30DEC2019
Initial U.S.-China trade deal has major hole: Beijing’s massive business subsidies
“The Chinese effort is dogged, long-term and very well-funded,” said John Neuffer, chief executive of the Semiconductor Industry Association. “That’s why the subsidy issue is such a big one for us.”
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, who lacks his predecessors’ enthusiasm for the free market, the state spigot has gushed aid. China now devotes more than 3 percent of its annual output to direct and indirect business subsidies — a share of the economy that is roughly equivalent to what the United States spends on defense, according to economist Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a nonpartisan research group.
In a 215-page report last year, which kicked off Trump’s trade war with China, Robert E. Lighthizer, the president’s chief trade negotiator, identified government financial support as a key element in China’s plan to overtake U.S. technology leadership. China is “grossly subsidizing and taking over our markets,” he complained this summer before the Senate Finance Committee.
Chinese central and provincial governments have earmarked about $100 billion for equity investments, credit lines and various grants over the next five years so China will become by 2030 the global leader in [the semiconductor] industry now dominated by U.S. firms.
Mitsubishi Electric discloses security breach, China is main suspect
In a short statement published today on its website, Mitsubishi Electric, one of the world’s largest electronics and electrical equipment manufacturing firms, disclosed a major security breach.
Although the breach occurred last year, on June 28, and an official internal investigation began in September, the Tokyo-based corporation disclosed the security incident today, only after two local newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun and Nikkei, published stories about the hack.
Both publications blamed the intrusion on a Chinese-linked cyber-espionage group named Tick (or Bronze Butler), known to the cyber-security industry for targeting Japan over the past few years
https://www.zdnet.com/article/mitsubishi-electric-discloses-security-breach-china-is-main-suspect/