Tag: International Trade and World Market

U.S. Tightens China’s Access to A.I. Chips

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The Biden administration on Tuesday announced additional limits on sales of advanced semiconductors by American firms, shoring up restrictions issued last October to limit China’s progress on supercomputing and artificial intelligence. The rules appear likely to halt most shipments of advanced semiconductors from the United States to Chinese data centers, which use them to produce models capable of artificial intelligence. More U.S. companies seeking to sell China advanced chips, or the machinery used to make them, will be required to notify the government of their plans, or obtain a special…

China’s Economy Grew More Than Expected Over the Summer

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China’s economy grew more than expected over the summer, as the government offset some of the harm from a real estate crisis by pouring money into infrastructure construction projects, like building rail lines. Data released on Wednesday showed that gross domestic product grew from July through September compared with the prior three months. Industrial production of everything from chemicals to steel began to stabilize as the government built more roads, sewage lines and other public works. China’s economy, the world’s second largest, has struggled since the spring, as housing sales…

How Nepal’s Deal With China for an Airport Became an Albatross

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On a sweltering June morning, the new international terminal at the airport in Pokhara, Nepal’s second-biggest city, roared to life with the arrival of a Sichuan Airlines flight from China. A water cannon showered the plane, an Airbus A319, the first international flight to land at the airport since it had opened six months earlier. A throng of people gathered in the arrival area to greet the passengers, wishing them a “hearty welcome” to “the Land of Everest” with their signs. These maiden arrivals were athletes and Chinese officials who…

China’s Economic Stake in the Middle East: Its Thirst for Oil

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China has cast itself as a neutral geopolitical player in the Middle East. It brokered a deal in March to help Iran and Saudi Arabia restore relations. And in the days since Hamas attacked Israel from Gaza, China has tried to keep its distance, with a government spokesman calling the country “a common friend of both Israel and Palestine.” Yet China’s stakes in the Middle East are high, particularly if the war now being fought in Israel and Gaza were to broaden through the region. One big reason: Oil. No…

Fragile Global Economy Faces New Crisis in Israel-Gaza War

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The International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday that the pace of the global economic recovery is slowing, a warning that came as a new war in the Middle East threatened to upend a world economy already reeling from several years of overlapping crises. The eruption of fighting between Israel and Hamas over the weekend, which could sow disruption across the region, reflects how challenging it has become to shield economies from increasingly frequent and unpredictable global shocks. The conflict has cast a cloud over a gathering of top economic policymakers…

How the Big Chip Makers Are Pushing Back on Biden’s China Agenda

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A year after the Biden administration took its first major step toward restricting the sale of semiconductors to China, it has begun drafting additional limits aimed at denying Beijing the technology critical to modern-day weapons. But in recent months, its progress has been slowed as American chip companies have pushed back with a blunt warning: Cutting sales to China would gut their businesses and derail the administration’s plan to build new semiconductor factories in the United States. Since July, Nvidia, Intel and Qualcomm, three of the world’s largest chip makers,…

Diesel Prices Could Keep Inflation High

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Inflation has been easing around the world. But what happens next could depend partly on the cost of diesel, a wild card that few analysts have been able to predict well. Higher gasoline prices — lit up on giant signs on streets and highways — are typically the most visible, visceral reminder of inflation to consumers. But analysts say diesel can have a bigger impact on inflation because the fuel powers trucks, industrial machinery and agricultural equipment. The prices of heating oil and jet fuel are also closely connected to…

Liu Yiqian, China’s Top Art Collector, Is Selling a Modigliani

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Few Chinese art collectors have made a bigger splash at global auctions in the past decade than Liu Yiqian, a former Shanghai taxi driver who amassed a fortune through big bets on Chinese real estate and pharmaceutical stocks. He was a profligate purchaser of Chinese antiquities and other artworks. In 2014, Mr. Liu paid a record $36.3 million for an ancient Chinese porcelain cup, and $45 million for a 600-year-old silk wall hanging. He paid $170.4 million for Amedeo Modigliani’s risqué “Nu Couché” painting a year later. One Shanghai museum…

Ukraine’s War of Drones Runs Into an Obstacle: China

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Surrounded by rooms filled with stacks of cluster munitions and half-made thermobaric bombs, a soldier from Ukraine’s 92nd Mechanized Brigade recently worked on the final part of a deadly supply chain that stretches from China’s factories to a basement five miles from the front lines of the war with Russia. This is where Ukrainian soldiers turn hobbyist drones into combat weapons. At a cluttered desk, the soldier attached a modified battery to a quadcopter so it could fly farther. Pilots would later zip tie a homemade shell to the bottom…

Behind China-U.S. Tensions Are Misunderstandings, Author Says.

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This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum in association with The New York Times. Keyu Jin was a 14-year-old schoolgirl in Beijing when she transferred as an exchange student to New York. She moved in with an American host family, and attended Horace Mann, a private high school in the Bronx. She was accepted to Harvard University, where she picked up economics degrees, including a Ph.D., and is now an associate professor at the London School of Economics. Steeped in the two cultures — she…