BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Chen Jian on Sunday played down talk of a shift in the central bank's currency policy as well as mounting expectations of a rise in the yuan's exchange rate. Speculation that China might let the yuan resume its climb after a 16-month pause swirled after a change last Wednesday in the long-standing wording used by the People's Bank of China to describe its currency stance.
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China official plays down yuan shift
BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Chen Jian on Sunday played down talk of a shift in the central bank's currency policy as well as mounting expectations of a rise in the yuan's exchange rate.
Speculation that China might let the yuan resume its climb after a 16-month pause swirled after a change last Wednesday in the long-standing wording used by the People's Bank of China to describe its currency stance.
In its third quarter monetary policy report, the central bank failed to refer to keeping the yuan "basically stable at a reasonable and balanced level" when discussing the outlook for the exchange rate.
Asked whether the PBOC was heralding a return to the gradual appreciation of the yuan against the dollar seen from July 2005-July 2008, Chen told Reuters: "I don't think the central bank meant to say that."
Chen, however, said the yuan should reflect movements in major international currencies, which was also part of the PBOC's policy formulation.
China is coming under growing international pressure to let the yuan rise. Its manufacturers have been gaining market share at the expense of rivals in countries whose currencies have risen against the falling dollar, to which the yuan is pegged.
But, speaking on the sidelines of a forum, Chen said his ministry was not worried about rising appreciation expectations.
Turning to China's trade, Chen said there was only a small chance that exports would resume year-on-year growth by the end of 2009.
Many private economists, by contrast, expect positive growth in November or December because of the low base of comparison in 2008. Exports in October were 13.8 percent lower than a year earlier.
Chen also said a leap in China's trade surplus to $24 billion in October from $12.9 billion in September did not constitute a new trend.
(Reporting by Aileen Wang and Alan Wheatley; Editing by Alex Richardson)
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009
China official plays down yuan shift
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Stock exchange due for soft launch during Q1
“The soft opening of Cambodia’s stock market will be in January or February next year,” Mey Vann told the Post, adding that the government had only passed about 10 of the 30 required regulations to launch the bourse.
The three state-owned companies the government has pushed to list on the exchange – Sihanoukville Autonomous Port, Phnom Penh Port and Telecom Cambodia – would not make their initial public offerings until the end of 2010, he added.
“We will open it without any company listings at the start,” Mey Vann said. “I will just open an office to receive companies that are sufficiently qualified to join the stock market.”
The Ministry of Economy and Finance will house the new bourse to begin with, he said, ahead of the completion of a US$6 million exchange building in Camko City on the outskirts of Phnom Penh which is scheduled to be finished and ready to start trading around October next year.
Duk-Kon Kim, vice president of Korea’s World City, which is the developer of Camko City, told the Post Thursday that it was still waiting for the finance ministry to select one of five conceptual designs for the exchange.
“The Ministry of Finance informed me that they will select the final one … this week, and the construction agreement can be reached at that time,” he said, adding that World City would be able to break ground in December, a month later than it previously planned.
The design, which will be paid for by World City along with construction costs, will mix a traditional Khmer pagoda style with modern design elements, he added.
Inpyo Lee, the Cambodia-based project director of Korea Exchange (KRX), the joint-venture partner on the exchange along with the finance ministry, said Thursday that discussions were continuing on the start date, but that he thought it should be launched without delay.
“I think the sooner, the better. Many countries had a stock market early even when their economic situations lagged behind … Cambodia’s,” he said, referring to South Korea’s decision to launch a securities exchange in the late 1950s despite being one of the poorest countries in the world at the time after the Korean War.
Given the significance of the project, Lee said, the government would push hard to set up the exchange, but public confidence remains the biggest challenge.
“People are still cautious about the stock market,” said Lee, agreeing that the three firms due to list would not be qualified to do so until the end of 2010. “Many people still think the stock market is a form of gambling, but it’s not actually; it will help the Cambodian government boost the economy.”
Villagers carve out a niche with traditional set of skills
Koh Chen’s villagers have been hammering out a living for generations, and its younger artisans see no reason why their source of income should change
Coppersmith Pin Vuthy at work creating Khmer ceremonial swords in his Chinese Island village.
This is the sound of the villagers practising their craft. For inhabitants of Koh Chen, on the opposite side of the river to Oudong on National Highway 5, copper smithing has long been a way of life.
The Kandal province artisans make pots, bowls, plates, ornamental swords, bracelets, and other souvenir items from flattened copper. Their work not only exemplifies Cambodia’s reputation for craftsmanship, but offers generations of villagers a reliable income.
Hammer in hand, coppersmith Pin Vuthy, 24, says he and other young people in the village learned their craft from their parents and elders.
“Making artistic copper pots, bowls, plates or bracelets is our traditional job in Koh Chen village,” he says.
And Pin Vuthy says he wants to see these skills passed on, so future generations can enjoy this guaranteed livelihood.
Their traditional work is in such high demand that Koh Chen villagers rarely need to market their products directly, with Phnom Penh’s dealers beating a path to their door.
“Generally we make copper products based on orders from dealers at the market,” Pin Vuthy says.
All eight people in Vuthy’s family are skilled in fashioning copper into craft items, involved in every stage of the production process.
Pin Vuthy cuts and carves flattened copper into decorative swords, popular among Cambodians for weddings. His two sisters carve them with traditional Khmer motifs. In one day they can produce up to six wedding swords.
Pin Vuthy emphasises the fact that his is a highly skilled trade in which attention to detail is essential to a quality product. “Carving is not an easy job, and I pay a lot of attention to it,” Pin Vuthy says. “I have to use both physical and mental power to do the work carefully by hand.”
He says he is proud of the traditional skill set of his family and his community, considering his craft to be a part of his ancestral heritage.
He says his job offers him a good income, and he doesn’t have to leave his village for work – although he occasionally goes to Phnom Penh to buy copper.
Jeng Chanthou, one of the dealers who frequent Koh Chen village, has sold its products for the past 14 years.
She has some of the copper items silver-plated, selling the work at Russian Market, Central Market and small shops in the city.
“Mostly foreigners and high-class people buy the artistic pieces from us,” Jeng Chanthou says. “But we also place orders for bracelets, copper jewellery and swords for traditional Cambodian weddings.”
She says plates with carvings of Angkor Wat or Preah Vihear temple always fetch a good price.
Pottering around: travelling the nation's roads by oxcart
Ton Sophas and his oxen take a break on their way to Phnom Penh with a load of clay merchandise.
IT can be both a fun life and a suffering life selling clay pots and cookers by oxcart.
It is for this reason that oxcarts still can still be found steadily clomping their way along the busy highways around the Kingdom.
After leaving his home province of Kampang Chhnang, Ton Sophas and his fellow clay merchants will take about four days to make the journey to Phnom Penh. But for Sophas, if he can unload his wagon it will be a worthwhile trip.
Kampong Chhnang’s Rolea Bier district is famous for its clay pots, cookers, vases and toys. Though Phnom Penh is the biggest market for the goods, the old oxcarts make their laborious deliveries throughout Cambodia.
Ton Sophas can spend up to a month at a time on the road, peddling his goods in Kampong Cham, Takeo, Battambang and Siem Reap.
Although he doesn’t make the wares, Ton Sophas is part of a production and sales partnership that goes back generations. Villagers make the pots in Kampong Chhnang, and the oxcart fleet takes care of the logistics.
Ton Sophas isn’t the only person in his family making the long slow trips.
“My father does this job, and I just want to follow him,” he says.
But it can be an unpredictable life on the road, he adds. “It can be both a fun or a suffering life selling clay pots and cookers by oxcart.”
A good trip can net him 1 million riels (about US$250), but problems with his ox or cart eat away at his profit.
“Sometimes I earn money, but sometimes it shocks me when my oxcart breaks or my oxen get sick.”
And unlike motorbikes or cars, you can’t push an ox to an mechanic when things go awry. A few years ago in Takeo province, Ton Sophas’s oxen fell ill, and he was forced sell the sick animals and return home with only the cart.
Ton Sophan says he sleeps wherever he happens to be when the sun sets, and relies on locals to keep an eye on the clay creations.
“I have never been robbed, but my relatives faced gangsters who destroyed all their clay goods,” he says.
Phnom Penh is a prime location for Ton Sophas and his comrades to peddle their goods, but it’s not an easy market to penetrate. Police often prevent him from taking his cumbersome cart into the city.
Like many merchants in the Kingdom, Ton Sophas prefers to haggle on a sale-by-sale basis.
“If I see them get out of a car, I charge 3,500 riels (US$0.80) for a set of small clay toys,” Sophas says of his sales technique. “They usually ask for a discount of 500 ($0.12) – but I still get a higher price than a normal sale.”
After a few days of sales in Phnom Penh, Ton Sophas and his team head back to restock their wagons.
The empty wagon makes the oxen’s task a whole lot easier, and within a couple of days, Ton Sophas and his fellow clay men of the highways are back in Kampang Chhnang.
Economy Worsens Trafficking
Hard times are abetting the massive global slave trade, according to a new U.S. report on human trafficking.
Children of Burmese migrants working in Thailand's commercial fisheries industry.
WASHINGTON—People in danger of falling prey to human traffickers are even more vulnerable as a result of the global economic downturn, according to a new State Department report that downgraded Cambodia and Malaysia for failing to do enough to fight the multi-billion dollar global trade in humans.
"Economic pressure, especially in the global economic crisis, makes more people susceptible to the false promises of traffickers," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in releasing the 2009 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report here.
"Trafficking has a broad global impact as well. It weakens legitimate economies, fuels violence, threatens public health and safety, shatters families, and shreds the social fabric that is necessary for progress," Clinton told a news conference.
The TIP report, which details government efforts to fight human trafficking, called both Malaysia and Cambodia “destination and…source and transit [countries] for women and children trafficked for the purpose of sexual exploitation and forced labor.”
Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, governments with a Tier 3 rating, the lowest that can be assigned by the report, can be subject to sanctions including the suspension of U.S. aid.
In April, Malaysia’s prime minister said his government would investigate a blistering report by a U.S. Senate panel that said thousands of Burmese migrants have been handed over to human traffickers and sent to work in the Thai sex industry.
The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after a year-long review, said illegal Burmese migrants had been deported from Malaysia, handed to human traffickers, and forced to work in brothels, fishing boats, and restaurants in Thailand if they didn’t have enough money to buy their own release.
U.S. Ambassador-at-Large to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons Luis CdeBaca said Malaysia's poor treatment of refugees is an issue that the U.S. State Department has been following for years.
During a briefing he called attention to authorities' use of a volunteer security force, the People's Volunteer Corps (RELA), to stage raids on suspected illegal immigrants. The group is given wide-ranging powers by immigration officers, including the right to bear arms, but provided with little professional training.
Rights groups say children, pregnant women, and United Nations-screened refugees awaiting resettlement, have all been detained in such raids.
"The presence of a 500,000-person-strong militia that has basically deputized, and in the past has actually gotten 'head money' for the aliens that they catch, is something that seems to have contributed to a zone of impunity around that refugee population," CdeBaca said.
"We’d certainly like to see more movement as far as [the Malaysian government's] investigation of the official complicity that’s been reported," he said.
Burma this year remained on Tier 3, where it has been ranked since the report was first compiled in 2001.
While Burma has made progress in curbing the international trafficking of women and children into the sex trade, the military regime hasn't stopped forced labor and the unlawful military conscription of children, the report said.
Cambodia meanwhile also dropped to Tier 3, based on what the report described as a lack of government progress in prosecuting human traffickers and protecting trafficking victims.
China remained a Tier 2 country in the report, which cited forced prison labor, abduction of children for forced begging and thievery, and involuntary servitude of children, migrant workers, and abductees.
"Some experts and NGOs suggested trafficking in persons has been fueled by economic disparity and the effects of population planning policies, and that a shortage of marriageable women fuels the demand for abducted women, especially in rural areas,” the report said.
It said girls from the largely Muslim Uyghur ethnic group in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have been forced to work in factories in eastern China on false pretenses and without regular wages.
Global economy
CdeBaca said economic factors were likely to have a ripple effect throughout the trafficking industry.
"Our report staff, as they surveyed the field, have seen how vulnerable populations are becoming even more susceptible to exploitation as a result of the financial crisis," CdeBaca said in an interview.
As western Europe’s construction industry contracts, workers returning from eastern Europe are displacing Asian workers who had taken up the slack.
"It will be very interesting to see what happens in the coming year to those Asian workers, whether they will be exploited in eastern Europe or return home to countries even worse off now than when they left," he said.
CdeBaca welcomed the work of international organizations and NGOs in combating human trafficking but called on governments in the region to do more instead of simply relying on foreign assistance.
"At the end of the day, it’s the governments’ responsibility to engage. Governments with crushing problems of poverty, if they have political will, can own the issue and respond to the issue of trafficking," CdeBaca said.
He cited impoverished Moldova as an example, noting that it had taken steps to aid victims of trafficking.
"If Moldova can do it, then we would hope similar countries in Asia would be able to find the political will rather than simply being dependent on the international community," CdeBaca said.
"It doesn’t create a sustainable anti-trafficking movement to outsource [this]…We don’t want years, we want decades, and the only way to do that is to get the government involved."
Little change in North Korea, Laos, Vietnam
The report kept North Korea at the lowest ranking, citing estimates that 80 percent of the tens of thousands of North Korean refugees in China are trafficking victims.
Pyongyang also uses forced labor and recruits citizens to work abroad for North Korean entities, often withholding their wages until they return home.
Most commonly, women and girls from one of North Korea’s poorest border areas cross into China and are then sold and re-sold as “brides.”
North Korea’s government does not acknowledge the existence of human trafficking either within its own borders or transnationally and actively punishes trafficking victims for acts they commit as a direct result of being trafficked, the report said.
The TIP report kept Laos at Tier 2, citing "significant" efforts by the government to fully comply with minimum standards to eliminate trafficking.
Laos stepped up efforts to investigate trafficking offenses and to prosecute and punish traffickers, it said.
But a severe lack of resources, poor training of officials, and ongoing corruption still impede the government’s ability to combat trafficking.
Vietnam also remained at Tier 2, prosecuting sex-trafficking offenders and making efforts to protect victims. But the report cited few gains in prosecuting labor-traffickers and protecting victims.
The United Nations defines human trafficking as the recruitment, transfer, or harboring of people by means of coercion for the purpose of exploitation.
The United Nations has said human trafficking remains the second largest illegal trade next to drugs, with traffickers earning an estimated U.S. $10 billion annually. It also estimated that 2.5 million trafficked people worldwide come from the Asia-Pacific region.
China, Africa Trade Soars
China's longtime investment in Africa is paying off in access to the continent's mineral wealth.
China's President Hu Jintao is welcomed by his Nigerian counterpart Olusegun Obasanjo upon his arrival at Abuja airport, April 26, 2006.
HONG KONG—Two-way trade flows between China and African nations have skyrocketed by a factor of 10 since 2000 as Chinese companies scramble to secure much-needed energy and mineral resources, building roads and other infrastructure and selling cheap goods to Africans in the process.
Two-way trade reached U.S. $107 billion last year, as deals drew criticism from activists and politicians, often Western, who say China is stripping Africa of raw materials while shoring up corrupt and oppressive regimes.
But according to international corruption watchdog Transparency International, China may be lowering standards to increase its presence in oil- and resource-rich African countries amid skyrocketing energy demand.
Elizabeth Davis, a China specialist at the Colorado School of Mines, said China is chiefly interested in two things in Africa.
"One is its energy resources. China's rapid economic growth has meant that they need to focus on finding energy security," she said in an interview translated and broadcast in Mandarin.
"The other thing that China is interested in in Africa is her mining resources. So they have invested in a number of African countries' mining sector," she said.
"China's commercial activities in Africa have caused a lot of concern in the international community in recent years...Some people see Chinese businesses in Africa as plundering local resources."
Need for infrastructure
Chinese businesses with investments in African countries say Chinese investments on the continent are satisfying a need for basic investment in infrastructure, and that Chinese enterprises are breathing new life into a moribund economy.
But as roads, stadiums, and government buildings built with Chinese cash spring up around the continent, critics are concerned about what exactly Beijing's money is buying.
Beijing entwines business and assistance more closely than Western governments, using infrastructure to pay for resources and often disbursing donated funds through each country's Commerce Ministry.
This makes it hard to put a figure on handouts. The only official number for Africa covers all spending from 1949 to 2006.
"Some Africans would say that corruption is a small price to pay, and that corruption existed in African countries—it’s not a new phenomenon," June Dreyer, China specialist at the University of Miami, said in an interview broadcast with a Mandarin translation.
"One the other hand a lot of Africans are very unhappy with Chinese commercial activities in Africa and with the corruption they bring with them, because the Chinese government has given a lot of money to some African dictators, and they have supplied them with weapons and surveillance and monitoring equipment."
These "can be used on their political opposition and on people who don't agree with them," Dreyer said.
"As well as this, some Africans are very angry with what they see as the exploitation by Chinese companies of African labor, as well as the destruction of Africa's environment and the undercutting of local industry with very low prices," she added.
Defining aid
The official Chinese view is that economic cooperation is a very broad set of relationships.
"We put everything into a very big basket called economic cooperation: investment, humanitarian assistance, contracts," He Wenping, an Africa expert at an official Beijing think-tank, was quoted as saying by Reuters.
"So it is difficult to figure out what belongs purely to aid."
But Beijing is aware—in the wake of an embarrassing graft probe in Namibia involving Chinese interests—of the risk to its reputation and market access if projects are discredited by graft.
Two Namibians and a Chinese national were arrested in Namibia in July, as part of a probe into bribery allegations around an X-ray security scanner supply contract and loan deal inked during Hu Jintao's 2007 to Namibia.
Nuctech representative Yang Fan and two Namibians, Teckla Lameck and Jerobeam Mokaxwa, were arrested after Namibia's Anti-Corruption Commission said they had taken money from a U.S. $12.8 million down payment on security scanning equipment.
Namibian officials recently announced they were re-opening negotiations for a loan and technology import contract with Beijing-backed Nuctech.
Nuctech was run until last year by the son of China's president Hu Jintao, despite the corruption scandal surrounding the deal.
Chinese authorities censored online news reports linking Hu Haifeng, 38, to the corruption probe in July.
Hu Haifeng left Nuctech to take up a post as Communist Party secretary of Nuctech's state-owned parent company.