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On Balance | A Donald Trump who’s sceptical of tech and Boeing is a friend of China
- The US president’s remarks on the Boeing crash underline his prejudice against innovation and Silicon Valley. Trump would like supporters to believe that he can bring back the 20th century and take back manufacturing jobs from China
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Why you can trust SCMP
In the torrent of heartbreaking news last week, perhaps the only silver lining was that none of it was created by a Donald Trump executive order.
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Leave aside the US president’s denial that the massacre in Christchurch was part of a rise in white nationalism, and we can at least consider it a week free of efforts by him to alienate strategic allies, disrupt global supply chains, dismantle environmental safeguards or demean minorities.
For China, there was another hopeful titbit. As the Ethiopian Airlines 737 MAX story developed, Beijing should have seen that Trump might be more of a solution than a problem in the still-unresolved stand-off over bilateral trade and investment.
"Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly,” Trump tweeted amid reports that Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg asked him not to ground the plane. “Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT.”
Besides being a premature conclusion, Trump’s comment about the 737 MAX also underscored his attitude towards the tech industry.
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