China has just been declared the world’s second biggest economy, and now it has a monster traffic jam to match.
FoxNews.com
August 25,2010

Triggered by road construction, the snarl-up began 10 days ago and was 60 miles long at one point. Reaching almost to the outskirts of Beijing, traffic still creeps along in fits and starts, and the crisis could last for another three weeks, authorities say.

It’s a metaphor for a nation that sometimes chokes on its own breakneck growth.

In the worst-hit stretches of the road in northern China, drivers pass the time sitting in the shade of their immobilized trucks, playing cards, sleeping on the asphalt or bargaining with price-gouging food vendors. Many of the trucks that carry fruit and vegetables are unrefrigerated, and the cargoes are assumed to be rotting.

On Sunday, the eighth day of the near-standstill, trucks moved just less than a mile on the worst section, said Zhang Minghai, a traffic director in Zhangjiakou, a city about 90 miles northwest of Beijing. China Central Television reported Tuesday that some vehicles had been stuck for five days.

Traffic Jam in China Stretches Bumper-to-Bumper for 60 Miles

Colossal traffic jam may last weeks
portable toilets were set up along the highway, leaving only two apparent options — hike to a service area or into the fields.

But there were no reports of violent road rage, and the main complaint heard from drivers was about villagers on bicycles making a killing selling boxed lunches, bottled water to drink and heated water for noodles.

A bottle of water was selling for $1.50, 10 times the normal price, Chinese media reports said.

The traffic jam built up on the Beijing-Tibet highway, on a section that links the capital to the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. The main reason traffic has increased on this partially four-lane highway is the opening of coal mines in the northwest, vital for the booming economy that this month surpassed Japan’s in size and is now second only to America’s.

Massive Backup Already 10 Days Old and Construction Expected to Continue until Mid-September; Drivers Play Cards in Street

A massive traffic jam in north China that stretches for dozens of miles and hit its 10-day mark on Tuesday stems from road construction in Beijing that won’t be finished until the middle of next month, an official said.

Bumper-to-bumper gridlock spanning for 60 miles with vehicles moving little more than a half-mile a day at one point has improved since this weekend, said Zhang Minghai, director of Zhangjiakou city’s Traffic Management Bureau general office.

Some drivers have been stuck in the jam for five days, China Central Television reported Tuesday. But Zhang said he wasn’t sure when the situation along the Beijing-Zhangjiakou highway would return to normal.

The traffic jam started Aug. 14 on a stretch of the highway that is frequently congested, especially after large coalfields were discovered in Inner Mongolia, Zhang said. Traffic volume has increased 40 percent every year.

Drivers stranded in the gridlock in the Inner Mongolia region and Hebei province, headed toward Beijing, passed the time sleeping, walking around, or playing cards and chess. Local villagers were doing brisk business selling instant noodles, boxed lunches and snacks, weaving between the parked trucks on bicycles.

Though there were no reports of road rage violence, drivers complained about price-gouging by villagers who were their only source of food and water. A bottle of water that normally costs 1 yuan (15 cents) was selling for 10 yuan ($1.50), while the price of a 3 yuan- (45 cent-) cup of instant noodles had more than tripled, media reports said.

“A boxed lunch is 10 yuan ($1.50), and one box isn’t enough for me,” China National Radio cited a driver surnamed Lu as saying. “I’m spending up to 50 yuan (about $7.50) a day on food. It’s more expensive than eating in a restaurant.”

The highway construction in Beijing that is restricting inbound traffic flow and causing the jam “will not be finished until Sept. 17,” Zhang said.

Authorities were trying to speed up traffic by allowing more trucks to enter Beijing, especially at night, Zhang said. They also asked trucking companies to suspend operations and advised drivers to take alternate routes.

China’s roadways are increasingly overburdened as the number of private vehicles booms along with commercial truck traffic hauling materials like coal and food to cities. Traffic slowdowns because of construction and accidents are common, though a 10-day traffic jam is unusual even in China. -- CBS News

Pentagon warning over China military build-up
Yahoo.com
August 17, 2010

China is extending its military advantage over Taiwan and increasingly looking beyond, building up a force with power to strike in Asia as far afield as the US territory of Guam, the Pentagon said.

In an annual report to Congress, the US Defense Department said Monday that China was ramping up investment in an array of areas including nuclear weapons, long-range missiles, submarines, aircraft carriers and cyber warfare.

“The balance of cross-Strait military forces continues to shift in the mainland’s favor,” the report said.

The Pentagon said China’s military build-up on the Taiwan Strait has “continued unabated” despite improving political and commercial relations since the island elected Beijing-friendly President Ma Ying-jeou in 2008.

Hours after the report was released, Taiwan said Tuesday it was “closely monitoring” China’s arms build-up.

“China has not given up the use of force against Taiwan, and we are closely monitoring China’s military developments. We ask the public to rest assured,” defense ministry spokesman Yu Sy-tue told AFP.

The report — which US officials delayed for five months amid strains with China — covered 2009, before the United States approved a 6.4 billion-dollar arms package for the island in January.

China considers Taiwan, where the mainland’s defeated nationalists fled in 1949, to be a province awaiting reunification, by force if necessary.

The military report said China was “already looking at contingencies beyond Taiwan,” including through a longstanding project to build a far-reaching missile that could potentially strike US carriers deep in the Pacific.

“Current trends in China’s military capabilities are a major factor in changing East Asian military balances and could provide China with a force capable of conducting a range of military operations in Asia well beyond Taiwan,” it said.

China’s military doctrine has traditionally emphasized the ability to strike within an area extending to Japan’s Okinawa island chain and throughout the South China Sea east of Vietnam, the report said.

But Chinese strategists are now looking to expand their reach further to be able to hit targets as far away as Guam, including much of mainland Japan and the Philippines, it said.

China is working on the longer-range precision missile, but probably needs more work on the technical infrastructure to put the weapon into use, an official who helped draft the report said on condition of anonymity.

Japan and Vietnam, which both have historic tensions with China, have reported rising incidents with China’s military in recent months.

The report predicted that China may step up patrols in the South China Sea. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last month in Vietnam backed open access to the sea, triggering a rebuke by Beijing.

The Pentagon report credited China with becoming slightly more open but reiterated concerns about an overall lack of transparency.

In March this year, China said it was raising its defense budget by 7.5 percent to 532.1 billion yuan — 77.9 billion dollars at the exchange rate at the time — breaking a string of double-digit increases.

The Pentagon study was cautious on suggestions that China’s military was partaking in national belt-tightening, saying that the spending growth may be lower simply because the forces were at the end of a five-year program.

The Pentagon paper estimated that China’s overall military-related spending was more than 150 billion dollars in 2009 when including areas that do not figure in the publicly released budget.

It is still far below the US defense budget, the world’s largest, which is more than 700 billion dollars in the fiscal year beginning in October.

President Barack Obama’s administration has sought to broaden cooperation with China, but bilateral military exchanges were broken off after the US agreed an arms package with Taiwan that included helicopters, missile defenses and mine-sweepers.

The Pentagon said it wanted dialogue with China to avoid any “miscalculation” between the two militaries.

“We stand prepared to work with the Chinese if they are prepared to work with us,” the anonymous official said. “But it only does us so much good to show up to a meeting if we’re the only ones that are there.”

The Taiwan arms sale did not include F-16 fighter-jets, which the island and many US analysts say are crucial to narrowing the strategic gap with Beijing.

China has overtaken Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy, the fruit of three decades of rapid growth that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

Depending on how fast its exchange rate rises, China is on course to overtake the United States and vault into the No.1 spot sometime around 2025, according to projections by the World Bank, Goldman Sachs and others.

China came close to surpassing Japan in 2009 and the disclosure by a senior official that it had now done so comes as no surprise. Indeed, Yi Gang, China’s chief currency regulator, mentioned the milestone in passing in remarks published on Friday.

“China, in fact, is now already the world’s second-largest economy,” he said in an interview with China Reform magazine posted on the website of his agency, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

Cruising past Japan might give China bragging rights, but its per-capita income of about $3,800 a year is a fraction of Japan’s or America’s. (Check the latest US GDP report here)

“China is still a developing country, and we should be wise enough to know ourselves,” Yi said, when asked whether the time was ripe for the yuan to become an international currency.

Can It Be Sustained?

China’s economy expanded 11.1 percent in the first half of 2010, from a year earlier, and is likely to log growth of more than 9 percent for the whole year, according to Yi.

China has averaged more than 9.5 percent growth annually since it embarked on market reforms in 1978. But that pace was bound to slow over time as a matter of arithmetic, Yi said.

Slideshow: Countries With the Most Foreign Investment

If China could chalk up growth this decade of 7-8 percent annually, that would still be a strong performance. The issue was whether the pace could be sustained, Yi said, not least because of the environmental constraints China faces.

In an assessment disputed by Beijing, the International Energy Agency said last week that China had surpassed the United States as the world’s largest energy user. If China can keep up a clip of 5-6 percent a year in the 2020s, it will have maintained rapid growth for 50 years, which Yi said would be unprecedented in human history.

The uninterrupted economic ascent, which saw China overtake Britain and France in 2005 and then Germany in 2007, is gradually translating into clout on the world stage.

China is a leading member of the Group of 20 rich and emerging nations, which since the 2008 financial crisis has become the world’s premier economic policy-setting forum.

In one important respect, however, China is still a shrinking violet: anxious to shield itself from the rough-and-tumble of global markets, it does not permit its currency to be freely exchanged except for purposes of trade and foreign direct investment.

And Yi said Beijing had no timetable to make the yuan fully convertible.

“China is very big and its development is unbalanced, which makes this problem much more complicated. It’s difficult to reach a consensus on it,” he said.

In the same vein, China was in no rush to turn the yuan into a global currency.

“We must be modest and we still have to keep a low profile. If other people choose the yuan as a reserve currency, we won’t stop that as it is the demand of the market. However, we will not push hard to promote it,” he added.

No Big Rise in Yuan

China has been encouraging the use of the yuan beyond its borders, allowing more trade to be settled in renminbi and taking a series of measures to establish Hong Kong as an offshore center where the currency can circulate freely.

But Yi said: “Don’t think that since people are talking about it, the yuan is close to becoming a reserve currency.

Actually, it’s still far from that.” He said expectations of a stronger yuan, also known as the renminbi, had diminished.

There was no basis for a sharp rise in the exchange rate, partly because the price level in China had risen steadily over the past decade. “This suggests that the value of the renminbi has moved much closer to equilibrium compared with 10 years ago,” he said.

Yi’s comments are unlikely to go down well in Washington, where lawmakers have scheduled a hearing for Sept. 16 to consider whether U.S. government action is needed to address China’s exchange rate policy.

China scrapped the yuan’s 23-month-old peg to the dollar on June 19 and resumed a managed float. The yuan has since risen only 0.8 percent against the dollar, and economists calculate that it has fallen in value against a basket of currencies.

China would stick to the principle of holding its $2.45 trillion of official reserves in a mix of currencies and assets.

The stockpile — the world’s largest — was so big that it was impossible to adjust its currency composition in a short space of time: “We won’t be particularly bearish on the dollar at a given time or particularly bearish on the euro at another time.” – CNBC

(A firefighter rushes to aid his colleague amid thick oil as they attempted to fix a pump in Dalian, China)

Keep in mind China ALWAYS under-plays their disasters, and the impact therein … Shortly after the BP oil rig blow-out and major spill in The Gulf of Mexico China, who if they are not already drilling in the Gulf hopes to be doing so very soon, jumped on the gun and issued this:

China plans tighter oversight of offshore oil drilling, tougher laws, after Gulf Oil spill – Jun 22, 2010

SHANGHAI — China’s leaders have ordered oil companies to beef up safety precautions for offshore oil drilling to prevent calamities similar to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, warning of “increasing risks” from aging equipment and weak rescue capabilities.

Safety officials and others working in offshore drilling must “profoundly analyze and earnestly learn lessons from the U.S. Gulf of Mexico rig accident” and fully grasp the grimness of the threat, said a statement posted on the website of the State Council’s Safety Commission.

At a recent meeting, officials warned that China’s main offshore oil company, China National Offshore Oil Corp., or CNOOC, faces “seriously aging production facilities, weak emergency rescue ability and extreme weather conditions,” the statement said.

Improving the security and safety of offshore drilling should be a high priority, it said.

The State Council, National Energy Bureau and State Oceanic Administration, meanwhile, are drafting regulations to safeguard offshore oil and gas pipelines, the state-run newspaper China Daily reported Wednesday.

A draft law will be submitted for a vote when the rubberstamp National People’s Congress wraps up a session of its Standing Committee on Friday, it said.

After the April 20 offshore explosion in the Gulf of Mexico blew out a well 5,000 feet (1,525 metres) underwater, killing 11 workers, Chinese lawmakers urged amendments to the current law, which now only includes regulations for onshore pipelines, to help prevent a similar catastrophe, the report said.

The Gulf spill has spewed anywhere from 20 million gallons (75 million litres) to 127 million gallons (480 million litres) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, but has received relatively little attention in China, where most drilling is done onshore.

But it did raise concerns given China’s own dire track record for industrial accidents.

China’s first offshore oil and gas wells and pipelines were built in the early 1980s and some have been in operation for more than 20 years, the China Daily report cited Chen Weidong, chief researcher at CNOOC’s energy research institute, as saying.

CNOOC has said it is upgrading the blowout preventer system of a 3,000-meter (9,840-foot) deepwater oil drilling rig being built in Shanghai, which would automatically shut down in an accident.

The company is also upgrading deepwater diving equipment to enable workers to eventually work at depths of up to 2,000 metres (6,560 feet) instead of the current 800 metres (2,625 feet)

China’s own state-run oil companies have so far had to deal only with onshore oil spills. The most recent was a pipeline leak in early January that spilled an estimated 100 tons of diesel fuel into a tributary of the Yellow River, a water source for millions of Chinese. That spill was contained within a downstream reservoir, helping to prevent wider contamination.

But 850,000 people were told to temporarily stop using water from affected parts of the river, which like many waterways in China suffers from severe pollution along much of its course.

BEIJING – China’s largest reported oil spill emptied beaches along the Yellow Sea as its size doubled Wednesday, while cleanup efforts included straw mats and frazzled workers with little more than rubber gloves.

An official warned the spill posed a “severe threat” to sea life and water quality as China’s latest environmental crisis spread off the shores of Dalian, once named China’s most livable city.

One cleanup worker has drowned, his body coated in crude.

“I’ve been to a few bays today and discovered they were almost entirely covered with dark oil,” said Zhong Yu with environmental group Greenpeace China, who spent the day on a boat inspecting the spill.

“The oil is half-solid and half liquid and is as sticky as asphalt,” she told The Associated Press by telephone.

The oil had spread over 165 square miles (430 square kilometers) of water five days since a pipeline at the busy northeastern port exploded, hurting oil shipments from part of China’s strategic oil reserves to the rest of the country. Shipments remained reduced Wednesday.

State media has said no more oil is leaking into the sea, but the total amount of oil spilled is not yet clear.

Greenpeace China released photos Wednesday of inky beaches and of straw mats about 2 square meters (21 square feet) in size scattered on the sea, meant to absorb the oil.

Fishing in the waters around Dalian has been banned through the end of August, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.

“The oil spill will pose a severe threat to marine animals, and water quality, and the sea birds,” Huang Yong, deputy bureau chief for the city’s Maritime Safety Administration, told Dragon TV.

At least one person died during cleanup efforts. A 25-year-old firefighter, Zhang Liang, drowned Tuesday when a wave threw him from a vessel, Xinhua reported.

Officials, oil company workers and volunteers were turning out by the hundreds to clean blackened beaches.

“We don’t have proper oil cleanup materials, so our workers are wearing rubber gloves and using chopsticks,” an official with the Jinshitan Golden Beach Administration Committee told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper, in apparent exasperation.

“This kind of inefficiency means the oil will keep coming to shore. … This stretch of oil is really difficult to clean up in the short term.”

But 40 oil-skimming boats and about 800 fishing boats were also deployed to clean up the spill, and Xinhua said more than 15 kilometers (9 miles) of oil barriers had been set up to keep the slick from spreading.

China Central Television earlier reported an estimate of 1,500 tons of oil has spilled. That would amount roughly to 400,000 gallons (1,500,000 liters) — as compared with 94 million to 184 million gallons in the BP oil spill off the U.S. coast.

China’s State Oceanic Administration released the latest size of the contaminated area in a statement Tuesday.

The cause of the explosion that started the spill was still not clear. The pipeline is owned by China National Petroleum Corp., Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer by volume.

Friday’s images of 100-foot-high (30-meter-high) flames at China’s second largest port for crude oil imports drew the immediate attention of President Hu Jintao and other top leaders. Now the challenge is cleaning up the greasy plume.

“Our priority is to collect the spilled oil within five days to reduce the possibility of contaminating international waters,” Dalian’s vice mayor, Dai Yulin, told Xinhua on Tuesday.

But an official with the State Oceanic Administration has warned the spill will be difficult to clean up even in twice that amount of time.

Some locals said the area’s economy was already hurting.

“Let’s wait and see how well they deal with the oil until Sept. 1, if the oil can’t be cleaned up by then, the seafood products will all be ruined,” an unnamed fisherman told Dragon TV. “No one will buy them in the market because of the smell of the oil.”

MORE PHOTOS HERE.

DALIAN, July 19 (Xinhua) — Over 500 fishing boats Monday joined a massive oil spill clean-up operation underway off the coast of northeastern China’s Dalian City, three days after pipelines exploded near the city’s oil reserve base, one of China’s largest.

Dalian officials said Monday the fires have been completely extinguished and the focus has shifted to the ocean clean-up and the investigation into the blast.

A dark-brown oil slick has stretched over at least 183 square kilometers of ocean near blast-hit Xingang port, with 50 square kilometers severely affected.

The slick can be seen about seven sea miles off Dayao Bay and it turns notably thicker about five sea miles off the bay and gives off a strong smell.

The over 500 fishing boats have been loaded with oil absorbers and dispersants to help in the clean up south of Dalian’s Golden Pebble Beach and east of Bangchui Island, local maritime officials said.

Luan Yuxuan, deputy director of Dalian City’s Oceanic and Fishery Administration, said the clean-up operations will take at least four to five days.

Each of the six large, specialized oil-spill-control vessels working in the clean up can take in 100 tons of oil-contaminated water per hour. But their work has been slowed by strong winds and big waves, said China National Offshore Oil Corporation engineers.

The cleanup started Saturday. By Monday morning, 24 oil clean-up vessels and 800 fishing boats had collected about 460 tonnes of the spilled oil, Luan said.

But officials said they did not know the exact amount of oil spilled into the sea.

Large quantities of oil-spill dispersant and absorption felts have been shipped in from neighboring Tianjin Municipality and Shandong Province, maritime officials said.

Meanwhile, vessel traffic at Dalian, China’s second largest port for crude oil imports, has been limited to allow to the cleanup operations to proceed.

Wang Ning, an engineer with the maritime authorities in Liaoning Province, told Xinhua port operations have been limited and not completely suspended.

Ships are allowed to enter and exit the ports with permission, he said.

Fire engulfed the Xingang port Friday evening, after an oil pipeline exploded, triggering an adjacent pipeline to also explode. The fires raged for 15 hours before being extinguished Saturday morning. No one was hurt in the explosions or subsequent fire.

A high-level investigation team has been set up to probe the incident.

The storage facility is owned by Dalian port and China National Petroleum Corp (CNPC), China’s top oil company.

CNPC General Manager Jiang Jiemin said the company has tightened safety measures at all of its facilities and will complete the clean up the slick as soon as possible.

Ding Shaoheng, a senior CNPC engineer, said the economic losses cannot be immediately estimated as the company may be penalized for the incident.

He said in any case the impact on CNPC operations would be limited.

The company, however, has announced plans to cut refining operations at one of its joint venture subsidiaries, West Pacific PetroChemical Corp. (WEPEC), by 20 percent in July and to suspend its export business.

The WEPEC is a major CNPC oil reserve base that exports roughly 200,000 tonnes of refined oil every month.

America’s Fast Track to the Third World

The Department of Defense has sounded an alarm about our access to a strategically vital group of metals called the rare earth elements. A report on the problem prepared by the GAO is not pretty. It concludes that the Chinese now control the production, processing, and manufacture of final products of these vital metals and now own the patents for many of these processes.

The worries of the DoD are well-justified; missile guidance systems, smart bombs, night vision gear, unmanned aircraft, and much more are dependent on the rare earth elements in some way. Without these metals, our weapons technology would be approximately that of the Korean War. Battery-powered tools, hybrid vehicles, the environmentalists’ precious windmills, and almost everything else electric cannot get by without them.

Rare earth elements have been described as the vitamins of modern technology. It took Beijing approximately twenty years to strip this technology from its birthplace in the United States and move it to China.

China’s success in capturing the entire production and manufacturing cycle for the rare earth elements is only the beginning. Their long-term strategy seems to be to repeat their rare earth coup in other sectors of mining and manufacturing. Awash in cash, they are on a gigantic worldwide shopping trip for resources of all kinds. Copper, lead, zinc, and iron are on their list, to name a few. Their reserves of U.S. dollars are being converted to hard assets. Anyone with experience with the Chinese knows that they are in the game to win. Their objective is world domination by whatever means necessary. Aided by our intellectually and morally challenged elites, they stand a good chance of accomplishing it without firing a shot.

Why the Chinese were able, at so little cost, to take away this vital sector of our technology is a question that needs to be asked. The answer is not hard to find. It is the natural result of a fifty-year “jihad” against America’s producers by the environmental left. This alarm signal from the Department of Defense marks the beginning of the endgame in this struggle. It should now be clear that there is nothing less than the survival of our Republic at stake. Fifty years of rapine and pillage by a nihilistic, deranged environmental movement and a government bureaucracy whose sole mitigating feature is its incompetence has left us more and more dependent on somebody else for the commodities and technology necessary for our existence as a nation. A terminally ignorant public has watched with detached indifference or has actively supported this assault on our basic industries. Our national consciousness is in the grip of such insanity that schoolchildren are routinely taught to hate the people and businesses that make their way of life possible. These environmental chickens are now coming home to roost. We are at the point where the bill for this half-century-long economic and environmental stupor is coming due.

This nation is going to have to realize that the ability to produce resources and manufacture products defines its military capability and its standard of living. This fact is as certain as the laws of thermodynamics. Everything you can touch comes from the earth. It must be mined, pumped, cut down, or grown by somebody. Somebody has to process it, refine it, manufacture it, and deliver it. In the vital sector of basic mineral commodities and energy, those “somebodies” need to be domestic, not foreign. The global economy, that our rulers told us would provide all our necessities, is turning out to be the private property of the Chinese, bought with our former money. Our present leadership in Washington, D.C. and most of the rest of our major institutions appear to have no concept of this reality and do not vehemently object to it. It is no accident that the military, our only government institution left with any grounding in reality, is the one to sense the danger.

Mindless obstruction by environmental NGOs and federal regulators now make it almost impossible to develop new or upgrade old productive facilities in this country. Work, absent bureaucratic harassment and NGO opposition, that would have cost hundreds of millions and taken months to complete, now needs billions and takes decades to complete, if it ever is completed at all. We are literally thirty years behind now, and we are rapidly losing the ability to catch up

The government’s solution to this existential crisis is to tax its way out of a recession and enact energy legislation so horrendous that it will guarantee to “fast track” us to third-world status. Environmental zealots in the EPA are on the verge of crippling both the domestic shale oil/gas industry and the Texas petrochemical complex. Legislation is in progress that will essentially make it uneconomic to develop any mineral resources on public land in the United States. The fevered plan to stop Gulf oil development is their latest sortie into the Twilight Zone. The damage now being inflicted on this country is long-lasting and, if not reversed, fatal. If these insane initiatives are implemented, the day will not be far off when the United States will not have the talent, technology, or money to restart its productive sector even if it wants to.

When a country is on a social and economic course so suicidal that the Russians are warning us about it, some introspection is called for. Post-racial, post-industrial, postmodern, post-fossil fuel, post-common sense America has very little time left to straighten out its priorities and reverse its slide into what Leon Trotsky called “the dustbin of history.”

The ironic epilogue to all this is that when the United States completes its journey to political, economic, and military impotence, the Chinese will walk in and buy up our vast reserves of mineral and energy resources with our own dollars and produce them for their own use. They will not be bothered by environmental niceties, and they will have the power to do as they please. Environmentalists in their uncompromising, unhinged war against our producers will have destroyed the environment they were claiming to save. – Dan Gorski @ American Thinker

(H/T BK)

China Passes U.S. As World’s Biggest Energy Consumer
July 19, 2010
By Spencer Swartz The Drudge Report

China is now the world’s biggest energy consumer, knocking the U.S. off a perch it held for more than a century, according to new data from the International Energy Agency.

The Paris-based agency, whose forecasts are generally regarded as bellwether indicators for the energy industry, said China devoured 2,252 million tons of oil equivalent last year, or about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2,170 million tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower.

The figures reflect, in part, how the global recession hit the U.S. more severely than China and hurt American industrial activity and energy use. Still, China’s total energy consumption has clocked annual double-digit growth rates for many years, driven by the country’s big industrial base. Highlighting how quickly its energy demand has increased, China’s total.

China Crude Runs Hit New High.
Access thousands of business sources not available on the free web. Learn More .”The fact that China overtook the U.S. as the world’s largest energy consumer symbolizes the start of a new age in the history of energy,” IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in an interview. The U.S. had been the biggest overall energy consumer since the early 1900s, he said. The IEA is an energy adviser to most of the world’s biggest economies.

China’s voracious energy demand helps explain why the country—which gets most of its electricity from coal, the dirtiest of fossil-fuel resources—passed the U.S. in 2007 as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases.

The U.S. is still by far the biggest energy consumer per capita, with the average American burning five times as much energy annually as the average Chinese citizen, said Mr. Birol, who has been in his current role for six years.

The U.S. also is the biggest oil consumer by a wide margin, going through on average roughly 19 million barrels a day—with China at a distant second at about 9.2 million barrels a day. But many oil analysts believe U.S. crude demand has peaked or is unlikely to grow very much in coming years because of improved energy efficiency and more-stringent vehicle fuel-efficiency regulations.

Journal Communitydiscuss..“ I wonder how much diesel is consumed by those massive engines in the hundreds of container ships that bring our merchandise from China… and then head back empty?”

Prior to the recession, China had been expected to become the biggest energy consumer in about five years, but the economic malaise and energy-efficiency programs in the U.S. brought forward the date of that superlative, Mr. Birol said.

The decreased energy “intensity” of the U.S. economy is a key reason investors, such as General Electric Co., have increasingly looked to China as a driver of future growth. Mr. Birol said China requires total energy investments of some $4 trillion over the next 20 years to keep feeding its economy and to avoid power blackouts and fuel shortages.

Mr. Birol, previously an economist at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, said China is expected to build over the next 15 years some 1,000 gigawatts of new power-generation capacity. That is about the total amount of electricity-generation capacity in the U.S. currently, and the construction of all those gigawatts occurred over several decades. “This demonstrates the major growth we are talking about” in energy demand and capacity growth in China, Mr. Birol said.

U.S. Missiles Deployed Near China Send a Message
by Mark Thompson The Drudge Report
Jul 8, 2010

If China’s satellites and spies were working properly, there was a flood of unsettling intelligence flowing into the Beijing headquarters of the Chinese Navy last week. A new class of U.S. super weapon had suddenly surfaced nearby. It was an Ohio-class submarine, which for decades carried only nuclear missiles targeted against the Soviet Union, and then Russia. But this one was different: for nearly three years, the U.S. Navy has been dispatching modified “boomers” to who knows where (they do travel underwater, after all). Four of the 18 ballistic-missile subs no longer carry nuclear-tipped Trident missiles. Instead, they now hold up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, capable of hitting anything within 1,000 miles with non-nuclear warheads.

Their capability makes watching these particular submarines especially interesting. The 14 Trident-carrying subs are useful in the unlikely event of a nuclear Armageddon, and Russia remains their prime target. But the Tomahawk-outfitted quartet carries a weapon that the U.S. military has used repeatedly against targets in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Sudan.

That’s why alarm bells would have sounded in Beijing June 28 when the Tomahawk-laden 560-foot USS Ohio popped up in the Philippines’ Subic Bay. More alarms likely were sounded when the USS Michigan arrived in Pusan, South Korea, the same day. And the klaxons would have maxed out as the USS Florida surfaced the same day at the joint U.S.-British naval base at Diego Garcia, a flyspeck of an island in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese military awoke to find as many as 462 additional Tomahawks deployed by the U.S. in its neighborhood. “There’s been a decision to bolster our forces in the Pacific,” says Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There is no doubt that China will stand up and take notice.”

U.S. officials deny any message is being directed at Beijing, saying the Tomahawk triple-play was a coincidence. But they did make sure news of the new deployments appeared in the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post – on July 4, no less. The Chinese took notice quietly. “At present, common aspirations of countries in the Asian and Pacific regions are seeking for peace, stability and regional security,” Wang Baodong, spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said Wednesday. “We hope the relevant U.S. military activities will serve for the regional peace, stability and security, and not the contrary.”

Last month, the Navy had announced that all four of the Tomahawk Tridents were operationally deployed away from their home ports for the first time. Each vessel packs “the firepower of multiple surface ships,” says Capt. Tracy Howard, commander, Submarine Squadron 16 in Kings Bay, Ga., and can “respond to diverse threats on short notice.”

The move forms part of a policy by the U.S. government to shift firepower from the Atlantic to the Pacific theater, which Washington sees as the military focus of the 21st Century. Reduced tensions since the end of the Cold War has seen the U.S. scale back its deployment of nuclear weapons, allowing the Navy to reduce its Trident fleet from 18 to 14. (Why 14 subs, as well as bombers and land-based missiles carrying nuclear weapons, are still required to deal with the Russian threat is a topic for another day.)

Sure, the Navy could have retired the four additional subs and saved the Pentagon some money, but that’s not how bureaucracies operate. Instead, it spent about $4 billion replacing the Tridents with Tomahawks and making room for 60 special-ops troops to live aboard each sub and operate stealthily around the globe. “We’re there for weeks, we have the situational awareness of being there, of being part of the environment,” Navy Rear Adm. Mark Kenny explained after the first Tomahawk Trident set sail in 2008. “We can detect, classify and locate targets and, if need be, hit them from the same platform.”

The submarines aren’t the only new potential issue of concern for the Chinese. Two major military exercises involving the U.S. and its allies in the region are now underway. More than three dozen naval ships and subs began participating in the “Rim of the Pacific” war games off Hawaii on Wednesday. Some 20,000 personnel from 14 nations are involved in the biennial exercise which includes missile exercises and the sinking of three abandoned vessels playing the role of enemy ships. Nations joining the U.S. in what is billed as the world’s largest-ever naval war game are Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Netherlands, Peru, Singapore and Thailand. Closer to China, CARAT 2010 – for Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training – just got underway off Singapore. The operation involves 17,000 personnel and 73 ships from the U.S., Singapore, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.

China is absent from both exercises, and that’s no oversight. Many nations in the eastern Pacific, including Australia, Japan, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam, have been encouraging the U.S. to push back against what they see as China’s increasingly aggressive actions in the South China Sea. And the U.S. military remains concerned over China’s growing missile force – now more than 1,000 – near the Taiwan Strait. The Tomahawks’ arrival “is part of a larger effort to bolster our capabilities in the region,” Glaser says. “It sends a signal that nobody should rule out our determination to be the balancer in the region that many countries there want us to be.” No doubt Beijing got the signal.

Updated May 18, 2010
Treason Season at the State Department
By Christian Whiton
- FOXNews.com

The Obama administration appears to be unable to distinguish between the reasonable Arizona immigration law and the acts of merciless dictators in China. It’s a vivid illustration of Obama’s ‘Blame America First’ policy.

A State Department official has all but validated concerns that the Obama administration sees the United States as an unexceptional nation, morally equivalent to the world’s authoritarian countries and best served by self-loathing and supplication to tyrants for its purported sins. That is the implication of a dialogue between Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner and the communist government of China last week.

Posner, who runs the democracy and human rights bureau at the State Department, met with officials from Beijing on May 13 and 14 for the “U.S.-China Human Rights Dialogue.” The forum was suspended for much of the previous administration because the Chinese government claimed its mere participation proved it took human rights seriously, even as the treatment of people within its borders worsened. Now Beijing has not only benefited from the veneer of legitimacy bestowed by the dialogue—it apparently has found a venue in which the U.S. conveniently flagellates itself.

At a briefing after the dialogue, Posner was asked by a reporter if the Chinese side brought up the recently passed Arizona law pertaining to illegal immigrants. To the surprise of those gathered, Posner remarked: “We brought it up early and often. It was mentioned in the first session, and as a troubling trend in our society and an indication that we have to deal with issues of discrimination or potential discrimination, and that these are issues very much being debated in our own society.”

We brought it up? Discrimination? This is appalling on several levels.

The new Arizona law is not discrimination and does not constitute a human rights abuse. Police in virtually every free nation have the ability to enquire if someone suspected of a crime has the legal right to be in their country. The law simply gives Arizona cops that ability. The amended act specifically precludes race as a factor to initiate or support an enquiry. Furthermore, an investigation can be initiated only after “lawful contact” between police and a suspect, such as when someone is detained for breaking another law. Suspicion of an immigration violation alone is not a legal reason to initiate action. The common-sense, reasonable nature of this recently passed law is why polls show most Americans support it.

Even if the misinformation about the Arizona statue were true, it would not compare to the intense, comprehensive and systematic infringement of human rights conducted by the unelected, illegitimate government in Beijing. This after all is the regime that recently used lethal force against scores of protestors in Tibet and East Turkestan. Tibetan nuns attempting to escape to Nepal were shot dead by Chinese border guards in 2006. Beijing routinely locks up those who dare call for democracy—or just for a more accountable government. During the 2008 Olympics, it sentenced elderly women who requested a permit to protest eviction from their homes to a year of “re-education through labor.”

If Mr. Posner was so eager to talk about the treatment of immigrants, he could have brought up the tens of thousands of refugees generously admitted to America each year because they face persecution elsewhere. This number reached 60,108 in 2008 according the Department of Homeland Security. Ironically, the largest portion of these—24%—were fleeing oppression in China. As it turns out, Beijing is rather less humane than the U.S. to those it considers illegal immigrants. North Korean refugees caught inside China, many starving and in search only of food, are repatriated forcibly and face time in brutal prison camps and sometimes death for their attempted emigration.

That the Obama administration cannot distinguish the reasonable Arizona law from the acts of merciless dictators indicates affliction by what Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the U.N., Jeanne Kirkpatrick, labeled “Blame America First.” That phrase still aptly describes the condition of those who believe the worst of our nation while overlooking the very real sins of our adversaries. Unfortunately, these people now dominate the highest levels of our government and foreign policy elite.

Aside from the repugnance of morally equating the Arizona law with what China does to people, this is also an ineffective approach to diplomacy and advancing human rights. It is naive to believe that preemptive self-criticism will lead to concessions from a counter-party in negotiations. There is no historical instance where ‘blaming America first’ prompted a repressive government to make verbal or real concessions on human rights in return. Authoritarians are more likely to see this instead as U.S. weakness and view it as an indication they can continue their misconduct without consequence or even a public rebuke. That is quite likely the lesson Chinese diplomats took back to Beijing after their agreeable encounter with Mr. Posner.

Finally, it is not the job of federal officials to criticize, before foreign parties, the laws passed by the states. The State Department is supposed to act as an advocate of American interests, not a Washington-based repository of elitists that is embarrassed by the citizens it is supposed to represent. The Department’s opinion on domestic matters is required in precisely no instance.
Mr. Posner and his boss in the White House owe an apology to the people of Arizona—and to the citizens of the compassionate, generous and humane country they purport to represent.

Christian Whiton was a State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and served as deputy special envoy for human rights in North Korea. He is a principal at DC International Advisory.

WASHINGTON: China’s dirty little secret of nuclear proliferation to Pakistan, including virtually giving Islamabad two nuclear weapons on a platter while the US remained oblivious and smug, has exploded in Washington. Embarrassingly for President Barack Obama, the disclosures come on the eve of his much-anticipated visit to Beijing.

The broad story is known to every Tom, Dinesh, and Hamid in strategic circles — that sometime in the early 1980s, China provided Pakistan with nuclear know-how and materials to enable it to make the bomb, in part to weigh down India and in part out of gratitude to Islamabad for facilitating its opening to US. But astonishing details of the transaction, which China has blithely denied because it is in violation of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations, have been exposed courtesy A.Q.Khan, Pakistan’s Dr Strangelove, to spite the military which incarcerated him.

In a letter that Khan sent to British journalist Simon Henderson, parts of which have already been made public with the latest dribble coming out ahead of Obama’s visit to China next week, the Pakistani metallurgist reveals the following sequence of an episode the broad contours of which are well known despite Chinese-Pakistani subterfuge for nearly 30 years: In 1976, some four years after India tested its first nuclear device, Pakistan’s then Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto approached China’s supreme leader Chairman Mao in his quest for the nuclear bomb. By this time, Bhutto had already invited expat Pakistani scientists, including A.Q.Khan, to return home to help Islamabad make the bomb to ensure that the country was never again humiliated by India the way it happened in 1971.

Mao died soon after, but according to Khan, the matter was advanced in talks he and two other Pakistani officials, including then foreign secretary Agha Shahi, had with Chinese officials at Mao’s funeral. It was not a one-sided transaction: the Pakistanis told the Chinese how European-designed centrifuges (whose designs Khan had stolen) could swiftly aid China’s lagging uranium-enrichment program.

“Chinese experts started coming regularly to learn the whole technology” from Pakistan and Pakistani experts were dispatched to Hanzhong in central China, where they helped “put up a centrifuge plant,” Khan said in an account he gave to his wife after Musharraf purged him under US pressure. That letter eventually found its way to the Henderson who shared it with the Washington Post, which advanced the story on Thursday. “We sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges,” Khan wrote. “Our teams stayed there for weeks to help and their teams stayed here for weeks at a time.”

Initially, it appears China sent Pakistan 15 tons of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), a feedstock for Pakistan’s centrifuges that Khan’s colleagues were having difficulty producing on their own. Evidently, Khan had made the centrifuges from the designs he stole but did not have enough raw material to run it. Khan said the gas enabled the laboratory to begin producing bomb-grade uranium in 1982. Chinese scientists also helped the Pakistanis solve other nuclear weapons challenges.

[Read more...]

By Chidanand Rajghatta
13th November 2009

One of the first tactics taught to me in the Marine Corps was only show the enemy what you want them to see. This doesn’t ease any doubt that I have.

China allowed foreign reporters a rare glimpse inside an army base on Tuesday, part of a charm offensive apparently aimed at countering foreign fears over the nation’s military build-up.

The People’s Liberation Army’s Third Guard Division gave journalists a tour of their living and dining quarters and a display of marksmanship and artillery firepower at their base, about an hour’s drive north of Beijing.

“I am confident this will give you more exposure to China, the PLA, and our men and women in uniform and a good understanding of our sincerity, hospitality, openness and friendship,” said Senior Colonel Leng Jiesong.

Visits by foreign journalists to Chinese military facilities are rare.

China has roughly doubled its military budget since 2006, according to official government figures that some overseas analysts say vastly downplay what Beijing actually spends.

The build-up has prompted concern overseas about China’s military ambitions and transparency, but Tuesday’s base visit was the latest in a series of moves that state media has said are aimed at countering such worries.

They include the appointment of the defense ministry’s first-ever spokesman last year, as well as plans, revealed last week by state media, for a bilingual ministry website to be launched August 1, the PLA’s 82nd anniversary.

“This event shows we are taking a major step forward in the process of opening up to the outside world,” Leng told reporters.

“China is more and more open to the outside world, and so is the PLA. We are actively speeding up this process, and it is the same with our transparency.”

China has argued recently that much of its new military spending has gone into better food and medical supplies for its 2.3 million servicemen and women.

After welcoming journalists with a goose-stepping honour guard and military band, the visitors were brought to a barracks kitchen.

Inside, soldiers cooked Chinese fried pancakes and displayed a range of meat, vegetable and other dishes that officers said were typical barracks fare while a chef butchered a four-foot side of pork.

Due to its proximity to Beijing, one of the unit’s main duties is the defense of the capital, including providing security during the October 1 National Day parade and other activities marking the 60th anniversary of Communist China’s founding.

Soldiers displayed their fighting prowess with a retinue of hand-to-hand combat moves punctuated by battle cries and showed off their rifle skills and bullet-riddled paper targets as Chinese reporters clapped.

Later, soldiers conducted a dramatic drill in which an anti-terror squad stormed a three-storey building to subdue a group of simulated “terrorists”.

Soldiers shimmied up the side of the building while others rappelled to the top as explosives went off around them.

As concerns have mounted over why China needs a high-tech military, the government has increasingly stressed the need for counter-terrorism forces.

The Pentagon in recent years has raised concerns about China’s development of cruise and ballistic missiles, its 2007 test of a satellite-striking weapon, an apparent rise in cyber-espionage by China’s military, and other issues.

Jul 28, 2009

(Breitbart.com)

China and Russia v. the US Grid – Here we go folks. With the current Obama administration and the wheel, driving our country into certain disaster, lets get ready to do nothing about this. Oh, what we will see, is taxes going up because we need to upgrade all our electrical grids. So, here we go again! Quick America, stand up and THROW ALL YOUR MONEY AT IT and it will just go away.

The story below is in regards to the WSJ’s article this morning. Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies

Kudos to Wired

Scary stuff! The story, while quite interesting, doesn’t however give much direct evidence that would allow us evaluate how real the threat is. All the specific quotes and information about the danger faced (“Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system”) come from unnamed officials—who could easily be hyping the threat in order to generate business for the companies, because they always hype the threat of Chinese hackers, or because they want to spur Congress into increasing budget outlays for their departments.The one specific quote, from director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, is so vague that it’s essentially meaningless: “A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.”

Still, the issue is fascinating and worth pursuing. As it happens, as part of Wired’s April cover story on the grid, we also investigated some of the dangers faced—particularly asking whether making the grid smart would make it more vulnerable. If everything is interconnected, and if it communicates by IP, it may be both easier and more tempting to hack. The journalist who did this, Bryant Urstadt, found some fascinating stuff.

For starters, there have been some frightening episodes:

•Last January, a CIA analyst confirmed that in an unnamed country, multiple-city blackouts were caused by hackers in an attempted blackmail scheme. [This sounds like the same attack mentioned in the middle of the WSJ piece.]

•Ira Winkler, a former NSA employee, and now a security consultant who specializes in simulating terrorist attacks on networks, has been breaking into the power grid for years. In 2007, at the request of one power company, he compromised its system in a day. The simulation, he says, was called off because it was “too successful.”

•In 2007, the Associated Press obtained a Homeland Security video which showed a small electric generator being disabled remotely. In the video the generator coughs, sputters, and then dies in a smoky paroxysm. HS labeled it an example of “the Aurora vulnerability,” but declined to elaborate on what exactly that vulnerability was, though more details were given to power plant operators

And here’s how Urstadt describes the problem:

The grid is going to introduce a huge host of unknowns, primarily with the roll-out of wireless, networked smart meters able to monitor and control appliances, and to talk to utilities and to one another over their own protocols and through an IP-based standard. These meters will likely be built from off-the-shelf components, and will be vulnerable to compromise. One fear, for example, is a hacker setting a meter to tell the utility that it needs more power, and also telling other meters to say the same. Or a hacked network could turn on every air conditioner in a city at the same time. Too many power requests, real or fake, could trip a shutdown at a utility, and then lead to a “cascade” of shutdowns at other utilities, such as caused the 2003 blackout.

So what can we do to prevent that? Urstadt reports on one very interesting solution: “researchers like Mike Assante, the Chief Security Officer for the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, an industry group, are working to make sure that when a control computer makes a decision, it assumes that some portion of the meters are compromised. Other lines of defense will include ‘dissimilar’ protocols for wireless meters in a neighborhood, which is roughly like making sure that not everyone in town uses the same cell phone carrier; the ability to quarantine meters; and the design of firmware that can easily be reset to a normal state.”

Another possible danger is what’s called a “man-in-the-middle” attack. This is where:

an invader gets between a conversation, purposely changing messages. Hackers might take an alarm from a voltage sensor in the field and convert it into an all-clear message, so that an operator screen reads normal, when, in fact, all hell is breaking loose. Stopping such hits will require the usual authentication codes, but also redundant meters. On the power delivery end, it will require systems that can differentiate a normal request for increased power from an orchestrated series of requests.

Urstadt’s ultimate conclusion is that: “In the long run, a few hacker-generated blackouts may be a fair price of the expected increase in efficiency and decrease in pollution from the smart grid—though it’s going to be hard to feel that way when some dork kid blows out the power on the eastern seaboard.

March 12, 2009

A potential conflict was brewing last night in the South China Sea after President Obama dispatched heavily armed American destroyers to the scene of a naval standoff between the US and China at the weekend.

Mr Obama’s decision to send an armed escort for US surveillance ships in the area follows the aggressive and co-ordinated manoeuvres of five Chinese boats on Sunday. They harassed and nearly collided with an unarmed American vessel.

Washington accused the Chinese ships of moving directly in front of the US Navy surveillance ship Impeccable, forcing its crew to take emergency action, and to deploy a high-pressure water hose to deter the Chinese ships. Formal protests were lodged with Beijing after the incident.

Please continue reading at The Times Online.uk

This is an update from this story a few days ago.

Pentagon: Chinese Vessels Harassed Unarmed US Navy Ship

Here we go again!

When are people going to learn that the Chinese care nothing about the health and safety of anyone in the world, not even themselves! There was a story at the end of last year about vendors in China selling cardboard filled dumplings to their own citizenry! And you trust the products that we buy from them, dumbass?!

First, it was dog food. Then on to toothpaste and shellfish. Now practically anything you purchase that was made/grown in China is like playing russian roulette! This is becoming such a problem, the United States may want to rethink its trade agreements with China.

At least pay attention to what food products you buy. We may never completely be rid of all Chinese products in our country but at the very least, you the consumer, should continously decide not to put Chinese food products into your body. I will be to compile an exhaustive list of Chinese food products. If you find me face down in an aisle at the store, it was either fatigue or a hit. Either way, please help.

Insecticide poisons Chinese dumplings
5-year-old girl in serious condition, charges considered as food recalled
Posted: January 30, 2008
2:54 p.m. Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com

In the latest scare from Chinese exports, dumplings containing insecticide have made 10 people in Japan ill, including a girl in serious condition, according to police who warn they could press criminal charges.

In a live press conference broadcast nationally last night, distributor JT foods announced it was recalling the product, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We pray for the early recovery of those whose health was affected,” said Mutsuo Iwai, an executive with a JT Foods subsidiary, Japan Tobacco.

“We sincerely apologize for the trouble.”

In one of a series of WND stories that first brought attention to the problem, FDA inspectors reported tainted food imports from China are being rejected with increasing frequency, because they are contaminated with pesticides and tainted with carcinogens, bacteria and banned drugs.

JT Foods said the dumplings contained an insecticide called methamidophos, AFP reported. The popular “gyoza” dumplings, with historical origins in China, are usually made with ground meat inside.

A mother and her four children were among the 10 people who got sick eating the Chinese dumplings, the news agency said. A 5-year-old girl was reported in serious condition.

At least five people remained hospitalized after suffering vomiting, stomach aches or diarrhea.

China is Japan’s second largest source of food imports, behind the U.S.

A WND investigation into the safety of Chinese exports triggered widespread interest in a problem that continued through the most recent Christmas season – highlighted by a series of recalls of children’s toys and other holiday items.

Concerns with China imports began with a pet food scandal that killed or maimed up to 39,000 American cats and dogs. WND’s investigation continued into imports of foods meant for human consumption. The New York Times and other major U.S. media followed.

Members of Congress have referenced statistics gathered in WND’s investigation of product recalls from China. WND found most of the safety recalls involved imports from the Asian giant, which were recalled twice as often as products made everywhere else in the world, including the U.S.

WND reported China, the leading exporter of seafood to the U.S., is raising most of its fish products in water contaminated with raw sewage and compensating by using dangerous drugs and chemicals, many of which are banned by the FDA.

China consistently has topped the list of countries whose products were refused by the FDA. The list includes many countries, including Mexico and Canada, that export far more food products to the U.S. than China.

China is the second largest source of imports for the U.S. while the U.S. is China’s largest overseas market and second largest source of foreign direct investment.