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antiqueanimals · 1 year
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Plate 48 from A Field Guide to Pacific Coast Fishes, showing deepsea and oceanic fishes that are seldomly encountered by sportsfisherman. From Terra: The Member's Magazine of The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Volume 22, No. 3. 1984.
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india-fish-01 · 1 year
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Know Your Catch - India Fish Company
The Black Pomfret fish is a marine fish with a laterally compressed body and a dark, blackish-gray color. It has a slender shape, a forked tail, and a prominent dorsal fin. This species is found in the Indo-West Pacific region and is valued for its firm, white flesh and mild flavor in Asian cuisines.
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usacounselingcredit · 2 years
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Las Vegas Nevada Mailbox: UNLV rolls to blowout win over NAIA opponent Life Pacific
Las Vegas Nevada Mailbox
UNLV rolls to blowout win over NAIA opponent Life Pacific
by Las Vegas Nevada Mailbox on Sunday 27 November 2022 02:16 AM UTC-05 | Tags: #lasvegasnevadamailbox las-vegas-nevada-mailbox
Fourteen UNLV players scored as the Rebels cruised past NAIA opponent Life Pacific 126-54 on Saturday at the Thomas & Mack Center.
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encyclopika · 2 years
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Animal Crossing Fish  - Explained #193
Brought to you by a marine biologist and a fish colonizing new horizons seas...
CLICK HERE FOR THE AC FISH EXPLAINED MASTERPOST!
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people tell me they don’t believe humans are having a profound effect on the planet and the other species that call this space rock home. But, like, literally everything we do affects an animal somewhere. That’s not to say it’s necessarily *bad* for that organism - sometimes it’s great for them, but at the detriment of other species (in which we call those invaders invasive species). Today’s fish certainly has us to thank for literally opening the door to new frontiers for it, and it’s not in the usual “Person A is dumb and let this thing free in the local pond” business. 
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The Silver Pomfret was a Pocket Camp winter fish that appeared in December 2020 and stayed until March 2021 in the marine area. Someone let me know if it ever came back?
Anyway, the Silver Pomfret is named to species because ACPC likes making my life extremely easy. I’m spoiled. Anyway, this is Pampus argenteus, a type of butterfish native to the Indo-Pacific, primarily the coastal waters of the Middle East through South Asia. It is, of course, widely eaten in that part of the world. Butterifish are an interesting group of fish. They are surprisingly a part of the same Order as Mackerels and Tunas, the Scombriformes. Within that order, butterfish split off into Family Stromateidae, of which there are 15 species of butterfish, and they appear worldwide. Some other fish are called “butterfish” (it typically has to do with how the meat tastes when cooked), but if it’s not in Stromateidae, it’s not a true butterfish. Yes, we gatekeep fish terms here.
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By Hamid Badar Osmany - http://fishbase.de/photos/thumbnailssummary.php?Genus=Pampus&Species=argenteus#, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31706488
The icon ACPC uses for this fish is so spot-on, like, damn! 
Now, I’m here to talk to you about a sneaky thing this fish did. You’ve heard of invasive species - non-native species that trash their new homes, basically, and it often happens because, y’know, people. Well, what if a told you that animals also take full advantage of our structures to do this, too, no idiots required? Animals will use our bridges, trash, etc. to expand into new territory where they never would have been able to before without that structure. This actually has a very specific name - it’s called Lessepsian Migration. The term can be used to describe any organism’s movement and subsequent invasion of a new area via human structures, but it’s often used to describe the very particular act of marine species moving from the Red Sea (the sliver of ocean between Egypt and the Persian Peninsula) into the Mediterranean Sea via the Suez Canal (yes, the canal that had the boat stuck in it). Yes, species can go the other way, but it’s a lot rarer because of salinity differences and physical oceanography stuff.
The Suez Canal has a lot of history, but it’s extremely important for the flow of goods across the world. For example, ships leaving from Mediterranean countries can reach India and other South-Asian countries much faster, and vice versa through it. The alternative would be to sail all the hell the way around Africa, and despite what it looks like on a map, Africa is LARGE. No one wants to do that. And people apparently aren’t the only ones using the Suez Canal for that very purpose. The Silver Pomfret is one such fish that has expanded its range into the Mediterranean Sea using the canal...and it’s not alone! To date, about 300 Red Sea marine species have staked their claim in the Med Sea.
And there you have! Fascinating stuff, no? 
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nethajosh · 2 years
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White Pomfret Fish
White pomfret also known as Zubaidi, Butterfish, Managatsuo, Paplet, Sadumi, Avoli, and Vavval in regional areas. . It contains relatively high nutritional value. It may be considered good for your skin for its high vitamin A, vitamin B3, and vitamin E content. Pomfret is a seawater fish with a single bone. Found in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it is a rich source of vitamins A, B-3…
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freshfishbasket · 3 years
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Seafood like fish and prawn is a rich source of Omega 3 unsaturated fats. Fishes and prawns have different medical advantages. Look at the sorts of fishes and their medical advantages. 
As indicated by a study, eating 8 ounces of fish every week decreases the danger of passing on from heart illnesses by 36%. Fish gloats on supplements like protein and Vitamin D. Having fish can also provide various psychological benefits and help in raising IQ at a beginning phase. 
Assuming you are confronting any insufficiency of Omega3 unsaturated fat, you should consider adding fish to your eating regimen. You can easily buy these sources of protein like fresh fish and chicken online. 
What are Some of the Key Benefits that Seafood like Fish and Prawns Provide?
Advantages of Seafood 
Fish are pressed of nutrients that can help your brain, heart, psyche, and by and large body. It is loaded up with fundamental supplements, similar to omega-3 unsaturated fats, proteins, iodine, and minerals that keep your body fit and your muscles solid. How about we study various kinds of fish with a clever healthful graph. In this article, we have included various types of fishes and their benefits. Once you have read about all the benefits, get prawn online home delivery in Delhi and soak up on all the various vitamins. 
Kelanga Fish, otherwise called ladyfish, has numerous different names in South Indian Kitchen. It is otherwise called Kilangan and Kilachi in Tamil; Poozhan, Noongal, and Cudeerah in Malayalam. 
Also Read:- Get All the Benefits of Fish by Getting Fresh Fish Home Delivery Delhi
It would appear that enormous size anchovies that are low in immersed fats and are a decent wellspring of Omega-3 fundamental unsaturated fats. The healthy benefit of fish is separated into - 9% fat, 59% carbs, 32% protein in 60gms of Kelanga fish. 
Ladyfish Benefits 
Rejuvenates the body 
Improves your sensory system work 
Reduces the danger of creating joint inflammation 
Improves the visual perception 
Therachi Fish 
Therachi Fish is otherwise called Thirukkai or Stingray or Thirandi Fish. It is particularly utilized in fish curries as its bone is palatable as well.  You can buy Fresh Fish in Delhi with your phone. 
Advantages 
It helps the mind wellbeing 
It forestalls and treats sadness 
A decent dietary wellspring of Vitamin D 
Lepo Fish 
Sole fish fry or Lepo fish is famously accessible in Goa. It is utilized to make curry or fry plans. It contains fundamental supplements like Selenium, Zinc, Potassium, Iodine, and Vitamin A that keep eyes splendid and sound. 
Breaking the wholesome realities, there are 26 calories in 1 ounce of boneless Sole (Fish) and accompanies 12% fat, 0% carbs, 88% protein. 
Advantages 
Good for gleaming skin 
Reduces the danger of coronary illness 
Rich in omega-3 unsaturated fats that bring down the cholesterol in your blood 
Karapodi Fish 
Karapodi Fish is otherwise called Silver Belly Big fish and Pony Fish. The fish is privately known by various names; Surgutta, Katali, and Titaka in Hindi, Kaara in Telugu, thaali mulen, nalla mullen, and karal in Malayalam. 
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This is quite possibly the most well-known south Indian dish that helps the memory as well as lifts up the resistance power. And now you can buy Fresh Fish in Delhi online. 
Advantages 
Extremely useful for calcium inadequacy 
Helps in building and fixing the body’s tissues 
Prevents rheumatoid joint inflammation 
Wam Fish 
Wam fish, discovered significantly on the Eastern Coast of North America, is known as Eel fish. Wam fish is a decent wellspring of Vitamin A, Vitamin B-12, Isoleucine, Lysine, and Tryptophan. Now you can order fishes and prawn online home delivery in Delhi/NCR.
Advantages 
Helps in the Formation of DNA 
Helps in the recovery of cells and tissues 
Improves the skin's wellbeing 
Assist in the assimilation cycle 
Sheela Fish 
Sheela Fish is known as Cheela, Barracuda, Neduva, Koduva, Sea Pike, Sheelavu, and Thinda in Malayalam. In Tamil, it is normally called Sheela, Ooli fish, Meen, Pilinjan, Cheela, Goli, Gola, and Oozha. 
This fish is a rich wellspring of Omega 3 unsaturated fats which is useful for recuperation from numerous medical problems. It is quite possibly the most seasoned assortments of fish in India. 
Sheela Fish Benefits 
Prevents the side effects of rheumatoid joint pain 
Protects your skin from UV harm 
Improves heart issue 
Prevents discouragement 
Konam Fish 
Konam Fish is otherwise called Vanjaram fish, Spanish mackerel fish, and Anjal fish in English. The mackerel sustenance or diviner fish nourishment are as per the following- 
1 cut serving of Seer fish fry contains 47% fat, 0% carbs, 53% protein, and has 217 calories. 
Diviner fish advantages or Mackerel benefits incorporate: 
It has omega-3 unsaturated fats that help in managing aggravation 
Lower the danger of cardiovascular sickness 
Supports the design and capacity of cells 
Useful for weight reduction since it has zero carbs 
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Pomfret Fish
Pomfret Fish is discovered worldwide in the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. 
A typical inquiry for this famous discover Indian locale fish is-Is pomfret fish useful for wellbeing? Indeed, Pomfret’s benefits are countless. It is a decent wellspring of calcium and essential vitamins like Vitamin A, B, and D, comprehensive of B12 that improves the general strength of a person. You can easily buy Fresh Fish in Delhi online. 
Pomfret fish benefits are: 
Very solid for skin and forestalls balding 
Ideal for vision improvement 
Helps the sensory system by lessening pressure 
Kane Fish 
Kane Fish likewise called Lady Fish and Silver Whiting Fish is discovered mostly in the South Indian kitchen. Having low immersed fats, it is a decent wellspring of omega 3 unsaturated fats. It is very solid in nature and gives a delectable taste by profound broiling it with a blend of rice flour. 
Advantages 
Lower your danger of cardiovascular failures and strokes 
Boost the cerebrum wellbeing 
Reduce irritation all through the body 
Helps in muscle growth 
Seelavathi Fish 
Seelavathi Fish is called Rohu Fish and Carpo fish improved with proteins and is low in fat. It is loaded with Omega 3 unsaturated fats and vitamins A, B, and C. You can have Seelavathi Fish in any event once every week. 
Advantages 
Keeps sicknesses like cold and hacking under control 
Serves as a cerebrum promoter 
Helpful in battling malignant growth 
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How are rohu and Katla fish different from each other? 
In rohu versus Katla, Katla has a decent proportion of omega 6 to omega 3 and a moderate degree of mercury while Rohu is a freshwater fish and has not many bones. 
Conclusion 
As a characteristic source of vitamins and protein, various kinds of fish sustain your body, improve your wellbeing, and increase the life span of a person. In this way, add it to your eating plan and see the magic in your body and wellbeing. Now you don’t even have to step out to get all these fishes and seafood. As the fresh fish basket delivers fishes, prawns, and other seafood to your doorstep.
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newstechreviews · 4 years
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In a speech last week to commemorate 70 years since China’s entry into the Korean War, President Xi Jinping launched a thinly-veiled attack on the U.S. “No blackmailing, blocking or extreme pressuring will work” for those seeking to become “boss of the world,” Xi told veterans and cadres crammed into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The 1950-53 Korean War, he went on, “broke the myth that the U.S. military is invincible.”
With U.S.-China relations at a decades-long nadir, it was fitting that Xi threw down the gauntlet on the anniversary of one of the only times the People’s Liberation Army and U.S. troops have faced off on the battlefield—a conflict still known in China as the “War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea.”
The upcoming U.S. election on Nov. 3 could be a turning point for American foreign policy, particularly regarding Beijing, which has borne the brunt of the Trump Administration’s sledgehammer approach to diplomacy. Chinese trade practices, tech companies, diplomats and even students have been in the crosshairs, feeding Beijing’s paranoia that the U.S. is pursuing a Soviet-era policy of containment.
Much hangs in the balance: economics, nuclear proliferation, the climate crisis, human rights as well as possible military confrontations. Whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden controls the White House may decide if the last four years of rancor was an aberration or the new normal for relations between the world’s top two economies.
“China, of course, is very concerned about the election,” says Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University in Beijing. “If Biden wins, he may take a multilateral approach, more coherence with U.S. alliances. If Trump wins, he’ll definitely continue harsh policies toward China.”
But whoever sits in the Oval Office in January, a return to fulsome engagement appears off the table.
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AFP via Getty Images Containers are stacked at the port in Qingdao, in China’s eastern Shandong province on November 8, 2019. – China’s exports suffered their third month of decline in October, and while the drop was less than expected there were warnings on November 8 of more pain to come as the US trade war rumbles on.
Global rivalry between the U.S. and China
Washington’s attempts to isolate Beijing from an integrated and interconnected global economy have forced U.S. companies to relinquish established supply chains in China. Senior administration hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have also openly questioned the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and called for regime change.
As a result, the U.S. is losing the goodwill of ordinary Chinese, with moderate voices within society replaced by resurgent nationalism. Meanwhile, the vacuum created by the Trump Administration’s America First approach has allowed Beijing to co-opt international institutions. China now sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council despite detaining one million Muslims in its far west region of Xinjiang. It champions the Paris Climate Accords and free trade despite, being the world’s worst polluter and propping up key industries with state funds.
This has allowed China to develop a narrative that it is reasserting its rightful place in global leadership while the U.S is in terminal decline—riven by income inequality, political polarization, racial injustice and toxic nativism. That has been strengthened this year by Trump’s inability or unwillingness to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. while China has successfully controlled the coronavirus within its borders and is the only major economy heading for growth this year.
At the same time, China has torpedoed some of its relationships around the world as it seeks to swell its influence. When the normally urbane Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Europe late August—ironically to smooth trade tensions—he threatened Norway with reprisals were it to give the Nobel Peace Prize to Hong Kong protesters, and swore that the president of the Czech senate would pay a “heavy price” for visiting the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which China regards as a breakaway province. (The affront prompted the Mayor of Prague to brand Chinese diplomats “rude clowns.”) On Oct. 21, China responded to Sweden’s decision to ban Huawei from its 5G network by threatening a “negative impact” on Swedish companies.
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Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesU.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Xi Jinping, China’s president, shake hands during a news conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017.
China’s military capability
Worryingly, Beijing’s hawkish Wolf Warrior diplomacy has gone beyond rhetoric and strayed into saber-rattling with U.S. allies. In recent months, China has ramped up military drills around Taiwan, sailed a record number of sorties into Japan’s territorial waters and engaged in deadly Himalayan border clashes with India. This appears to be more than mere chest-thumping; analysts suspect that China may be pitting its formidable yet untested military against unprepared foes in order to better gauge its own capabilities as well as the likelihood of an international backlash.
“India is a perfect target because it’s not a treaty ally of anybody,” says John Pomfret, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post and author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. “You push the Indians around a little bit, declare victory and leave. That would signal the rest of the world that China’s big and bad and can do this type of stuff so watch out.”
Beijing insists that it is the victim of Indian aggression in the recent Himalayan skirmishes. But it is less meek about designs for Taiwan, which split politically from the mainland following China’s 1927-1949 civil war and is by far the CCP’s most coveted prize. Xi considers reuniting the island with the mainland a historic “mission” and analysts agree it is the most likely issue to force a military confrontation between the superpowers.
Read more: How TikTok Found Itself in the Middle of a U.S.-China Tech War
In an Oct. 10 speech, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen called for “reconciliation and peaceful dialogue” with Beijing. Instead, Beijing responded within hours by releasing previously unseen footage of a large-scale military exercise simulating the invasion of an unidentified island, as well as video of a staged confession from a Taiwanese businessman charged with spying on the mainland.
Oriana Skylar Mastro, a specialist on China’s military at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, says that up until 2015 the main consideration of Chinese military leaders was Washington’s resolve to defend Taiwan. Now, however, she says they tell her: “It doesn’t matter. We would still win.”
The veracity of those sentiments is a matter of hot debate, but concerningly, “China has a remarkable tendency to overestimate its power,” says Pomfret. In September, the PLA Air Force released a video on its official social media showing nuclear-capable H-6 bombers carrying out a simulated raid on what looks like Andersen Air Force Base on the U.S. Pacific island of Guam. In a clear reference to U.S. support for Taiwan, Xi told the Great Hall of the People last week that any attempt to invade or separate China’s “sacred territory” will be met “with a head-on blow!”
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Photo by Andrea Verdelli/Getty Images Soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army march during a parade to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, at Tiananmen Square on October 1, 2019 in Beijing, China.
Sino-U.S. relations after the election
It’s a precarious situation in need of deft diplomacy. Some China hawks in the Trump Administration are calling for Taiwan to be provided with an explicit U.S. defense guarantee. But that would be “provocative and expensive,” says Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director for the nonpartisan Defense Priorities think tank. “I’m not in favor.”
Trump’s distaste for multinational institutions like NATO, and dislike of U.S. troop deployments overseas, has made America’s allies take their own security more seriously. On Monday, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of 100 Boeing-made Harpoon Coastal Defense Systems to Taiwan in a deal worth as much as $2.37 billion, prompting China to impose sanctions on the U.S. companies involved.
“Taiwan could do more, Japan could do more,” says Friedman. “They could buy more defensive systems, particularly mobile missiles and radar that will make it harder to be invaded.”
Biden, by contrast, has voiced support for a multilateral approach in the region, restoring America’s role in global governance and re-establishing a liberal democratic order. Writing on Oct. 22 in World Journal, America’s largest Chinese-language newspaper, Biden vowed to “stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity and values in the Asia-Pacific region … That includes deepening our ties with Taiwan, a leading democracy, major economy, technology powerhouse—and a shining example of how an open society can effectively contain COVID-19.”
Biden has railed against Trump’s trade war—which studies estimate has trimmed 0.7% from U.S. GDP—and would likely rollback many tariffs. He also said that he would organize and host a global Summit for Democracy to “renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world” during his first year in office.
Read more: What Happens Next With the U.S.-China Rivalry
Reasserting such historic alliances could cause Beijing much heartburn. “We are 25% of the world’s economy,” Biden told the audience at the final presidential debate Oct. 23. “We need to have the rest of our friends with us saying to China, ‘These are the rules, you play by them or you will pay the price for not playing by them, economically.’”
While there’s no doubt that Biden would be tougher on China than Obama, many in diplomatic circles hope he could reopen lines of communication with Beijing to seek pragmatic solutions on trade, the environment, human rights and other issues. America still has many tools. The dollar’s role as global reserve currency has become more important during the pandemic. And the U.S. still boasts the world’s biggest economy, spearheading innovation.
But the U.S. has never faced a rival that can compete economically and militarily as China can. In the week before his Korean War anniversary speech, Xi addressed the nation on state-run television: “We Chinese know well we must speak to invaders with the language they understand,” he said. “So we use war to stop war, we use military might to stop hostility, we win peace and respect with victory. In the face of difficulty or danger, our legs do not tremble, our backs do not bend.”
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sarahlwlee · 4 years
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31 Stories in 31 Days: Meals
What is this? As part of celebrating Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month (May), I am writing a story a day about my experiences as a Chinese Malaysian immigrant in America. My friends and family have provided numerous one-word prompts to help me create these stories. Today’s word prompt was contributed by Cheri B. and the word is “Meals”. Thank you Cheri for your contribution and thank you everyone who stopped by to read my story today.
A meal is a reflection of the person who cooked it — filled with love, care and the joy of nourishing your loved ones. Home cooked meals when I was growing up were my favorite, especially when it came to my mom’s cooking. Every meal embodied who she was as a person and also the love and care she felt about her family. She knew each family member’s favorite dish and tried to incorporate everyone’s favorite dish into almost every dinner meal. For example my brother loves meatloaf, my favorite was fried Pomfret fish, my sister loves chicken with beancurd, and my father loves Chinese sausage with steamed rice. All of those dishes don’t always go together as a dinner menu, however my mom somehow figured out how all of us could feel special at the dinner table.
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Whenever a sibling moved out of the house, my mom’s cooking would change and so would the dinner menu. After my sister moved out when she got married, we had soups very infrequently. We use to have some sort of soup featured at every meal. The only soup she kept making were my favorites, spinach with egg soup or pork ribs with lotus soup. All the other soups never came back to the dinner table. When my brother moved out after he got married, meat loaf was no longer an option at the table as well as foo yoong tan (Chinese omelette) — my brother’s favorite dishes. Something else changed as well, all the dishes were under seasoned. I realized my mom missed her children and a little piece of her left with them.
I was the last one left at home along with my dad. During this time period, my mom was going through menopause and the symptoms affected her severely. She refused to participate in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or any medication to ease her symptoms. Herbal medicine was her preferred method in coping with these symptoms. Some days her mood swings were so drastic that no herbal medicine would soothe her. My mother shaved off her hair, broke dining furniture, yelled at both my father and I constantly. She wailed in her bedroom with the door locked often. I could hear her praying and crying through the door. I was so scared of what might come next that I would often leave her alone and hide in my bedroom.
Our dinnertime with just the three of us became infrequent. My father sometimes ordered pizza delivery or leave the house to tah-pau food (buy food to-go) from the nearby restaurants or mamas stalls. As a teenager I chose to participate in more social activities in the evening at church or with the writer’s group I was a part of, which meant spending dinner time outside of the house with friends. My mom didn’t cook as much anymore, when my scheduled changed to be less at home. In fact, there were days I dreaded going home because I never knew what state my mother would be in.
Some days when I returned home late, she would be up late waiting for me and would ask me about my evening — patiently listening while I recounted in detail about my day. Other days when I came home, she would be screaming at me asking me where I had been, what took me so long to come home and if I had stopped loving her that’s why I am such a disobedient child. Days like this, our conversations would be short with her mostly yelling uncontrollably while crying, like a volcano erupting and there was nothing you could do to stop the molten lava that washed over you. My dad sometimes was present when my mom was behaving this way, he resorted to bear hugging her and holding her back for fear of her striking me or doing something she would regret later.
I recognize today is Mother’s Day as I reflect back on this memory. Unfortunately it isn’t a sweet memory of her, but it doesn’t mean she was a bad mother. She offered her whole self to our family the best way she knew how. When I was a child, she often told me that the only thing she could ever offer to me was a mother’s love. She would also say that she had no intelligence nor beauty to offer me because she wasn’t born smart nor beautiful, so I wouldn’t inherit any of these ugly useless traits from her as she would describe it.
Every time when she talked about a mother’s love, she would share this story about her servant who lived with her family named Ah Sam (aa-sohm). My mother was the youngest of four girls and my grandfather wanted a son. When she was born, her parents were disappointed that she wasn’t a boy so they gave her to their servant to raise. They didn’t care about her well being as much as they cared about their three older daughters. My mother described Ah Sam’s love was what she knew of a mother’s love growing up. She always felt insecure whenever Ah Sam would threaten her father that she would leave whenever he started to argue with her because she felt under appreciated and under paid. My mother slept in the same bed as Ah Sam and would always lay her leg over Ah Sam’s leg to make sure she didn’t leave without her if she ever chose to leave in the middle of the night. My mom said the only reason Ah Sam never left when she was growing up was because of her.
My mom’s memories of the mother she knew, Ah Sam, and how she was raised gave me perspective as an adult. I don’t hold any grudges towards my mother even after some of the ugly things she said to me during my formative years. It took me a long time to unpack those scars, to forgive her and to let it go. I think the best gift I could give myself was forgiving my mother. It gave me the opportunity to explore my capacity to love again.
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mitchbeck · 5 years
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CANTLON: (FRI) WOLF PACK LIMP HOME
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BY: Gerry Cantlon, Howlings HARTFORD, CT - When last seen, the Hartford Wolf Pack (16-7-2-5) were riding-high on a five-game winning streak, but that came to a crashing halt as the team came off two of their worst performances of the season in Charlotte against the Checkers as part of a three-game road trip. They started off by losing the back-end of a home-and-home with the Lehigh Valley Phantoms last Saturday. “We played good enough in Lehigh Valley, but in Charlotte we weren’t really ready to play in the first period. They really took it to us. We played better later, but too little, too late, to make a difference in the outcome,” remarked Pack head coach Kris Knoblauch who was keeping an even keel about the performance. Charlotte has been like a graveyard for Wolf Pack teams the past few years. They are winless in the Queen city at 0-12-0-0. Besides getting outscored 13-4 over two games, for the first time in the AHL franchises' 1,624 games, as either the Wolf Pack or CT Whale, the team's two goalies were lifted in back-to-back games. Were Igor Shesterkin and Adam Huska the sole reasons for the losses? No, but they had plenty of company. For the first time though the two of them looked mortal between the pipes. Shesterkin, who held the AHL's best Goals-Against-Average entering the two games, is now is fifth at 2.14. He was lifted after surrendering goals after facing 19 shots in the first period alone. Huska was fine in relief with 19 saves on Tuesday night in a 6-3 loss. “To be honest, pulling them was more because of not wanting to leave them in the way the team was playing… not very well in front of them. Igor and Adam have been so good for us all year, and I don’t think there's a coach in the league after thirty games that could say they weren’t at their best. They’ve been exceptional. It was the first two games they haven’t been. We still trust our goaltenders very much,” Knoblauch stated. Then, in a 7-1 thrashing, Huska was pulled after the second period with just 10 saves and a trailing 4-0. Shesterkin fared no better surrendering three more goals. “Honestly, we had a good streak. We won five and now we lost three. Sometimes it happens,” said Phil Di Giuseppe, “Now we have had some success against Providence, hopefully they played Wednesday, and tonight we can take advantage of that." He'll get the call tomorrow against the P-Bruins, who hold first place, two points ahead of Hartford (41-39). They lost to the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, 1-0. Knoblauch was self-critical as well stating, “The coaching staff has to get better too, and address things and trends a little earlier.” This was also the first time this season the Wolf Pack looked like the team of the last two years. At times they were undisciplined, disinterested, and not playing as a five-man unit. “We're going to have to play a lot better all throughout the lineup than the last two games. Providence is in first place." The Pack played as if they were already on Christmas break and will be after Saturday’s game. “We're in the middle of (the season) now and everybody else in the league is in the same position. It’s still no excuse for the way we played. Hopefully, we can get things off on the right foot for the New Year. Everybody has got each other’s back and we're looking forward to it. We’ve had a lot of changes lately, but that’s pro hockey these days.” said Di Giuseppe. NOTES: After ten games and no points, the Wolf Pack reassigned Ryan Dmowski (Old Lyme/Gunnery Prep) back to their ECHL affiliate, the Maine Mariners. Jansen Harkins, the son of ex-Hartford Whaler Todd Harkins, has 31 points in 30 games with the Manitoba Moose. He was recalled by the Winnipeg Jets. He was a scratch in Thursday’s game in Winnipeg against Chicago. Scott Morrow (Darien) who plays at Shattuck’s St. Mary’s (MNPREP) has committed to North Dakota (NCHC) for 2021-22. The Canadian-entry for the Christmas-time, European six-team, Spengler Cup Tournament in Davos, Switzerland has some familiar names. The GM is ex-Whaler, Sean Burke. The head coach is former New York Ranger, Craig MacTavish. His assistant coach is ex-Whaler (in spirit only), Paul Coffey. On the ice will be ex-Pack, Adam Tambellini, as well as ex-Sound Tigers, Andrew MacDonald, and Dustin Jeffrey, as well as former Quinnipiac Bobcat, Justin Danforth, and former Ranger Josh Jooris, and ex-Ranger and Sound Tiger, David Desharnais all lacing them up. HC Davos features a trio of ex-Pack players. They're led by captain Andres Ambuhl, Danny Kristo, and Casey Wellman. HC Ocelari Trinec (Czech Republic) has ex-Pack/CT Whale, Tomas Kundratek, David Musil, the nephew of former Whaler and Ranger, Robert (Bobby) Holik, and goalie Nick Malik, the son of ex-Whaler, Beast of New Haven, and Ranger, Marek Malik. TPS Turku (Finland) features as their captain, ex-Pack, and Ranger, Lauri Korpikoski, and from HC Ambri-Piotta (Switzerland), Brian Flynn (Pomfret School). Former UConn Husky, Philip Nyberg, after having contract dissolved by Mora IK (Sweden - SHL) signs for the rest of the season with Lindloven IF (Sweden Division-1). Ex-Sound Tiger goalie, C.J. Motte, goes from HC Innsbruck to Coventry Blaze (England - EIHL). Ex-Sound Tiger, Robert Nilsson officially retires as a result of concussion issues from ZSC Zurich Lions (Switzerland - LNA) and a ceremony will be held January 18th. Ex-Pack, Ryan Haggerty was dealt by the Pittsburgh Penguins to the Florida Panthers for Kevin Roy in a minor league swap as Haggerty heads to the Springfield Thunderbirds and Roy to Wilkes-Barre/Scranton. Haggerty scored the game winner in his first game a Thunderbird. Springfield also did some additional holiday house cleaning sending Blaine Byron to Ontario for future considerations. One of the few AHL coast-to-coast trades since the Pacific Division was created. After the break, the Wolf Pack play the Bridgeport Sound Tigers who have had two lineup additions. Robert Carpenter, the son of former NHL'er, Bobby Carpenter, and brother to Team USA's forward, Alex Carpenter, has recovered from a preseason injury. Returning from his Islanders imposed exile in Toronto is truculent forward, Josh Ho-Sang. He demanded a trade at the end of training camp and has been working out at the University of Toronto and was shaken the team hasn't traded him. The US WJC camp is in full swing in Plymouth, MI. Leading the charge is goalie and Darien-native, Spencer Knight (Boston College/Florida). He is being joined by fellow former Avon Old Farms Winged Beaver, Trevor Zegras (Boston University/Anaheim). Also on the roster is Christian Krygier (Michigan State Big 10/NY Islanders), the son of former Whaler/Nighthawk/UConn player, Todd Krygier) and K’Andre Miller (Wisconsin Big 10), the Rangers first-round pick (22nd overall) in 2018. Mattias Samuelsson (Western Michigan - NCHC/Buffalo), the son of former Nighthawk, and Ranger, Kjell Samuelsson, Jack Drury (Harvard - ECACHL/Carolina), the son of former Whaler, Ted Drury and the nephew of current Wolf Pack GM, Chris Drury. Shane Pinto (Selects Academy at South Kent Prep/North Dakota - NCHC/Ottawa) and the Islanders sent current Sound Tiger forward, Oliver Wahlstrom over. The USA team is in the Czech Republic and the final team will be announced on Christmas Eve Day. Ironically or not, the Islanders didn’t send Noah Dobson to the Canadian team. Peter Dilaberatore (Quinnipiac University) and Barrett Hayton (Arizona-NHL), the son of former New Haven Nighthawk, Brian Hayton, are with Team Canada. Team Sweden has two Ranger prospects, defenseman Nils Lundkvist, and center Karl Henriksson. The US team will be playing in Group B in Ostrava, Czech Republic and the opening game is against traditional rival, Canada on Boxing Day at 1 PM on the NHL Network. All preliminary and medal games will be shown on the NHL Network. Lastly, sad news during the holiday season. Former Whaler, Scot Kleinendorst, passed away Tuesday from the injuries suffered at a mill plant in his hometown of Grand Rapids, MN. The family took him off life support as a result of the extensive nature of his injuries. Kleinendorst played in the NHL from 1982-90. He appeared in 281 games for the Hartford Whalers, New York Rangers (53 games two goals and 13 points) and the Washington Capitals. His NHL totals were 12 goals, 58 points, and 452 PM. With the Whalers, he played five seasons (210 games) tallying nine goals and 40 points. He played collegiately at Providence College, then in ECAC, but who are now in Hockey East. He and his brother, Kurt, were both drafted by the Rangers in the 1980 NHL Draft out of PC with Scot going in the fifth round (98th overall) and Kurt was taken in the fourth round before (77th overall). Kurt coached in the AHL with Lowell, Binghamton on two different occasions, Iowa and Belleville. He presently coaches the Nuremberg Tigers (Germany-DEL) that features ex-Pack players Chris Summers, and Chris Brown. Kleinendorst after starring at Grand Rapids High School, where he was first-team All-State defenseman in 1977-78 and part of a Minnesota state championship team in 1976. Read the full article
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the-end-of-art · 7 years
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An essence that restores us
Soup by Boey Kim Cheng
Memory boiled down to the rich stock of tender images, Grandmother mustering the ingredients, slicing, dicing, making music on the hefty chopping board, its grain and flaws dyed with juices of all that ever passed its pith, seasoned to take the deepest cuts and blows of the favoured cleaver, tough as Grandmother bearing the privations of childhood and the Japanese Occupation, watching her friends hauled to the cliffs and her mother dragged on tarmac by the roots of her hair till she died. Into the soup Grandmother poured all sorrows past and current, the long grains of images of the disappeared and the dead; she added the salt of memory, the peppercorns of pain, the sweet wolfberries of forgetting, all the seasonings her body had learned she added to the pitted wheels of sliced lotus root, the clump of watercress, and to the pork leg, kidney, liver, brain or maw, their essences bled into the heart of the good soup, flavours extracted by the claypot’s patient earthy hold, whole chicken dressed in gingseng and angelica, or duck sheathed in pickled mustard, the marrow, gristle, cartilage and bone slow-boiled with the deep low flames of patience, to make the whole that we chewed, sucked and slurped to make us whole.
No meal was ever complete without a soup. At heart of the table an imperial throne around which the other dishes orbited on the veined marbled top, its filigree web of inky veins like the tracery of deep jade rivulets on Grandmother’s hands and arms my fingers loved to read as she rested between meals. We drank from the communal bowl, our spoons travelling an arm-length, mastering without spilling the art of soup-slurping, between mouthfuls of rice, taking chopstick pinches of steamed pomfret, broiled chicken, and braised pork, returning to the hearth of the soup. Bracing tonic, fortifying broth that gave the gleam to our eyes, the colour to our lips, that kept us coming back, kept her tethered to her station, while life stormed and fell apart around her. A rotation of soups through the year, gurgling over the charcoal-stove whose flames never seemed to run out, like the fire in the French baker’s  oven, lit from the first generation.
At the end of his life Carver says it’s all gravy. For me it will be a bowl of soup, the essence slow-cooked and distilled from what has eluded me, what was never said, the forgotten recipes and untold stories simmered to a broth of lost time, the ineffable flavours, clarity born of long brewing, words boiled down to an essence that restores us, food we can believe in, right saltiness, right sweetness, the harmony of five flavours a corrective to the imbalance around and in us, the warring elements reconciled in its pacific taste.
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newstfionline · 6 years
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The U.S. adopts a hard line against China, and an era of engagement recedes into the past.
By Mark Landler, NY Times, Nov. 25, 2018
On a late August weekend in 2017, a week after he was forced out as President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon made a trip to the Connecticut country house of Henry A. Kissinger to talk about China.
It was more of a pilgrimage, actually: the prophet of disruption seeking out the high priest of geopolitics to make the case that Mr. Kissinger’s view of America’s relationship with China was hopelessly out of date. The two men talked for hours in the sunroom, and while they enjoyed each other’s company, they did not, in the end, see eye to eye.
“He agreed 100 percent with my analysis,” Mr. Bannon recalled, “but he disagreed with my conclusions because they were too blunt force.”
Mr. Kissinger confirmed this account, saying he told his visitor that the United States and China must strive for the “partial cooperation of countries that by normal standards might be considered enemies.”
“He has a different view,” Mr. Kissinger added dryly.
In the four decades since the United States re-established diplomatic ties with China, Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Bannon can be seen as bookends.
With his secret trip to Beijing in 1971, Mr. Kissinger kicked off an era of engagement marked by the stubborn belief that bringing China out of its isolation through trade and investment would make America safer--and perhaps make China more like America. That era now seems to be ending, giving way to a more hostile one, with a trade war encouraged by Mr. Bannon and the ascendancy of his view that the United States must confront China while it still can.
From the White House to the boardroom, from academia to the news media, American attitudes toward China have soured to an extent unseen since Mr. Kissinger’s historic trip. China’s rapid rise, and the acute sense of grievance and insecurity it has stirred in the United States, has led some to conclude, as the title of a recent book about the relationship suggested, that these two giants are “destined for war.”
The United States and China, of course, have had their ups and downs ever since the 1780s, when New England brigs first sailed to China with beaver skins and silver coins, ushering in more than a century of exchanges that sent Christian missionaries to the Middle Kingdom and Chinese railroad workers to the Wild West.
The two nations fought as allies in World War II, then faced off as foes in the Cold War, before Richard M. Nixon rekindled relations with Beijing to isolate the Soviets. The hopes generated by Deng Xiaoping’s economic opening in the 1980s were dashed by the Tiananmen Square massacre. The trade deals of the 1990s were strained when wayward American bombs destroyed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
For at least a decade, Americans have blamed China for shuttered factories and jobless workers. Public views of China swung from positive to negative in 2012, according to Pew Global Research, and have remained underwater since. About 38 percent of Americans now view China favorably--down from 44 percent in 2017--but that number is not markedly worse than it has been for the last half-decade.
Yet the current chill in the relationship seems different, less a temporary rupture than a searching reappraisal of what a status-quo superpower should do about an ambitious, formidable challenger.
The Trump administration has adopted a more confrontational stance but struggled to set clear goals and articulate a strategy for achieving them. To date, its efforts have been scattershot: trade tariffs that have rattled Beijing but also Wall Street, a foreign aid program dwarfed by China’s enormous loans for infrastructure overseas, a warning against Chinese meddling in American elections without much evidence of such activity.
The White House is channeling antagonism that extends far beyond Washington. Business executives accuse China of stealing technology from their firms. College professors suspect that some of its exchange students are spies. Military officers see its warships advancing across the Pacific.
Many Americans who embraced trade and cooperation with China had hoped that bringing it into the global economic order would, over time, pull its politics and society into a kind of convergence with the West. Yet China is heading in the opposite direction under the strongman rule of Xi Jinping, toward less political freedom and more state control of the economy--a surveillance state at home that nourishes imperial ambitions abroad. Far from modeling itself on the United States, China is presenting itself as a defiant alternative.
“In our good-hearted way, we wanted to believe that with a few more cultural exchanges, a few more visiting ballet troupes, China would come around,” said Orville H. Schell, the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “But Xi Jinping shut the door on that. He said, ‘Not only are we not going there, but we have our own model now.’”
Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister of Australia and longtime observer of China, said the political and economic changes in China under Mr. Xi, and in the United States under Mr. Trump, had shattered the consensus in both nations about how to manage the relationship. That, Mr. Rudd said, portended an uncertain--and almost certainly more dangerous--future.
“You can almost hear the ripping sound somewhere up the middle of the Pacific,” Mr. Rudd said in an interview, “and I’m not sure how that’s put back together.”
Realpolitik motivated Mr. Kissinger’s outreach to China: He and Nixon saw it as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. But they were not immune to what an American diplomat, U. Alexis Johnson, called “rapturous enchantment.” After a return trip to Beijing in 1973 to open a liaison office, a euphoric Mr. Kissinger wrote to Nixon, “We have now become tacit allies.”
In the United States, China suddenly became cool. “Americans donned Mao jackets and Mao hats, stir-fried in woks, and wielded chopsticks,” the journalist John Pomfret wrote in his 2016 book, “The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom.” Shortly after Nixon’s landmark trip, the Chinese cut a $392 million deal with a Texas company to build 16 fertilizer plants in China, an early sign of engagement’s bottom-line benefits.
Diplomatic relations would ebb and flow, buffeted by domestic politics in both nations. But trade across the Pacific began a relentless upward march. Companies like IBM, Citibank and Jeep were entranced by the vastness of the Chinese market, and the pioneers of engagement marveled at how quickly commerce came to define the relationship.
Even a devastating setback, the deadly crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement, did not snuff out those ties. President George Bush, who once headed the United States liaison office in Beijing, secretly sent his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, to Beijing to keep the relationship from going off the rails.
In March 2000, after the United States opened the door to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, Bill Clinton laid out the case for economic integration as the best way to bring freedom to the country. In one of the more forceful arguments for engagement made by an American president, he promised that W.T.O. membership would wean China off state-owned enterprises and open its society.
“The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people--their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise,” he said. “And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.”
Mr. Clinton’s view was widely shared at the time, and not without reason. Under President Jiang Zemin and his prime minister, Zhu Rongji, the Communist Party withdrew from large parts of the economy, encouraged private entrepreneurship and welcomed foreign investors.
Over the decades, the United States and China built the mightiest commercial relationship in history: Trade between the two ballooned from $5 billion in 1980 to $231 billion in 2004. China soon became the manufacturer of choice for T-shirts and toys, laptops and television sets. General Motors, Motorola and other American companies that invested in China made healthy profits. To satisfy the American appetite for low-cost goods, China began exporting more to Walmart alone than it did to most entire nations.
By 2006, though, China’s transition to market economics was slowing, and it began pursuing a policy of “indigenous innovation,” establishing targets to achieve dominance in high-tech industries that were traditionally the domain of the United States and Japan. By the time Barack Obama was elected, a narrative had taken hold in some quarters that letting China into the W.T.O. was a mistake.
Mr. Obama called out Beijing on the theft of American technology and intellectual property, and needled two of his advisers, Lawrence H. Summers and Jeffrey A. Bader, about their work in negotiating with China during the Clinton administration. “Did you guys give away too much?” he asked, according to Mr. Bader.
President Trump has since turned Mr. Obama’s private gibe into a political slogan. Letting China into the W.T.O., he argues, was the original sin of America’s dealings with China--a defective agreement that gave the Chinese license to steal from American companies and siphon off American jobs.
But to Charlene Barshefsky, the United States trade representative who ran the negotiations with Beijing in the 1990s, whether China should have been admitted is a “nonsensical question.”
“Of course it was going to end up in the W.T.O.,” she said.
With a fifth of the world’s population, nuclear weapons, a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council and a track record of economic opening, China could not realistically be kept out, she argued. It already had significant access to the world’s major economies, including the United States. If it did not join the W.T.O., it would have continued to reap the benefits without being forced to open its own markets.
“The issue is, was it going to be a substantively, commercially significant deal?” Ms. Barshefsky said. “And I would argue that the proof is in the pudding.” China, she noted, now imports more goods from the world than any country besides the United States.
But with every step China took to open its markets, it erected new barriers that hobbled foreign competitors and favored its own companies. The problem was not China’s W.T.O. membership but the failure of American officials to use the tools in the agreement to force China’s compliance with the terms, Ms. Barshefsky said.
“The U.S. did the right thing,” she said. “We just didn’t continue to do the right thing.”
Peter Navarro, the bomb-throwing economist who heads Mr. Trump’s trade office, said he first noticed the corrosive impact China was having on the American economy in the early 2000s, when he was teaching evening classes at the University of California, Irvine.
During the day, most of his students held down jobs. But Mr. Navarro recalled noticing that “my students were having more and more problems in the job market. It was a puzzle to me. I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ “
Mr. Navarro already suspected that jobs were moving to China because of its low labor costs. But after a year of research, he concluded there were four other factors at play: China’s theft of American intellectual property, its subsidies for exporters, its currency manipulation and its dearth of environmental regulations.
“All roads led to China,” he said.
The economist remade himself into a China Cassandra, publishing books like “The Coming China Wars” and “Death by China” that put him on the radical fringe of his profession. But his views dovetailed with those of Mr. Trump, who had railed for decades against the unfair trade practices of China and, earlier, Japan.
While the Japanese threat was overblown, there is little disagreement now that China contributed to the hollowing out of American manufacturing. Cheap Chinese clothing decimated textile jobs between 1973 and 2015. Chinese furniture makers wiped out their American counterparts. For blue-collar America, “Made in China” became synonymous with the ravages of globalization.
Now ensconced in the White House, Mr. Navarro has supplied the intellectual grist for Mr. Trump’s trade war with China. In June, his office published a report titled “How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World,” which accused China of preying on American companies in a variety of ways.
Other economists still dismiss Mr. Navarro’s prescription, which consists of piling on more tariffs until China agrees to fundamental changes. But privately, many businesspeople share his diagnosis. Their immediate concern is Made in China 2025, a state policy that seeks to dominate key industries by forcing American companies to hand over technology and assisting Chinese firms with subsidies.
Occasionally, American frustrations with Chinese partners and competitors spill into the open. In July 2010, the then-chief executive of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, said at a private dinner, “I am not sure that in the end they want any of us to win, or any of us to be successful.” General Electric backpedaled furiously after his comments were reported. Despite their grievances, American business executives were still afraid of antagonizing the Chinese authorities, who could order raids on their operations.
Doing business in China became even harder after the financial crisis of 2008. By that time, China had passed Japan to become America’s largest creditor, holding about $600 billion of United States Treasury notes. Chinese officials were appalled by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and fearful of their own exposure. If they were always suspicious of American politicians, now they turned against their friends on Wall Street, too, taking a harder line in negotiations and rejecting their calls to open up the Chinese economy further.
“Chinese officials began to dress down Americans and skip meetings,” said James McGregor, the chairman of greater China for APCO Worldwide, who advises companies dealing with Chinese officials. “For the Chinese leadership, this was the emperor-had-no-clothes moment.”
For all of Mr. Obama’s wariness on trade, he was as committed to engaging China as each of his predecessors going back to Nixon. He sought global issues, like climate change and nuclear nonproliferation, on which the United States and China could work together. But his strategy, known as the “Asia pivot,” also called for a greater American diplomatic and military presence in the region, to try to manage China’s rise.
The Trump administration has rejected the Obama strategy, branding it naïve and inadequate. It has adopted a more combative approach, formally designating China a “strategic competitor” and “revisionist power,” one that is trying to rewrite the rules of the post-World War II order to match its own interests and ambitions. Mr. Trump’s aides say that China has gotten away with too much for too long, and that only a show of American strength can force it to change its behavior.
The cornerstone of this policy has been the trade war, with new tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese exports in place and Mr. Trump threatening more. Yet the administration’s objective is uncertain.
Mr. Trump has floated various demands that would be difficult to enforce or require a wholesale overhaul of the Chinese economy, including a sharp reduction in the trade deficit and an end to coercive technology transfers. Some trade and security hawks have urged “decoupling” the United States entirely from the Chinese economy.
The Trump administration has taken a tougher approach outside trade as well. It has stepped up naval patrols in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, where the Chinese have been turning isolated spits of reef into military installations. But it has not laid out how the United States can stop a Chinese military buildup that is already tilting the balance of power in the region in Beijing’s favor.
The Trump administration has also taken a harder line on economic espionage, indicting Chinese citizens accused of being intelligence agents, tightening controls on Chinese investment, and even considering a plan to restrict Chinese students from attending American universities.
Left unanswered has been a profound question: How can the United States compete by closing its doors when openness has been key to its success?
Vice President Mike Pence laid out the case for confrontation in a harshly worded speech last month that many interpreted as a call for a new Cold War, with the United States as defender of democracy and market competition and China as the champion of authoritarianism and state-led growth. But as he called for a sustained effort to counter Beijing, Mr. Pence made little effort to reach beyond America’s partisan divide and rally the entire nation behind it.
“To put it bluntly,” he said, “President Trump’s leadership is working; and China wants a different American president.”
The conflict with China is intensifying amid unresolved concerns about American leadership and overreach that built up during the era of globalization, and in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and other distant battlefields.
If anything, Mr. Trump has shown a desire to pull back from commitments around the world--a pattern, critics say, that has sundered trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and undermined America’s allies, depriving the United States of one of its greatest advantages in a geopolitical competition.
China’s own efforts to win friends and expand its influence, meanwhile, have brought mixed results so far. As part of its Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has dangled billions of dollars for infrastructure projects in dozens of countries, from Malaysia to Kenya. The Trump administration has condemned the loans as predatory and is trying to put together its own competing aid program.
Mr. Trump’s instincts about China are not easy to pigeonhole. He speaks often about his friendship with Mr. Xi and admiringly of China’s economic success. His grievances are rooted in trade--in the conviction that China has been cheating the United States--rather than in Beijing’s ambitions in Asia or its repressive political system.
Among his advisers, there is a wide disparity in how they view the coming contest. Some, like Mr. Navarro, cast it as an epic struggle over who will control the commanding heights of the 21st-century economy. Others, like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and the director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, have tried to put the brakes on Mr. Trump’s most belligerent trade moves.
They feud constantly, and at times publicly, about who speaks for the president, leaving both Chinese officials and China experts in the United States confused about the direction of American policy.
Mr. Bannon, who says his views of China were formed as a young Navy officer in the Pacific in the 1970s, speaks in almost apocalyptic terms, foreseeing a clash of civilizations. “It’s either going to be the Confucian, mercantilist model or the liberal democratic Western model handed down from Greece,” he said.
Matthew Pottinger, the senior director for Asia on the National Security Council, portrays it as more of a traditional, Cold War-style rivalry between superpowers with competing ideologies. He began his career as a foreign correspondent in China, where a state security officer once roughed him up.
Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who worked in the Defense Department to reshape relations with former Soviet nations after the end of the last Cold War, argues that a rising power like China is likely to come to blows with an established one like the United States. In his book “Destined for War,” he describes a chilling scenario in which an accidental naval collision in the South China Sea escalates calamitously into a full-blown conflict.
But some China experts note that other areas of dispute, like Taiwan, have not become more fraught in recent years. And whatever the issue, they argue, a disastrous miscalculation is more likely without persistent engagement.
“Americans need to understand that if we go down the road of disengagement from China in pursuit of unbridled competition, it will not be a repetition of the Cold War with the Soviet Union,” said Mr. Bader, the former Obama adviser. “The rest of the world, like us, is deeply entangled with China.”
As a result, he said, even countries as wary of China as the United States “will not risk economic ties nor join in a perverse struggle to re-erect the ‘Bamboo Curtain,’ this time by the West. We will be on our own.”
At 95, Mr. Kissinger, not surprisingly, takes the long view. Together, he said, the United States and China exert such power, and are capable of inflicting such unthinkable destruction, that they owe it to the world to find a path toward “partial cooperation.”
“We have to make the effort of moving in that direction,” he said.
Harking back to his session with Mr. Bannon, Mr. Kissinger added, “I cannot guarantee that that will be the result.”
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usacounselingcredit · 2 years
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United States Mailbox | Post Office | Virtual Mail Delivery: Chinese Rocket Plummets to Earth, Causing One Country to Halt Air Traffic - CNET
United States Mailbox | Post Office | Virtual Mail Delivery
Chinese Rocket Plummets to Earth, Causing One Country to Halt Air Traffic - CNET
by United States Virtual Mailbox Digital Mail, Diego Canton on Monday 07 November 2022 01:39 AM UTC-05 | Tags: #unitedstatesmailboxpostofficevirtualmaildelivery united-states-mailbox-post-office-virtual-mail-delivery
The booster eventually broke up over the Pacific Ocean. Mobile AL Hempstead NY Michigan Ohio Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana November 06, 2022 at 11:25PM
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Hammond Louisiana Ukiah California Dike Iowa Maryville Missouri Secretary Maryland Winchester Illinois Kinsey Alabama Edmundson Missouri Stevens Village Alaska Haymarket Virginia Newington Virginia Edwards Missouri https://unitedstatesvirtualmail.blogspot.com/2022/11/united-states-mailbox-post-office_7.html November 07, 2022 at 02:38AM Gruver Texas Glens Fork Kentucky Fork South Carolina Astoria Oregon Lac La Belle Wisconsin Pomfret Center Connecticut Nason Illinois Roan Mountain Tennessee https://coloradovirtualmail.blogspot.com/2022/11/united-states-mailbox-post-office_7.html November 07, 2022 at 03:41AM from https://youtu.be/GuUaaPaTlyY November 07, 2022 at 03:47AM
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todaynewsstories · 6 years
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Super typhoon slams into China after pummeling Philippines
HONG KONG/MANILA (Reuters) – A super typhoon made landfall in China’s Guangdong on Sunday, the country’s most populous province, after wreaking havoc in Hong Kong and Macau and killing potentially more than 50 people in the Philippines.
Packing winds of more than 200 kph (125 mph), tropical cyclone Mangkhut is considered the strongest to hit the region this year, equivalent to a maximum Category 5 “intense hurricane” in the Atlantic.
That’s more powerful than the maximum sustained winds of 150 kph (90 mph) when Hurricane Florence roared into North Carolina in the United States on Friday.
The eye of Mangkhut, the Thai name for Southeast Asia’s mangosteen fruit, skirted 100 kms (62 miles) south of Hong Kong but the former British colony was still caught in the typhoon’s swirling bands of rain and gale-force winds.
Hong Kong raised its highest No. 10 typhoon signal at mid-morning as ferocious winds uprooted trees and smashed windows in office and residential buildings, some of which swayed in the gusts, residents said.
“It swayed for quite a long time, at least two hours. It made me feel so dizzy,” said Elaine Wong, who lives in a high-rise tower in Kowloon.
Water levels surged 3.5 m (12 ft) in some places, waves swamped roads and washed up live fish, washing into some residential blocks and a mall in an eastern district.
“It’s the worst I’ve seen,” resident Martin Wong told Reuters. “I’ve not seen the roads flood like this, (and) the windows shake like this, before.”
The plans of tens of thousands of travelers were disrupted by flight cancellations at Hong Kong’s international airport, a major regional hub. Airlines such as flagship carrier Cathay Pacific canceled many flights last week.
In the Philippines, casualties reported by various agencies on Sunday evening indicate the death toll from the impact of Mangkhut could exceed 50, with most killed in landslides in or near mountainous areas of the Cordillera region.
Francis Tolentino, an advisor to President Rodrigo Duterte and head of the government’s disaster coordination, said the latest number of casualties was 33 dead and 56 missing.
But the head of the military’s Northern Luzon Command, Emmanuel Salamat, told Reuters that at least 19 more were killed in landslides in one part of Benguet province.
The 19 who died were part of a bigger group of 43 people, likely miners, and those who were still alive were feared to be trapped in an old mining bunkhouse that had collapsed under rubble, according to Tolentino.
Search and rescue missions were ongoing, and a local mayor in Benguet, Victorio Palangdan, said he feared the number killed there could be more than 100.
An umbrella is seen on a road after a rainstorm as Typhoon Mangkhut makes landfall in Guangdong province, in Shenzhen, China September 16, 2018. REUTERS/Jason Lee
Separately, the coastguard said it had recovered the bodies of three people.
In Macau, which halted casino gambling late on Saturday and put China’s People’s Liberation Army on standby for disaster relief help, some streets were flooded.
“The suspension is for the safety of casino employees, visitors to the city, and residents,” said authorities in the world’s largest gambling hub, who faced criticism last year after a typhoon that killed nine and caused severe damage.
GRAPHIC: Typhoon Mangkhut – tmsnrt.rs/2oZmnIS
“KING OF STORMS”
The typhoon, dubbed the “King of Storms” by Chinese media, made landfall in Haiyan town at 5 p.m. local time, packing winds of more than 160 kph (100 mph), weather officials said.
Ports, oil refineries and industrial plants in the area have been shut. Power to some areas were also reduced as a precaution. In Shenzhen, electricity supply to more than 130,000 homes was cut at one point on Sunday.
The storm has fueled concern about sugar production in Guangdong, which accounts for a tenth of national output, at about 1 million tonnes. China sugar futures rose last week on fears for the cane crop.
Guangdong is also China’s most populous province, with a population of more than 100 million.
No deaths have been reported so far.
More than 2.45 million people have been relocated and over 48,000 fishing boats called back to port in the province. Work at more than 29,000 construction sites has been suspended.
State television showed scenes of crashing waves, innundated streets and trees half-bent by the strong winds as Mangkhut unleashed its power.
The Shenzhen airport, shut since midnight, will be closed until 8:00 a.m. (2400 GMT) on Monday. Flights have also been canceled in Guangzhou and the island of Hainan, China’s southernmost province.
High winds and swells also hit Fujian province north of Guangdong, shutting ports, suspending ferry services and cancelling more than 100 flights. Waves as high as 7.3 meters (24 ft) were sighted in the Taiwan Strait, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
Traveling at 30 kph (19 mph), Mangkhut will continue on its northwesterly track, bringing heavy rain and winds to the autonomous region of Guangxi early on Monday.
Slideshow (32 Images)
It is expected to weaken into a tropical depression when it reaches southwestern Yunnan province the early hours of Tuesday.
Reporting by James Pomfret, Anne Marie Roantree, Farah Master and Enrico dela Cruz; Additional reporting by Julia Fioretti and Bobby Yip in HONG KONG, Manolo Serapio Jr, Manuel Mogato and Martin Petty in MANILA, and Ryan Woo and Meng Meng in BEIJING; Editing by Clarence Fernandez/Himani Sarkar and Emelia Sithole-Matarise
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Butterfuly / Vellai Vavval Fish
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White pomfret also known as Zubaidi, Butterfish, Managatsuo, Paplet, Sadumi, Avoli, and Vavval in regional areas. . It contains relatively high nutritional value. It may be considered good for your skin for its high vitamin A, vitamin B3, and vitamin E content. Pomfret is a seawater fish with a single bone. 
 Found in the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, it is a rich source of vitamins A, B-3 and E. You can either grill them, fry, steam or simply make delicious curry. They do not have a strong odor and aftertaste that most of the saltwater fish have. White pomfret is diamond-shaped, shiny seawater fish.
White Pomfret has lean meat with medium texture and a mild flavour. It is also low on fats as compared to the Black Pomfret. With a low presence of bones, the fish is an excellent choice for frying and curries This fish can grow to 23 inches but the photo specimen, wild caught in India
Benefits: Rich source of proteins, calcium, vitamins and minerals. Pomfret fishes are high in fat content, provides calcium, vitamins A and D including Vitamin B12. Increased Vitamin B12 makes it important for the nervous system. It also contains good amount of iodine, critical for the thyroid gland. Thus Pomfret is good for eyesight and healthy hair and skin. Rich in omega 3 fatty acid. It is very nutritional food for the health
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In a speech last week to commemorate 70 years since China’s entry into the Korean War, President Xi Jinping launched a thinly-veiled attack on the U.S. “No blackmailing, blocking or extreme pressuring will work” for those seeking to become “boss of the world,” Xi told veterans and cadres crammed into Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The 1950-53 Korean War, he went on, “broke the myth that the U.S. military is invincible.”
With U.S.-China relations at a decades-long nadir, it was fitting that Xi threw down the gauntlet on the anniversary of one of the only times the People’s Liberation Army and U.S. troops have faced off on the battlefield—a conflict still known in China as the “War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea.”
The upcoming U.S. election on Nov. 3 could be a turning point for American foreign policy, particularly regarding Beijing, which has borne the brunt of the Trump Administration’s sledgehammer approach to diplomacy. Chinese trade practices, tech companies, diplomats and even students have been in the crosshairs, feeding Beijing’s paranoia that the U.S. is pursuing a Soviet-era policy of containment.
Much hangs in the balance: economics, nuclear proliferation, the climate crisis, human rights as well as possible military confrontations. Whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden controls the White House may decide if the last four years of rancor was an aberration or the new normal for relations between the world’s top two economies.
“China, of course, is very concerned about the election,” says Wang Yiwei, director of the Institute of International Affairs at Renmin University in Beijing. “If Biden wins, he may take a multilateral approach, more coherence with U.S. alliances. If Trump wins, he’ll definitely continue harsh policies toward China.”
But whoever sits in the Oval Office in January, a return to fulsome engagement appears off the table.
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AFP via Getty Images Containers are stacked at the port in Qingdao, in China’s eastern Shandong province on November 8, 2019. – China’s exports suffered their third month of decline in October, and while the drop was less than expected there were warnings on November 8 of more pain to come as the US trade war rumbles on.
Global rivalry between the U.S. and China
Washington’s attempts to isolate Beijing from an integrated and interconnected global economy have forced U.S. companies to relinquish established supply chains in China. Senior administration hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have also openly questioned the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and called for regime change.
As a result, the U.S. is losing the goodwill of ordinary Chinese, with moderate voices within society replaced by resurgent nationalism. Meanwhile, the vacuum created by the Trump Administration’s America First approach has allowed Beijing to co-opt international institutions. China now sits on the U.N. Human Rights Council despite detaining one million Muslims in its far west region of Xinjiang. It champions the Paris Climate Accords and free trade despite, being the world’s worst polluter and propping up key industries with state funds.
This has allowed China to develop a narrative that it is reasserting its rightful place in global leadership while the U.S is in terminal decline—riven by income inequality, political polarization, racial injustice and toxic nativism. That has been strengthened this year by Trump’s inability or unwillingness to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. while China has successfully controlled the coronavirus within its borders and is the only major economy heading for growth this year.
At the same time, China has torpedoed some of its relationships around the world as it seeks to swell its influence. When the normally urbane Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Europe late August—ironically to smooth trade tensions—he threatened Norway with reprisals were it to give the Nobel Peace Prize to Hong Kong protesters, and swore that the president of the Czech senate would pay a “heavy price” for visiting the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which China regards as a breakaway province. (The affront prompted the Mayor of Prague to brand Chinese diplomats “rude clowns.”) On Oct. 21, China responded to Sweden’s decision to ban Huawei from its 5G network by threatening a “negative impact” on Swedish companies.
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Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesU.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Xi Jinping, China’s president, shake hands during a news conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2017.
China’s military capability
Worryingly, Beijing’s hawkish Wolf Warrior diplomacy has gone beyond rhetoric and strayed into saber-rattling with U.S. allies. In recent months, China has ramped up military drills around Taiwan, sailed a record number of sorties into Japan’s territorial waters and engaged in deadly Himalayan border clashes with India. This appears to be more than mere chest-thumping; analysts suspect that China may be pitting its formidable yet untested military against unprepared foes in order to better gauge its own capabilities as well as the likelihood of an international backlash.
“India is a perfect target because it’s not a treaty ally of anybody,” says John Pomfret, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post and author of The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present. “You push the Indians around a little bit, declare victory and leave. That would signal the rest of the world that China’s big and bad and can do this type of stuff so watch out.”
Beijing insists that it is the victim of Indian aggression in the recent Himalayan skirmishes. But it is less meek about designs for Taiwan, which split politically from the mainland following China’s 1927-1949 civil war and is by far the CCP’s most coveted prize. Xi considers reuniting the island with the mainland a historic “mission” and analysts agree it is the most likely issue to force a military confrontation between the superpowers.
Read more: How TikTok Found Itself in the Middle of a U.S.-China Tech War
In an Oct. 10 speech, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen called for “reconciliation and peaceful dialogue” with Beijing. Instead, Beijing responded within hours by releasing previously unseen footage of a large-scale military exercise simulating the invasion of an unidentified island, as well as video of a staged confession from a Taiwanese businessman charged with spying on the mainland.
Oriana Skylar Mastro, a specialist on China’s military at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, says that up until 2015 the main consideration of Chinese military leaders was Washington’s resolve to defend Taiwan. Now, however, she says they tell her: “It doesn’t matter. We would still win.”
The veracity of those sentiments is a matter of hot debate, but concerningly, “China has a remarkable tendency to overestimate its power,” says Pomfret. In September, the PLA Air Force released a video on its official social media showing nuclear-capable H-6 bombers carrying out a simulated raid on what looks like Andersen Air Force Base on the U.S. Pacific island of Guam. In a clear reference to U.S. support for Taiwan, Xi told the Great Hall of the People last week that any attempt to invade or separate China’s “sacred territory” will be met “with a head-on blow!”
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Photo by Andrea Verdelli/Getty Images Soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army march during a parade to celebrate the 70th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, at Tiananmen Square on October 1, 2019 in Beijing, China.
Sino-U.S. relations after the election
It’s a precarious situation in need of deft diplomacy. Some China hawks in the Trump Administration are calling for Taiwan to be provided with an explicit U.S. defense guarantee. But that would be “provocative and expensive,” says Benjamin H. Friedman, policy director for the nonpartisan Defense Priorities think tank. “I’m not in favor.”
Trump’s distaste for multinational institutions like NATO, and dislike of U.S. troop deployments overseas, has made America’s allies take their own security more seriously. On Monday, the U.S. State Department approved the sale of 100 Boeing-made Harpoon Coastal Defense Systems to Taiwan in a deal worth as much as $2.37 billion, prompting China to impose sanctions on the U.S. companies involved.
“Taiwan could do more, Japan could do more,” says Friedman. “They could buy more defensive systems, particularly mobile missiles and radar that will make it harder to be invaded.”
Biden, by contrast, has voiced support for a multilateral approach in the region, restoring America’s role in global governance and re-establishing a liberal democratic order. Writing on Oct. 22 in World Journal, America’s largest Chinese-language newspaper, Biden vowed to “stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity and values in the Asia-Pacific region … That includes deepening our ties with Taiwan, a leading democracy, major economy, technology powerhouse—and a shining example of how an open society can effectively contain COVID-19.”
Biden has railed against Trump’s trade war—which studies estimate has trimmed 0.7% from U.S. GDP—and would likely rollback many tariffs. He also said that he would organize and host a global Summit for Democracy to “renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world” during his first year in office.
Read more: What Happens Next With the U.S.-China Rivalry
Reasserting such historic alliances could cause Beijing much heartburn. “We are 25% of the world’s economy,” Biden told the audience at the final presidential debate Oct. 23. “We need to have the rest of our friends with us saying to China, ‘These are the rules, you play by them or you will pay the price for not playing by them, economically.’”
While there’s no doubt that Biden would be tougher on China than Obama, many in diplomatic circles hope he could reopen lines of communication with Beijing to seek pragmatic solutions on trade, the environment, human rights and other issues. America still has many tools. The dollar’s role as global reserve currency has become more important during the pandemic. And the U.S. still boasts the world’s biggest economy, spearheading innovation.
But the U.S. has never faced a rival that can compete economically and militarily as China can. In the week before his Korean War anniversary speech, Xi addressed the nation on state-run television: “We Chinese know well we must speak to invaders with the language they understand,” he said. “So we use war to stop war, we use military might to stop hostility, we win peace and respect with victory. In the face of difficulty or danger, our legs do not tremble, our backs do not bend.”
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A factory worker at 13, Hong Kong’s iconic billionaire Li Ka-shing retires
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Li Ka-shing’s rise from penniless immigrant in 1940 to billionaire tycoon is the consummate success story in Hong Kong, a city which progressed alongside him from trading outpost to one of the world’s biggest financial centers.
Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing takes a selfie with journalists after announcing his retirement as chairman of CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd at a news conference in Hong Kong, China March 16, 2018. REUTERS/Bobby Yip
A factory apprentice when he was 13, Li, who announced his retirement on Friday at 89, was called “Superman” in the ultra-capitalist hub for his work ethic and business success.
While Hong Kong’s adoration of the billionaire and his rags-to-riches story has waned somewhat in recent years, he is still stepping aside from one of Asia’s most outward-looking empires, spanning more than 50 countries and 323,000 employees at last count.
Through a career spanning the 78 years since his family fled war-torn China for Hong Kong, Li built fortunes first in plastics and property before joining the first wave of top-tier Chinese tycoons in the city with the 1979 purchase of Hutchison Whampoa, a venerable British “hong” or trading house.
Along the way, he led raids on rivals, built strong – later controversial – ties with mainland leaders, was rapped on the knuckles for insider dealing in Hong Kong and turned his sights to overseas expansion in a way that few of his local rivals ever did.
Also unlike his rivals, including fellow hongs Swire Pacific (0019.HK) and Jardine Matheson (JARD.SI), he proved adept at something else: selling assets.
“Li Ka-shing’s real genius, to me, is not necessarily in the assets he acquired, but his ability to sell them at the right time,” said Jonathan Galligan, head of Asia gaming and conglomerates research at CLSA, the brokerage. “Look at anything he sold and, plus or minus a year, its hard to say he didn’t pick the top – that’s a tremendous skill.”
One of Li’s best-known deals in this respect was the 1999 sale of its UK telecoms unit, Orange, to Germany’s Mannesmann at the height of a market boom. After Vodafone bought Mannesmann soon after, the subsequent forced disposal of Orange to France Telecom produced a second windfall for the Li empire, which netted $21 billion in profits from the two deals.
Today, the assets still held by Li through his flagship CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd (0001.HK), include the biggest container port operator in the world, Canadian oil giant Husky, one of Europe’s leading telecoms operators as well as a collection of UK businesses that saw him awarded a knighthood by the Queen in 2000.
Even after stepping down, Li, who turns 90 in July, will remain a senior adviser for his sprawling business empire.
MYTH AND REALITY
Shrouded in myth and filled with apocryphal anecdotes and tales of family misfortune, Li’s name has become synonymous with against-the-odds success by dint of hard work.
He himself has regularly emphasized the hard work as well as his own drive to educate himself after becoming an apprentice in a watch strap factory at the age of 13, shortly before his father died.
By 19, he had become general manager of the factory, overseeing up to 300 workers and office staff, and at 21, he founded Cheung Kong plastics – the foundation of his empire.
That factory, with 1,000 square feet of space, operated around-the-clock, made a profit from its first year of operation and the young Li slept in a storage room in one of the many stories about his personal thrift.
Li has used his Hutchison platform, as well as a habit of personally investing alongside his companies, to amass a fortune estimated by Forbes at $35.3 billion, making him the world’s 23rd richest man.
Li, whose wife died nearly three decades ago, will hand over the keys to his empire to his elder son Victor Li, who, unlike younger son Richard, keeps a low public profile.
But despite the fables of Li’s thrift and being an active philanthropist, many Hong Kongers resent the pervasive role his family plays in the local economy.
They also blame the oligopolistic dominance of tycoons such as Li for social ills including a gaping wealth gap, extensive harbor reclamation, heritage demolition and extortionate property prices.
It is true that it would be difficult to spend a day in Hong Kong without enriching the Li empire and Hong Kongers sometimes use a Cantonese pun on his name, which translates to “Li family city”.
Li’s Hongkong Electric is one of two power utilities in the city, while Cheung Kong is one of Hong Kong’s biggest residential developers. His companies also control one of the two dominant supermarket chains and one of the two largest pharmacies as well as one of Hong Kong’s largest cellphone companies.
Economists have joked privately that Li’s businesses give him better first-hand knowledge of the health of the Hong Kong economy than any amount of government information ever could.
END OF AN ERA
Li is the most prominent of the city’s powerful tycoons or oligarchs to step aside for the next generation, an exclusive peer group that also include Lee Shau-kee of Henderson Land, six months Li’s senior.
While these tycoons still control large swathes of Hong Kong, namely its core property sector, Chinese capital and businesses have become increasingly intertwined in the city’s economic fabric, challenging their dominance as the streets are increasingly lined with mainland-backed banks, petrol stations, shops and supermarkets.
Over the past few years, Li’s close ties with Beijing’s Communist Party leadership have come under scrutiny.
Li came under rare attack by some Chinese state media outlets a few years ago, who accused him of abandoning China by selling off some assets there. Li, however, has denied turning his back on China and says he is confident in the country and its president Xi Jinping.
Though rarely accessible in recent years, the bespectacled tycoon enjoys shooting from the hip during public appearances and hasn’t shied from making controversial and politically barbed comments.
His lieutenants have however tended to be more circumspect – at least when it comes to commenting on Li. Asked in 2015 for his thoughts about what a surprise wholesale restructuring of the Li empire meant for the family’s succession planning, Canning Fok, Li’s second-in-command, told reporters, to laughter that “We don’t interpret what the big boss says.”
And asked this week by Reuters for his thoughts on any retirement by Li, Simon Murray, Fok’s predecessor, kept it brief, replying via email simply “Happy Retirement!”
Reporting by James Pomfret and Jennifer Hughes; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan
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