NIKKEI 5 JUNE 2023
The Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s largest security summit.
The final day took place against the backdrop of a near collision between part of China’s naval fleet and a U.S. ship in a joint exercise with Canada in the Taiwan Strait on Saturday.
Observers looking for any signs of tensions between China and the U.S. ratcheting down came away with little, as top defense officials on both sides stuck to their guns. China Defense Minister Gen. Li Shangfu said on Sunday that exchanges with the U.S. should be based on mutual respect as a “fundamental principle.”
Responding to questions over the Chinese military’s brush with the U.S. and Canadian naval forces through the Taiwan Strait, Li said he sees a lot of information about foreign vessels and fighter jets coming to areas near what he said was Chinese territory.
“They are not here for innocent passage, they’re here for provocation,” Li said. “What’s the point of going there? For China, we always say: mind your own business.”
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FT 20 MAY 2023
AMUNDI MOVES TO CHINA FROM USA
Europe’s largest asset manager Amundi is moving out of US assets in favour of China, attracted by the country’s brighter economic prospects, better valuations and a more benign outlook for inflation. Vincent Mortier, chief investment officer of the Paris-based fund firm, which has €2.1tn in assets, thinks “too much risk” is priced into Chinese credit and high-quality companies, while markets in the US are “too optimistic” as a recession looms. “In our allocations we have made a clear shift from west to east,” Mortier said in an interview with the Financial Times, predicting that the US economy will not grow next year while China, India and Indonesia will each grow by 5/6% per cent. Mortier’s bullish stance on the world’s second-largest economy comes as political tensions between Beijing and Washington worsen and recent consumer and industrial activity has fallen far short of expectations.
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FT 25 MAY 2023
SOUTH KOREA AND CHIP CONDUCTORS
The chief executive of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, has warned that the US tech industry is at risk of “enormous damage” from the escalating battle over chips between Washington and Beijing. Speaking to the Financial Times, Jensen Huang said US export controls introduced by the Biden administration to slow Chinese semiconductor manufacturing had left the Silicon Valley group with “our hands tied behind our back” and unable to sell advanced chips in one of the company’s biggest markets.
At the same time, he added, Chinese companies were starting to build their own chips to rival Nvidia’s market-leading processors for gaming, graphics and artificial intelligence. “If [China] can’t buy from . . . the United States, they’ll just build it themselves,” he said. “So the US has to be careful. China is a very important market for the technology industry.”
