicate consciousness. The researchers were so shocked they anaesthetised the brain cells as a precaution and reported the experiments to US authorities.

An outside neurologist was brought in, who thought they had misread their electroencephalogram (EEG) used to detect electrical activities in neurons. Still all parties involved thought the EEG activity was possible in principle and that the Yale team was right to shut down the experiment.

Instead of pig neurons, another group, based at the University of California, San Diego, was experimenting with hundreds of miniature human brains, called brain organoids, that were grown from human stem cells.

Floating in Petri dishes, the tiny brains that were the size of sesame seeds really did produce coordinated waves of electrical activity that mimic those recorded in premature babies. The team found that the waves continued for months before the experiments were shut down. This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The San Diego team has experimented connecting the brain organoids to control walking robots and to develop more humanlike artificial intelligence systems.


Creating a conscious brain in a jar, once a philosophical thought experiment inspired by Descartes and the sci-fi plot of a famous episode in the 1960s Star Trek TV series, may well become a reality one day. Star Trek, by the way, has had an uncanny record in predicting future inventions, such as mobile phones that could be used everywhere on a planet.

Meanwhile, some computer scientists and physicists have been conceptualising experiments that may prove or disprove whether we are all nothing more than a computer simulation. They are responding to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s argument, first published in 2003, that logically and statistically, we are far more likely to be simulated than real.

The experimental design ideas, though still not carried out, point out that there are usually glitches in any computer program. It may be possible to look at, say, telltale signs of glitches in simulated cosmic rays, or slight anomalies that depart from the fixed values of some universal constants in physical laws.

Such ideas have been alarming to some people. Last year, The New York Times ran an opinion piece, a cri de coeur asking scientists not to carry out such physical experiments. What would happen if we find out we really are just computer simulations? Wouldn’t societies and humanity itself lose all sense of purpose and collapse? Wouldn’t the experimenters – our God or gods – just pull the plug and wipe us out since they might decide there was no point to continue with the simulation experiment?


I find the egoism of thinking that if there were simulators out there, they came up with us 

Lisa Randall

Many scientists and philosophers think such concerns are overblown. Just because some experiments may reproduce EEG responses doesn’t mean the clumps of brain cells could be conscious. And how would scientists, or anyone else, know if they were?

In an interview with Nature, the premier research publication journal, Anil Seth, a prominent cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, says scientists and philosophers don’t even have an agreed upon theory or definition of consciousness, so it’s misleading to talk about assembled brain cells becoming “conscious”.

“Confidence largely depends on what theory we believe in,” he said. “It’s a circularity.”

The late Hilary Putnam, one of the great contemporary philosophers, once advanced an elegant argument stating we can’t be “brains in a vat” because if we were, we would not know what being “a brain in a vat” means in our language.

It must be noted that unlike the simulation hypothesis, brain organoids have many practical uses, such as testing drugs for neurodegenerative diseases.

Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, has said it’s puzzling so many serious scholars are taking up the simulation hypothesis, whether for or against.

“I find the egoism of thinking that if there were simulators out there, they came up with us,” she said. “The self-centredness to this whole thing is kind of hilarious.”

Randall might be on to something. For thousands of years, people have believed that of all the things that Allah, Yahweh, Elohim or whatever you want to call the great creator, could have created, he/she/it/they chose to create us. That’s kind of ridiculous.

Many of us can no longer believe in the Bible or the Koran. But our religious impulse is still there. An all-powerful simulator is just another word for creator. The most speculative areas of contemporary science, empirically untested or untestable, are a back door for religious urges, disguised as hypotheses, to slip in.



Alex Lo has been a Post columnist since 2012, covering major issues affecting Hong Kong and the rest of China. A journalist for 25 years, he has worked for various publications in Hong Kong and Toronto as a news reporter and editor. He has also lectured in journalism at the University of Hong Kong.

Are we butterflies or computer games?

Elon Musk says we are almost certain to be computer simulations, but a new paper argues we are statistically more likely to be living in the real world, after all

Alex Lo
Published:  28 Sep, 2020

“Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.”

– the Zhuangzi

We are all nothing more than a computer game, according to tech billionaire Elon Musk. As he famously put it during a conference in 2016, “There’s a one in billions chance we’re in base reality.”

Personally, I prefer being a butterfly than a computer simulation. But with that kind of probability, can’t we just say with almost certainty that we are nothing more than computer sims? Is that why Musk often says strange things and behaves strangely? If you are convinced your life is just a clever lifelike simulation, would you behave differently from before? Or would that be part of your programmed awareness as well?

But before you go and make any big life changes, you may want to know someone has come up with a credible and very clever calculation that significantly – seriously! – lowers the chances of our being simulations to less than 50 per cent. Well, still quite high, still very disturbing, but a lot better than Musk’s odds!


The paper, “A Bayesian approach to the simulation argument”, is by David Kipping, an astronomer at Columbia University, that was published last month in the MDPI journals.

He wrote: “The probability that we are sims is in fact less than 50 per cent, tending towards that value in the limit of an infinite number of simulations.”

“An infinite number of simulations” refers to Musk’s billions of simulated worlds. Musk’s argument is in turn based on the famous paper, “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”, published by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003, which started the current controversy among brainy geeks and fans of the Matrix sci-fi series.

Bostrom presents three possibilities: (1) humans will never achieve a simulated reality; (2) we achieve the technology but don’t use it; (3) we achieve and use it.

We can probably all agree that (2) is highly unlikely. We humans have always used whatever technology invented, however terrible, like the atomic bomb. Musk provides arguments against (1) and for (3).

Against (1), he says: “The strongest argument for us being in a simulation, probably being in a simulation is the following: 40 years ago, we had pong, two rectangles and a dot,” Musk said. “That is what games were. Now 40 years later we have photorealistic 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality, if you assume any rate of improvement at all, the games will become indistinguishable from reality.”


Actually, the strongest argument – that’s Musk’s “one in billions” – lies with (3). Once beings in the “real” world or what these guys call “base reality”, have achieved true simulation tech, it will spawn not one but many, which in turn will create more and more sims, possibly at an exponential rate. Hence, Musk’s “one in billions” and Kipping’s “tending towards that value in the limit of an infinite number of simulations”.

In other words, you and I, statistically, are far more likely to inhabit one of those billions of sims than the “one and only” base reality/real world.

“If post-human civilisations eventually have both the capability and desire to generate such Bostrom-like simulations,” Kipping wrote, summarising his opponents’ argument, “then the number of simulated realities would greatly exceed the one base reality, ostensibly indicating a high probability that we do not live in said base reality”.

Bayesian statistics allows for the updating of new information to determine the probability based on the latest input.

Kipping’s Bayesian approach allows him to calculate the probability of us being sims when we have not yet mastered or used the technology – Bostrom’s (1) and (2), which is also the situation we are presumably in now – as well as the probability of us being sims once that technology becomes available and is used.

It’s interesting to note that Kipping makes a clever use of Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum in his calculations. That’s fitting, since Descartes’ “evil genius” thought experiment may be said to be the precursor of the sims argument. Kipping uses “I think, therefore I am” as the single one known datum that must exist in all and every possible simulated world as well as base reality.

His result, based on (1) and (2), as we report at the start, is that our chances of being sims are less than 50 per cent. But once we have achieved (3), that probability is reversed, meaning there is then a more than 50 per cent chance of us being sims.

Kipping’s odds are less disturbing than those of Musk and Bostrom, but hardly reassuring, that is, if you prefer to live in the real world. Perhaps this can be a Stephen King-type horror movie. Imagine you are a reporter interviewing a group of scientists who have just achieved a computer simulation powerful enough to resemble real life.

You really need to pause – because your chances of being a sim yourself in a computer programme has just risen considerably.

From all these readings, and you may add Plato’s famous allegory of the cave in the Republic, the Matrix movies and any number of postmodern theories that deny “reality” as such, you may think the West really suffers from an extreme case of epistemological anxiety or anguish. Consider those images: prisoners chained up inside a dark cave; an evil genius who uses “all his time, powers and energies” to deceive Descartes; humans kept alive in capsules and used as batteries …

Many people, over the ages, have compared the famous butterfly dream of the Zhuangzi to Plato’s cave and Descartes’s demon. Thematically, they are certainly comparable, but their literary tones are completely different. In the iconic classical Chinese planting, Zhuang Zhou is portrayed in a serene repose, dreaming of being a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zhou.

Zhuang Zhou or the butterfly is just having a pleasant dream.

China-US tension: Portugal feels Washington’s ire as Beijing comes wooing with an eye on strategic Azores


The Pentagon cut spending in Portugal as China stepped up with keen interest and investment
Former ambassador points to China-Portugal relationship going back hundreds of years but US says modern China seeks ‘malign influence’


Eduardo Baptista
Published: 10:00pm, 2 Nov, 2020

A US Air Force plane lands at the Lajes US airbase on the Azores island of Terceira.

 Photo: AFP via Getty Images

As the US-China rivalry intensifies around the world, European states have increasingly found themselves caught in the middle. The South China Morning Post looks at how different countries on the continent are responding and why, ranging from anti-China to China-friendly and those seeking to walk a line between Washington and Beijing. The first in the four-part series looks at Portugal.

When it comes to geography, Portugal is the EU member state physically closest to the United States. In diplomatic terms, however, the small Atlantic nation is the subject of an energetic economic courtship by Beijing, and Washington is not happy with Lisbon’s wandering eye.
With the US and China in open, strident attacks on each others’ policies, from trade to human rights, Washington’s ambassador to Portugal George Glass told local newspaper Expresso last month that the time had come for Lisbon to  “choose between its friends and allies, and China”.

The remarks annoyed Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva who countered that Portugal was a “reliable and credible” member of the three blocs it had long been associated with – the EU, Nato and the West.

In reality, American concerns about Beijing’s influence in Portugal predate the current hawkish policies of US President Donald Trump towards China. And those concerns are not just economic, they involve military strategy and Portugal’s Azores archipelago, a group of nine volcanic islands about 1,400km (870 miles) off the coast in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean.

The Azores today are better known for tourism, but in World War II they played a decisive role as a base for US and allied warships and aircraft. In the Cold War, the US used the islands to track Soviet submarines in the Atlantic, with the Lajes US airbase on the Azores island of Terceira vastly extending the range of military surveillance aircraft.

As military demands shifted though, in 2012 the Pentagon began to scale back Lajes, which is now referred to as a “ghost base”. Beijing soon came knocking.

In 2012, China’s premier at the time Wen Jiabao made a stopover at the Azores, followed in 2014 by President Xi Jinping to meet Portugual’s then deputy prime minister Paulo Portas on Terceira Island. Premier Li Keqiang visited two years later with Santos Silva.

“Washington has a bad habit of ignoring Lajes until a crisis erupts and we need it,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and currently a resident scholar at Washington-based think tank American Enterprise Institute.

“We have failed to recognise and respect just how important Portugal has been to Nato and the United States.”

The Azores visits of Beijing’s leaders and top diplomats dovetailed with China’s growing investment in Portugal, which was left with debt that exceeded its GDP and an unemployment rate of about 16 per cent following the global financial crisis in 2008.

While the European Union forced Lisbon to accept unpopular austerity measures in exchange for a debt bailout, Chinese state-owned companies pumped cash into some of Portugal’s key industries.

In 2011, China Three Gorges Corp beat several European conglomerates in the race for the Portuguese government’s stake in struggling Energias de Portugal (EDP), the nation’s largest power provider, offering €2.7 billion (US$3.2 billion) for 21.35 per cent of EDP’s shares. In 2018, Three Gorges proposed a takeover of EDP that was rejected last year by the energy company’s remaining shareholders.

Glass had spoken out against the takeover bid, stating the US would never allow the Chinese state-owned conglomerate to take over EDP’s assets in the US, where it is the third largest producer of energy from renewable sources.

“If China Three Gorges wants to proceed after this warning, the Trump administration has the power to dismantle EDP in the United States through the regulator for foreign investment,” Glass said in 2019.

The Azores are a popular tourist destination. Photo: Getty Images

Last month, Glass referred to that deal as the first warning shot in the US-China battle for influence over Portugal.

The second came when China set its sights on the Atlantic. In 2016, Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa said there was interest from Beijing to convert the US Lajes military base into a Chinese-run scientific research institute.

This set off alarm bells in Washington, with Republican Representative Devin Nunes, who is of Portuguese ancestry and the former chairman of the US Congress House Intelligence Committee, waging a campaign to not only fight the Pentagon spending cuts in the Azores, but rebuild the US presence at Lajes.

In a note sent to then secretary of defence Ashton Carter in 2016, Nunes urged Carter to see the Azores in the context of what he called China’s growing overseas military ambitions.

“China has spread its influence through similar infrastructure investments in Djibouti, Sri Lanka and elsewhere around the globe,” he said.

“It is now using the same tactics to establish a foothold in the Azores which, if successful, will be used for a logistics and intelligence hub that could ultimately be expanded for other military purposes, adjacent to critical US military facilities,” Nunes said.

“Effectively, we are divesting from billions of dollars worth of infrastructure at Lajes Field that is likely to end up in the Chinese government’s possession.”

Glass, who was appointed to the ambassador post after donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to Trump’s 2016 election campaign, said last year that the Lajes base was “fundamental” to Atlantic security.

As the debate about the Lajes base continues, Beijing is investing in the Portuguese mainland as a key part of its Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s ambitious plan to reshape the international order via a network of transport and trade links emanating from China.

In 2017, Chinese investment in Portugal totalled US$4.36 billion, or more than three times the US$1.26 billion from the US, according to OECD figures cited by the European Think-tank Network on China.

And it was not just Beijing-backed corporate spending. With Portugal offering a so-called
Golden Visa scheme that gives residency rights to individuals who invest a certain amount, there was a “great boom” in Chinese clients buying property between 2014 and 2016, said Nelson Santos, a Lisbon-based property agent.

Some buyers set up WeChat groups and seemed to want to outspend each other, he said.

“There was a client who would want a property for €600,000, so another in the group would then want to spend €700,000, and the next €800,000. It was all about who bought the biggest and most expensive,” Santos said.

As Europe’s westernmost country, Portugal’s airports and ports are a gateway into Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean, as well as a springboard into Atlantic trade routes and South America, or what the US considers its own backyard.

The port of Sines in the south of Portugal will start taking bids for a new €642 million container terminal in April next year and local media reports say Chinese shipping groups are expected to be front runners.

During the 2017 Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, Jorge Costa Oliveira, Portugual’s then secretary of state for internationalisation, said he hoped for “a maritime route to [the port of] Sines be included and, in addition, that the land rail Silk Road, which already goes from Chongqing to Madrid, also comes to Portugal”.

Connecting the Spanish capital to Portugal will stretch the belt and road as far westwards as it can go and provide the first and only contact point with the Atlantic Ocean.

Portugal’s former ambassador to China José Manuel Duarte de Jesus said the belt and road plans spoke to relations going back to the 16th century when Portuguese explorers established official ties with the Ming empire.

He said the trading networks developed between the Portuguese and Chinese empires were defined by multilateralism and that the Trump presidency’s disdain for such cooperation and “demonisation of China” was part of the problem.

“I think Portugal can make contributions when it comes to stopping the propagation of that demonisation at the level of the EU,” he said.

US ambassador Glass said Portugal should stop looking at China through the rose-spectacled prism of history.

“Portugal has been doing business with China for centuries and that is well accepted, but this is not the same China that it has dealt with in the last 500 years. This is a new China, with long-term plans for malign influence through economics, politics or other means,” he said.

Just a few days after the Glass interview with Expresso, the Portugal-China Chamber of Commerce waded in with its own interview in the same publication, calling the US ambassador’s comments “shameless”.

“American pressure against China is nothing new and has been increasing on a global scale,” its president Y Ping Chow said.

“We are confident Portugal’s government will continue to act with common sense. We trust the long history of [the] Portugal-China friendship and we will not be concerned with the words of the ambassador.”

Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute said Washington had not been a very good friend to Lisbon in recent years and that was a mistake. But he said other countries had signed up for belt and road projects and found themselves in massive debt to Beijing.

Lisbon officials should ask themselves “whether China would really respect Portugal any more than it does the targets of its debt diplomacy around the world and whether China would ever peacefully depart should Lisbon request”, he said. “Frankly, the answer to both is no.”

Portugal rejects US warning of sanctions over Chinese investment as rivalry heats up

US envoy said the country was part of a ‘battlefield’ between Washington and Beijing, and Lisbon would have to ‘choose between its allies and the Chinese’

President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa responded that ‘it is the representatives chosen by the Portuguese – and they alone – who decide on their destiny’

Keegan Elmer in Beijing
Published:  29 Sep, 2020


Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa shakes hands with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Lisbon in 2018. Washington’s ambassador in Lisbon described Portugal as part of a “battlefield” between the US and China. Photo: AFP

Lisbon has rebuffed a warning from the US ambassador that sanctions could be imposed on Portuguese companies with Chinese investment, the latest sign that rivalry between Washington and Beijing over Europe is intensifying.

Washington’s envoy in Lisbon also said Portugal would have to choose between the US and China.
It comes as the US ramps up pressure to keep Chinese firm Huawei Technologies out of its allies’ next-generation mobile networks – a key issue in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s six-day European tour this week.

Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa on Monday brushed off the US ambassador’s remarks.

“It’s an obvious question of principle that in Portugal it is the representatives chosen by the Portuguese – and they alone – who decide on their destiny, respecting the Constitution and the rights it gives them, like international law,” Rebelo de Sousa told Portuguese media.

01:06
Mike Pompeo urges US officials to beware China’s attempts at engagement

He was responding to comments by US ambassador George Glass that Portugal “has to choose between its allies and the Chinese” in an interview with Portuguese newspaper Expresso on Saturday.

Glass said  US undersecretary of state Keith Krach would provide further clarification on Portugal’s future relations with the US when he visited Lisbon this week.

He said Portuguese companies like builder Mota-Engil could be the target of US sanctions after it agreed to sell a 30 per cent stake to China Communications Construction Company.

Glass described Portugal as part of a “battlefield” between the US and China, and said that if the US did not have reliable partners in Portuguese telecoms networks it would change the way it interacted with Lisbon on security and defence.

Portuguese Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva (right) at a press briefing with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Lisbon last year. Photo: dpa

Foreign Minister Augusto Santos Silva also weighed in, saying such decisions would be made “in accordance with Portugal’s national interests” and in conjunction with the European Union consultation process.

“We know very clearly that, in certain aspects that have to do with national security issues or with defence systems in which Portugal is integrated, the evaluation criteria also incorporate these criteria,” the foreign minister told Portuguese media on Saturday.

The row has erupted as US Secretary of State Pompeo arrived in Greece on Monday for the first leg of a European tour that will also take in Italy, the Vatican and Croatia, with China’s 5G provider Huawei in his sights.

Ahead of Pompeo’s visit, the US State Department praised Greece’s efforts to step up 5G security, and the decision of its largest cellular network provider Cosmote to work exclusively with Swedish company Ericsson, a Huawei rival.

Pompeo was expected to discuss 5G security in Italy on Tuesday and Wednesday, a State Department spokesperson said last week.


03:12
China’s foreign minister begins Europe tour to discuss US influence, Hong Kong issues and Huawei



China’s growing economic footprint in Portugal has drawn the attention of both Washington and Brussels. Chinese investment in Portugal sat at over €9 billion (US$10.48 billion) in 2018, according to China’s embassy in Lisbon.

Last year, state-owned China Three Gorges Corporation was blocked by shareholders from gaining majority control of Portugal’s biggest company Energias de Portugal, the country’s main power supplier. It followed fiery comments from US ambassador Glass, who said that “under no circumstances” should China take over the company.

Meanwhile, Chinese shipping giant Cosco has shown interest in the Port of Sines, raising further concerns about China’s rising influence in the country. In response to questions about the port, Foreign Minister Santos Silva rejected the notion that his country was “some kind of a special friend of China”, in an interview with the Financial Times in January.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Portugal rejects US threat of sanctions on companies with Chinese backing

Keegan Elmer is a reporter at the Post covering China in world affairs, including US-China relations and China's relationship with its neighbours. He has degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the University of Helsinki.

BUDDHIST FASCIST
Fugitive Myanmar monk gives himself up after 18 months on run

Issued on: 02/11/2020 - 

Ashin Wirathu waves to followers as he turns himself in at a Yangon police station 

Sai Aung Main AFP

Yangon (AFP)

A hardline Buddhist monk turned himself in Monday after 18 months on the run -- and less than a week before Myanmar's national elections -- a move analysts described as a bid to "influence" the vote.

Once dubbed by Time magazine as the "Buddhist Bin Laden" for his role in stirring up religious hatred in the Buddhist-majority nation, Ashin Wirathu has been on the run since police issued an arrest warrant in May last year.

The 52-year-old has long been known for his nationalist anti-Islamic rhetoric -- particularly against the stateless Rohingya Muslim community.

But it was his outbursts against civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and her government last year that prompted the arrest warrant for sedition.

After a year-and-a-half as a fugitive, a video posted online Monday showed him speaking to supporters in Yangon, wearing a face mask and shield against coronavirus.

The government "forced me into this situation", he said, calling on Myanmar citizens to vote out the "evil" National League of Democracy (NLD) party from power.

"I will go to the police and do whatever they ask of me," he added, before climbing into a taxi.

Sein Maw, director of Yangon Regional Government's Religious Ministry, confirmed the firebrand monk's arrest to AFP.

- 'Craving notoriety' -

Wirathu could face up to three years in jail if found guilty of attempting to bring "hatred or contempt" or of "exciting disaffection" towards the government.

In 2017, Myanmar's highest Buddhist authority banned the monk from preaching for one year over his tirades.

After the ban expired, however, the pro-military preacher once again became a regular at nationalist rallies, where he accused the government of corruption and fumed against its failed attempts to re-write the junta-scripted constitution.

Facebook, which banned him in 2018, told AFP it had taken down a "number of reported videos related to today's events" and was working fast to prevent others from sharing them.

"Wirathu craves notoriety, so avoiding arrest by keeping a low profile was never really his style," Yangon-based analyst Richard Horsey told AFP.

"He aims to influence politics."

Suu Kyi's NLD party is widely expected to be returned to power in the November 8 polls in spite of widespread discontent in ethnic minority areas.

"By grabbing headlines just before elections (he) will hope to portray the NLD government as the enemy of Buddhist nationalism," Horsey said, adding the monk's message would be unlikely to resonate beyond a small coterie of hardcore nationalists.

 The FBI is investigating reports of voter intimidation following social media videos showed a convoy of Trump supporters surrounding a Joe Biden campaign bus in Texas and forcing it to slow down – which the president appears to have commended. In another instance, Trump supporters blocked roads and bridges in New York and New Jersey.

It's the economy, stupid! Examining the economic issues in the US election

Issued on: 30/10/2020 - 

Megan Greene, Economist and Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School 

© FRANCE 24
By:Stephen Carrol

Kate MOODY|Farah BOUCHERAK


Americans are going to the polls as their economy faces its worst crisis in decades. In this special programme ahead of the US election, we look at how the world's economic powerhouse has been hit by the coronavirus pandemic and compare the pledges made by Donald Trump and Joe Biden on taxes and spending. Plus, as local communities try to come up with solutions, we report from the city of Compton, where private donors are funding a minimum income for some of its poorest residents.

Economist Megan Greene, Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, explains how the US economy was doing before and after the virus struck, and assesses the challenges facing the next president in steering a recovery.

Plus, FRANCE 24's Kate Moody has been delving into the two candidates' economic plans. She tells us how they differ on issues like taxes and healthcare, but also share some views.