China

2019 was a busy year for Port Tampa Bay. Florida’s largest port set a record for cruise passengers and welcomed cargo ships from Asia.

CEO Paul Anderson said direct service to Shanghai, Singapore and other Asian ports has been a priority since he was hired in 2012. The service’s launch coincided with a trade war between the Trump Administration and China, which included tariffs and prolonged negotiations on a bilateral trade agreement.  

A Chinese businesswoman who was incarcerated for eight months for trespassing at President Donald Trump’s Palm Beach club was transferred Wednesday from a federal lockup to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation to China.

Yujing Zhang, 33, was moved to the Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven after being held at the Paul Rein Detention Facility in Broward County following her sentencing last week, according to an ICE website.

It was not clear when Zhang, who faces a removal proceeding, would be deported to China.

Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is one of China’s biggest critics in Congress.

In the last three weeks, he called out China for using U.S. academic visa programs as “a weapon against us,” warned that the Chinese government’s internet propaganda campaigns are “subtle and sophisticated but no less effective,” and warned that Bejing will try to impose a “Macau-style system of government in Hong Kong” in response to ongoing democracy protests.

A bill that would halt employment-based immigration from any countries other than India or China is headed back to the floor of the U.S. Senate next week.

If it passes, immigration policy experts estimate that for the next 10 years or so, Indian nationals, as well as a small number of Chinese nationals, would be the only foreign workers able to obtain green cards through employment — a move that would crush U.S. businesses seeking other talented foreign employees.

A controversial institute focusing on Chinese language and culture at Miami Dade College is shutting down after it became an issue in the institution's tumultuous presidential search.

Like other similar programs around the country, Miami Dade College's Confucius Institute has been criticized as a tool for spreading communist propaganda for the Chinese government. Although the institute opened in 2010, it has been thrust into the spotlight recently as the college's presidential search started, stopped and then started again.

COMMENTARY

Here’s a dirty little secret about Amazon deforestation that liberals prefer you overlook: the slash-and-burn may be ugly under right-wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, but it was bad when leftists controlled the rainforest, too. Under former President Dilma Rousseff, the liberal darling who ruled Brazil from 2011 until her impeachment in 2016, Amazon deforestation actually increased.

In no way does that excuse Bolsonaro’s reckless efforts to accelerate the trend – which in 2019 have resulted in an alarming 85 percent rise in Amazon fires that have destroyed more than 7,000 square miles of rainforest. What it points out is that Brazil, left or right, is and largely has been a lousy steward of an emerald ecosystem known as the lungs of the earth.