Fórum Defesa Brasil

US defence secretary calls India, China 'threats'
18 November 2011


Groton, US: Pentagon spokespersons got into damage control mode after their newly installed chief, Leon Panetta, referred to India and China as "threats" on Thursday.

The US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, speaking to workers at a Connecticut shipyard that builds attack submarines, described an array of threats facing the United States, including Iran, North Korea and cyber-attacks.

He then added India and China to the list of security dangers, saying the United States would need to make clear to these "rising powers" that it would not be pulling out of the Pacific region.

"We face the threats from rising powers, China, India, others that we have to always be aware of, and try to make sure that we always have sufficient force protection out there in the Pacific to make sure they know we're never going anywhere," he said.

Though frequently voicing concerns over China's perceived military build-up, Washington never openly portrays China as a security threat. As for India, US officials general tend to go overboard trying to portray the country as an increasingly vital ally and a country that the Pentagon is very keen to enhance security ties with.

Panetta's comments came even as president Barack Obama, on a tour to Southeast Asia, was preparing to summit with the heads of government of China and India in Bali, Indonesia.

After announcing a ramped up US Marine presence in Australia over the coming years, the US has also been trying to convince Australia, India and Japan to form a quadrilateral security alliance with itself in a bid to counter China.

A Pentagon spokesman got into the act after Panetta's goof-up saying Panetta did not view China or India as military threats.

"Any suggestion that he was implying that either country was a military threat is just false," the spokesman said.

"He was referring instead to the challenges these rising powers face within themselves, challenges that we share with them as we try to forge better relationships going forward in a very turbulent, dynamic security environment."

That is a spin even the jaded Americans, much used to these implanting spin on just about anything, will have a hard time figuring out.

PRick escreveu:O Império Romano já estava falido e em crise, mais de um século antes de seu fim, porém, Roma não entrava em colapso porque não existia alternativa, e assim, vivemos de 1970 até 2000. Porém, agora já existe uma Constantinopla, essa é a grande diferença, e não estamos falando apenas na China, mas num grupo de países chamados BRIC´S. Eles são a Constantinopla do mundo moderno. E não adianta Roma continuar com as mesmas políticas anteriores a 2000. Porque diante da existência de Constantinopla essas antigas políticas são ineficazes.

O único grande número que interessa é o peso do PIB dos EUA em relação ao resto do mundo. Em 1970 era de 35%, e em 2011 deverá atingir um patamar de 17%. Essa realidade é determinante na crise da hegemônica dos EUA.

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China Bends to U.S. Complaint on Solar Panels but Plans Retaliation
By KEITH BRADSHER
Published: November 21, 2011

HONG KONG — Chinese solar panel manufacturers are preparing to shift steps in their production processes to South Korea, Taiwan and the United States in response to the filing of a trade case against them in Washington, and are working on a way to retaliate against U.S. exports to China, Chinese solar industry executives and officials said Monday.

Preparations to redesign supply chains and retaliate come after the U.S. Department of Commerce opened an anti-dumping and anti-subsidy case against Chinese solar panel manufacturers on Nov. 9, at the request of SolarWorld Industries America and six other U.S. solar companies. The Commerce Department said it was considering anti-dumping tariffs of 50 percent to 250 percent on Chinese solar panels, plus a request by SolarWorld for anti-subsidy tariffs of more than 100 percent.

After hastily hiring trade lawyers, Chinese solar panel manufacturers are increasingly gloomy about their chances of winning the case, said Ocean Yuan, the president of Grape Solar, a big importer of solar panels based in Eugene, Oregon. Many trade lawyers in Washington have reached the same conclusion because the Commerce Department handles anti-dumping complaints against China under special rules that heavily favor U.S. manufacturers. China accepted the rules as part of its joining the World Trade Organization in 2001.

Mr. Yuan said that Grape Solar was already in negotiations with several Chinese manufacturers, whom he declined to identify, to do final assembly of solar modules in Oregon as the last step in new supply chains that would start in China then run through South Korea and Taiwan to avoid the likely tariffs.

The Chinese solar panel industry is also seeking legal advice on filing its own anti-dumping and anti-subsidy trade case against the United States with China’s Commerce Ministry, Chinese solar industry executives in Beijing said Monday. The most likely target would be U.S. exports of polysilicon, the main material used to manufacture conventional solar panels, said Wang Shijiang, a manager at the China Photovoltaic Industry Alliance based in Beijing.

The manufacture of polysilicon requires enormous amounts of electricity — so much electricity that it typically takes the first year of operation of the panel to generate as much power as was required to make the polysilicon in it. The United States is one of the world’s largest producers of polysilicon, in states like Tennessee and Washington, because it has access to a lot of inexpensive hydroelectric power.

China’s own polysilicon industry is controversial because it relies heavily on electricity generated by coal-fired power plants, and because weak environmental controls at Chinese polysilicon factories have resulted in toxic spills that have fouled streams and rivers.

Polysilicon production guzzles electricity because it requires superheating large volumes of material in electric arc furnaces, including the melting of quartzite rock at 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,630 Fahrenheit) at the start of the process.

The United States exported $873 million worth of polysilicon to China last year while importing only $4 million worth of the material, according to GTM Research, a renewable energy consulting firm based in Boston.

At the simplest level, there are four main steps in making a solar panel, also known as a solar module. Using molten polysilicon to grow crystals or cast blocks of polycrystalline silicon is the first step. The second step is cutting and polishing the material into thin, smooth wafers.

The third step involves chemically treating the wafer and adding electrical contacts to turn it into a solar cell. The last step involves connecting 60 or 72 solar cells together, covering them with glass, enclosing them in an aluminum frame and adding an electrical junction box.

Mr. Yuan said that Chinese manufacturers wanted to keep wafer production in China, but were making plans to ship wafers to Taiwan or South Korea for conversion into solar cells.

Turning wafers into cells is the costliest, most high-tech and most highly automated step in producing solar panels, representing about a third of the total cost.

An executive at a Chinese solar manufacturer said his company had already begun making elaborate preparations to move solar cell production out of China for panels destined for the U.S. market.

Chinese manufacturers have studied moving solar cell factories directly to the United States but have largely rejected it in favor of other countries because it takes so long to comply with the many American regulations for opening new factories that use a lot of chemicals, said the executive, who spoke on condition that neither he nor his employer be identified.

Frank Haugwitz, a solar industry consultant based in Beijing, said Taiwan had a very large solar cell manufacturing sector with capacity equal to more than five times the U.S. market, and a significant chunk of that capacity was not being used.

But Taiwan has very little capacity to turn solar cells into solar modules; the finished modules are heavy and expensive to ship because of the weight of the glass and aluminum frames.

China exports finished modules because its low wages offset the extra shipping costs. But wages in Taiwan are considerably higher than those in China.

Solar cells fabricated in Taiwan or South Korea from Chinese wafers will be shipped to the United States for final assembly, Mr. Yuan of Grape Solar said.

Final assembly involves a lot of labor in bolting components together, for which regulatory approvals tend to be simpler than for solar cell manufacturing. The final assembly typically accounts for a little less than a fifth of the total cost of making a solar panel.

The U.S. trade case was filed against solar panels for which either of the final two steps — turning the wafer into a cell or assembling cells into a panel — was done in China. So if Chinese manufacturers shipped solar cells from Taiwan or South Korea back to China for final assembly into modules at their existing factories, these products would also be hit by any steep tariffs that the United States might impose.

Ben Santarris, a spokesman for SolarWorld Industries America, a subsidiary of SolarWorld of Germany, said that there was only one small Chinese-owned factory in the United States doing final assembly of modules. “Chinese manufacturers would have to build significant production capacity here for final assembly” to reduce appreciably their exposure to any tariffs, he said.

The single Chinese module assembly site, located near Phoenix, Arizona, and owned by Suntech Power, has a capacity equal to about 3 percent of the American market, according to GTM Research.

Companies based in China manufactured 41 percent of the panels installed in the United States in the third quarter of this year.

Mr. Santarris also said that solar cells manufactured in Taiwan or South Korea and imported by the United States would not be immune to trade cases — despite close U.S. trade relations with both countries — if they were discovered to have broken trade rules, as in benefiting from government subsidies.

The U.S. Commerce Department will rule by mid-March on the anti-dumping complaint and by late May on the anti-subsidy complaint, and each ruling is likely to be retroactive for at least 90 days, and possibly retroactive to the department’s opening of the case on Nov. 9.

Under the terms of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, other countries are allowed to treat it as a nonmarket economy in anti-dumping cases until 2016. This allows other countries to use special rules so that Chinese manufacturers almost always lose.

SolarWorld calculated in its petition for the anti-dumping and anti-subsidy case that American imports of Chinese solar panels rose 220 percent in February through August of this year compared with the preceding six months.

The period of February through August was the most recent available when the company filed its case in October.

Túlio escreveu:Diria que os ianques naturalmente não querem de jeito nenhum largar o osso mas cada vez mais demonstram que não podem evitar que outros comecem a roer também. Temos uns dentinhos aí, poucos mas temos.

Agora, a comparação com Roma realmente deixa a desejar, os EUA jamais chegaram sequer a uma parcela do poder absoluto desfrutado por alguns Césares, de domínio total e inquestionável sobre todo o mundo então conhecido...

Aliás, comparar a PAX ROMANA com a PAX BRITANNICA ou mesmo a PAX AMERICANA mostra discrepâncias imensas; mesmo considerando que o mundo era outro, o Ser Humano era o mesmo...

Túlio escreveu:CUIDADO, o nosso véio Aiatolá da M'daira é devoto de Dom Sebastião...

Túlio escreveu:Gaia, a supremacia ianque está em plena DECADÊNCIA - ideologices à parte, é só $$$ - seja qual for o ponto de vista. A BIPOLARIDADE (URSS x EUA) foi seguida pela UNIPOLARIDADE (EUA) e parece que chegou a hora da MULTIPOLARIDADE, da qual - até que enfim - fazemos parte...

Mas é apenas minha opinião, claro...