This week’s News on China.
• Syrian president returns to China after almost 20 years
• 19th Asian Games started in Hangzhou
• Particle accelerator to produce semiconductors
• ‘Comfort women’ film debuts in Japan
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The U.S. Department of State condemned Beijing in a statement Friday for secretly imposing a life sentence on a Uyghur folklore expert and ethnographer who disappeared in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region nearly six years ago.
Rahile Dawut was tried and convicted in December 2018 for the crime of “splittism,” a U.S.-based rights group reported last week, citing a source within the Chinese government.
The State Department statement said Dawut and other Uyghur intellectuals were unfairly imprisoned for their work to protect and preserve Uyghur culture and traditions.
“Professor Dawut’s life sentence is part of an apparent broader effort by the PRC to eradicate Uyghur identity and culture and undermine academic freedom, including through the use of detentions and disappearances,” the statement said, using an acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
It called on Beijing to end “genocide and crimes against humanity” against Uyghurs and other minority groups, and to honor its commitments to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms.
“We continue to call on the PRC government to immediately release Professor Dawut and all individuals who are unjustly detained,” the statement said.
Anthropologist
Dawut, 57, is the creator and former director of Xinjiang University’s Minorities Folklore Research Center. She penned articles in international journals and several books about Islamic sacred sites in Central Asia.
An anthropologist by training, she mysteriously disappeared in December 2017, the same year that Chinese authorities launched a mass incarceration campaign in Xinjiang.
After years of silence on her case, RFA Uyghur learned in July 2021 through interviews with employees at the university that she was in fact among the many other members of the Uyghur intellectual and cultural elite who were detained in 2017, and she was sentenced and jailed in 2018.
China has detained as many as 1.8 million Uyghurs in detention camps constructed in 2017. Beijing first denied the existence of the camps, but later described them as vocational training or re-education centers aimed at combating terrorism in Xinjiang.
Western governments and rights groups have accused China of targeting of intellectuals, artists, teachers and cultural figures in an effort to erase the Uyghur identity, with many coming to the conclusion in 2021 that Beijing’s treatment of Uyghurs and other minorities was genocide. China rejects the accusation.
Edited by Malcolm Foster
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Eugene Whong.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
New York: The New York City government celebrated the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival.
A large number of the South Asian community attended the ceremony held at Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
As the Mayor’s Office celebrated the Moon Festival, Mayor Eric Adams distributed certificates of appreciation to the South Asian community.
This festival is a part of Chinese culture and is celebrated every year in the month of September when the moon is full.
On this occasion, Mayor Eric Adams awarded the New York Police Department’s Muslim Officers Society (MOS) President Deputy Inspector Adeel Rana and other professionals associated with different departments with certificates of appreciation for their excellent services to the community.
On this occasion, Adeel Rana said that the development of the city and maintaining peace here are among our top priorities. There has always been an effort to improve the relationship between different communities and the police, he said.
The post NYC Govt. celebrates the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival first appeared on VOSA.
This post was originally published on VOSA.
Barely a day passes without a story in the British or Australian media that ramps up fear about the rulers in Beijing, reports the investigative website Declassified Australia.
According to an analysis by co-editors Antony Loewenstein and Peter Cronau, the Australian and British media are ramping up public fear, aiding a major military build-up — and perhaps conflict — by the United States and its allies.
The article is a warning to New Zealand and Pacific media too.
Citing a recent article in the Telegraph newspaper in Britain headlined, “A war-winning missile will knock China out of Taiwan – fast”, says the introduction.
“Written by David Axe, who contributes regularly to the outlet, he detailed a war game last year that was organised by the US think-tank, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“It examined a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and concluded that the US Navy would be nearly entirely obliterated. However, Axe wrote, the US Air Force ‘could almost single-handedly destroy the Chinese invasion force’.
“‘How? With the use of a Lockheed Martin-made Joint Air-to-Surface Strike Missile (JASSM).
“‘It’s a stealthy and highly accurate cruise missile that can range hundreds of miles from its launching warplane,’ Axe explained.
“‘There are long-range versions of the JASSM and a specialised anti-ship version, too — and the USAF [US Air Force] and its sister services are buying thousands of the missiles for billions of dollars.’
“Missing from this analysis was the fact that Lockheed Martin is a major sponsor of the CSIS. The editors of The Telegraph either didn’t know or care about this crucial detail.
“One week after this story, Axe wrote another one for the paper, titled, ‘The US Navy should build a robot armada to fight the battle of Taiwan.’
“‘The US Navy is shrinking,’ the story begins. ‘The Chinese navy is growing. The implications, for a free and prosperous Pacific region, are enormous.’”
Branding the situation as “propaganda by think tank”, the authors argue that some sections of the news media are framing a massive military build-up by the US and its allies as necessary in the face of Chinese aggression.
“These repetitive media reports condition the public and so allow, or force, the political class to up the ante on China,” Loewenstein and Cronau write.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) is a massive public diplomacy op launched at the recent G20 summit in New Delhi, complete with a memorandum of understanding signed on 9 September.
Players include the US, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the EU, with a special role for the latter’s top three powers Germany, France, and Italy. It’s a multimodal railway project, coupled with trans-shipments and with ancillary digital and electricity roads extending to Jordan and Israel.
If this walks and talks like the collective west’s very late response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched 10 years ago and celebrating a Belt and Road Forum in Beijing next month, that’s because it is. And yes, it is, above all, yet another American project to bypass China, to be claimed for crude electoral purposes as a meager foreign policy “success.”
No one among the Global Majority remembers that the Americans came up with their own Silk Road plan way back in 2010. The concept came from the State Department’s Kurt Campbell and was sold by then-Secretary Hillary Clinton as her idea. History is implacable, it came down to nought.
And no one among the Global Majority remembers the New Silk Road plan peddled by Poland, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the early 2010s, complete with four troublesome trans-shipments in the Black Sea and the Caspian. History is implacable, this too came down to nought.
In fact, very few among the Global Majority remember the $40 trillion US-sponsored Build Back Better World (BBBW, or B3W) global plan rolled out with great fanfare just two summers ago, focusing on “climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality.”
A year later, at a G7 meeting, B3W had already shrunk to a $600 billion infrastructure-and-investment project. Of course, nothing was built. History really is implacable, it came down to nought.
The same fate awaits IMEC, for a number of very specific reasons.
Pivoting to a black void
The whole IMEC rationale rests on what writer and former Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar deliciously described as “conjuring up the Abraham Accords by the incantation of a Saudi-Israeli tango.”
This tango is Dead On Arrival; even the ghost of Piazzolla can’t revive it. For starters, one of the principals – Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman – has made it clear that Riyadh’s priorities are a new, energized Chinese-brokered relationship with Iran, with Turkiye, and with Syria after its return to the Arab League.
Moreover, both Riyadh and its Emirati IMEC partner share immense trade, commerce, and energy interests with China, so they’re not going to do anything to upset Beijing.
At face value, IMEC proposes a joint drive by G7 and BRICS 11 nations. That’s the western method of seducing eternally-hedging India under Modi and US-allied Saudi Arabia and the UAE to its agenda.
Its real intention, however, is not only to undermine BRI, but also the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INTSC), in which India is a major player alongside Russia and Iran.
The game is quite crude and really quite obvious: a transportation corridor conceived to bypass the top three vectors of real Eurasia integration – and BRICS members China, Russia, and Iran – by dangling an enticing Divide and Rule carrot that promises Things That Cannot Be Delivered.
The American neoliberal obsession at this stage of the New Great Game is, as always, all about Israel. Their goal is to make Haifa port viable and turn it into a key transportation hub between West Asia and Europe. Everything else is subordinated to this Israeli imperative.
IMEC, in principle, will transit across West Asia to link India to Eastern and Western Europe – selling the fiction that India is a Global Pivot state and a Convergence of Civilizations.
Nonsense. While India’s great dream is to become a pivot state, its best shot would be via the already up-and-running INTSC, which could open markets to New Delhi from Central Asia to the Caucasus. Otherwise, as a Global Pivot state, Russia is way ahead of India diplomatically, and China is way ahead in trade and connectivity.
Comparisons between IMEC and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) are futile. IMEC is a joke compared to this BRI flagship project: the $57.7 billion plan to build a railway over 3,000 km long linking Kashgar in Xinjiang to Gwadar in the Arabian Sea, which will connect to other overland BRI corridors heading toward Iran and Turkiye.
This is a matter of national security for China. So bets can be made that the leadership in Beijing will have some discreet and serious conversations with the current fifth-columnists in power in Islamabad, before or during the Belt and Road Forum, to remind them of the relevant geostrategic, geoeconomic, and investment Facts.
So, what’s left for Indian trade in all of this? Not much. They already use the Suez Canal, a direct, tested route. There’s no incentive to even start contemplating being stuck in black voids across the vast desert expanses surrounding the Persian Gulf.
One glaring problem, for example, is that almost 1,100 km of tracks are “missing” from the railway from Fujairah in the UAE to Haifa, 745 km “missing” from Jebel Ali in Dubai to Haifa, and 630 km “missing” from the railway from Abu Dhabi to Haifa.
When all the missing links are added up, there’s over 3,000 km of railway still to be built. The Chinese, of course, can do this for breakfast and on a dime, but they are not part of this game. And there’s no evidence the IMEC gang plans to invite them.
All eyes on Syunik
In the War of Transportation Corridors charted in detail for The Cradle in June 2022, it becomes clear that intentions rarely meet reality. These grand projects are all about logistics, logistics, logistics – of course, intertwined with the three other key pillars: energy and energy resources, labor and manufacturing, and market/trade rules.
Let’s examine a Central Asian example. Russia and three Central Asian “stans” – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan – are launching a multimodal Southern Transportation Corridor which will bypass Kazakhstan.
Why? After all, Kazakhstan, alongside Russia, is a key member of both the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The reason is because this new corridor solves two key problems for Russia that arose with the west’s sanctions hysteria. It bypasses the Kazakh border, where everything going to Russia is scrutinized in excruciating detail. And a significant part of the cargo may now be transferred to the Russian port of Astrakhan in the Caspian.
So Astana, which under western pressure has played a risky hedging game on Russia, may end up losing the status of a full-fledged transport hub in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea region. Kazakhstan is also part of BRI; the Chinese are already very much interested in the potential of this new corridor.
In the Caucasus, the story is even more complex, and once again, it’s all about Divide and Rule.
Two months ago, Russia, Iran, and Azerbaijan committed to building a single railway from Iran and its ports in the Persian Gulf through Azerbaijan, to be linked to the Russian-Eastern Europe railway system.
This is a railway project on the scale of the Trans-Siberian – to connect Eastern Europe with Eastern Africa and South Asia, bypassing the Suez Canal and European ports. The INSTC on steroids, in fact.
Guess what happened next? A provocation in Nagorno-Karabakh, with the deadly potential of involving not only Armenia and Azerbaijan but also Iran and Turkiye.
Tehran has been crystal clear on its red lines: it will never allow a defeat of Armenia, with direct participation from Turkiye, which fully supports Azerbaijan.
Add to the incendiary mix are joint military exercises with the US in Armenia – which happens to be a member of the Russian-led CSTO – cast, for public consumption, as one of those seemingly innocent “partnership” NATO programs.
This all spells out an IMEC subplot bound to undermine INTSC. Both Russia and Iran are fully aware of the former’s endemic weaknesses: political trouble between several participants, those “missing links” of track, and all important infrastructure still to be built.
Turkish Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for his part, will never give up the Zangezur corridor across Syunik, the south Armenian province, which was envisaged by the 2020 armistice, linking Azerbaijan to Turkiye via the Azeri enclave of Nakhitchevan – that will run through Armenian territory.
Baku did threaten to attack southern Armenia if the Zangezur corridor was not facilitated by Yerevan. So Syunik is the next big unresolved deal in this riddle. Tehran, it must be noted, will go no holds barred to prevent a Turkish-Israeli-NATO corridor cutting Iran off from Armenia, Georgia, the Black Sea, and Russia. That would be the reality if this NATO-tinted coalition grabs Syunik.
Today, Erdogan and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev meet in the Nakhchivan enclave between Turkiye, Armenia, and Iran to start a gas pipeline and open a military production complex.
The Sultan knows that Zangezur may finally allow Turkiye to be linked to China via a corridor that will transit the Turkic world, in Azerbaijan and the Caspian. This would also allow the collective west to go even bolder on Divide and Rule against Russia and Iran.
Is the IMEC another far-fetched western fantasy? The place to watch is Syunik.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Taiwan’s minister of national defense and military analysts are calling recent Chinese military drills “abnormal” and “out of control” amid reports that civilian ferries are being harnessed to carry out beach landing drills on the Chinese side of the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan is concerned that China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is using increasingly provocative tactics to habituate Taiwan – and its immediate de facto allies, the United States and Japan – into a militarily fractious routine.
On Friday last week, Taiwan Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng told reporters at the legislature in Taipei that Chinese military movements around Taiwan were “abnormal.”
“Our initial analysis is that they are doing joint drills in September, including land, sea, air and amphibious,” Chiu said, responding to questions about a rise in Chinese military activity around the nation involving dozens of warplanes, drones, bombers and warships.
Chieh Chung, a military researcher at Taiwan’s National Policy Foundation think tank, concurred, telling Radio Free Asia, “From September 11-15, the PLA mobilized three major fleets in the Western Pacific, with a total of 17 surface ships (including the Shandong aircraft carrier strike group) to conduct large-scale confrontational exercises.”
“That’s not like previous exercises in past years. It’s indeed unusual,” Chieh said.
Meanwhile, the English-language Taiwan News reported civilian ferries were carrying out “undetermined, but likely non-commercial” operations along China’s east coast.
The six roll-on roll-off (RoRo) ferries associated with the PLA were seen on Sunday conducting drills on Chinese beaches in the Taiwan Strait, at Xiamen, a city in Fujian Province directly opposite Taiwan, the report said, drawing on a series of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The source, Tom Shugart, is an adjunct senior fellow with the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Attempts by RFA to reach Shugart were not successful, but sources said his information was normally reliable.
Analyst Chieh Chung said he couldn’t verify Shugart’s claims, but added that in exercises conducted at Dacheng Bay, Fujian, last year and the year before, China mobilized civilian semi-submersible ships and RoRo cargo ships for “dock-less unloading” drills.
“Dacheng Bay is the PLA’s amphibious landing training base,” Chieh said. “Every year from July to September, many PLA units conduct exercises there. But he added: “The ‘Eight Transport Group (Strategic Sea Transport 8th Squadron)’ mentioned in the news [Shugart’s tweets] does indeed exist and is indeed part of the Bo Hai Ferry Group,” he said.
Ben Lewis, an independent defense analyst based in Washington D.C., said “Multiple Bo Hai ferries have been pulled off their normal routes, but I think the only thing about the recent drills that is unnormal is the fact that the PLA hasn’t bragged about them through its propaganda outlets.”
New normal
Michael Mazza, a non-resident Asia-Pacific defense analyst with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), describes “the new normal of PLA operations around Taiwan, which can arguably be dated to the Pelosi visit, as one of high numbers, high frequency and high intensity.”
Then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi incurred China’s wrath in Aug. 2022 by visiting Taiwan, which China claims as sovereign territory.
He added, “The new normal also seems to be one in which there is no accepted status quo and no obvious limiting principle. China will ramp up and ramp down as it wishes.”
But Mazza also said that he does not think the recent exercises “suggest an imminent use of force against Taiwan.”
Rather, he said, it seems more likely that the PLA is speeding up training and shaping operations ahead of Xi Jinping’s 2027 “readiness” deadline.
China’s President Xi Jinping has announced publicly that he wants China to be ready, should Taiwan not come to the table, to invade the de facto nation fortress by 2027, despite repeated U.S. statements that such a move would be unacceptable.
Washington-based Lewis is similarly unconcerned that China is planning an imminent move on Taiwan.
“August-October is one of the PLA’s training seasons, so I’m not concerned that they are doing anything out of the ordinary. Different, maybe, but not out of control.”
However, he added, while “the PRC is generally risk-averse … the more they increase their military activity region-wide, the higher the risk of a miscalculation.”
Says Mazza, on the question of possible red lines the PLA might inadvertently cross in its increasing adventurism, “China’s installation of a barrier at Scarborough Shoal last week may have been such a red line in the South China Sea – a seemingly minor escalation that was too much for the Philippines to bear.”
Lewis said, “The PRC is generally risk-averse, but the more they increase their military activity region-wide, the higher the risk of a miscalculation,” referring to the People’s Republic of China, the official name of China.
“Beijing uses this risk as a weapon in its engagements with other countries, including Taiwan. I also think, however, that the PRC is highly aware of the red-lines of its targets, specifically Washington and Tokyo.
“As much as they may escalate a situation, I think they want to avoid an escalation spiral as much as anyone else.”
Speaking on the Scarborough Shoal incident and the reaction of the Philippines, Mazza said, “It is difficult to predict what an equivalent would be in the Taiwan Strait, but the lesson is this: China is far too confident that it can control escalation and that it can count on the restraint of its rivals and adversaries.
“That confidence may be misplaced,” Mazza says.
Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chris Taylor for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The New York Times of 22 September 2023 and other outlets report on the increasing crackdown on dissent: Huang Xueqin, the journalist who gave #MeToo Victims a voice, and Wang Jianbing, a labor activist, have been accused of inciting subversion.
On 22 September saw the start of their trial after two years of arbitrary detention. A large number of civil society organisations, including the FIDH and the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) expressed their deep concern about their conditions of detention and called for their immediate and unconditional release.
Huang Xueqin, an independent journalist who was once a prominent voice in China’s #MeToo movement, and her friend Wang Jianbing, the activist, were taken away by the police in September 2021 and later charged with inciting subversion of state power. Their trial was held at the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court in southern China.
Little is known about the government’s case, but the vaguely worded offence with which the two were charged has long been seen as a tool for muzzling dissent. Since China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, came to power in 2012, the ruling Communist Party has sought to essentially silence people who have fought for free speech and political rights. A steady stream of activists, lawyers, tycoons and intellectuals have been put on trial and sentenced.
In Ms. Huang and Mr. Wang’s cases, the authorities questioned dozens of their friends in the months after their detentions and pressured them to sign testimonies against the two, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an advocacy group that is in close contact with many activists.
In the meantime the Washington Post of 22 September reports that Rahile Dawut, a prominent Uyghur academic who disappeared six years ago at the height of the Chinese government’s crackdown in Xinjiang, has been given a life sentence in prison, according to a human rights group that has worked for years to locate her..
Dui Hua, a California-based group that advocates for political prisoners in China, said in a statement Thursday that the 57-year-old professor — who was convicted in 2018 on charges of endangering state security by promoting “splittism” — had lost an appeal of her sentence in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region High People’s Court.
At a regular press briefing, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Mao Ning said she was “unaware” of Dawut’s case. “What I can tell you is that China is a law-based country and handles relevant cases in strict accordance with the law.”
A former professor at Xinjiang University and leading scholar on Uyghur folklore, she is among more than 300 intellectuals, artists and writers believed to be detained in Xinjiang, amid a government campaign ostensibly aimed at better assimilating China’s Muslim minority and promoting ethnic harmony. Rights groups have accused the Chinese government of committing “cultural genocide” by wiping out previously vibrant local Uyghur culture. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/11/11/rahile-dawut-recipient-of-courage-to-think-award-2020/
“The sentencing of Professor Rahile Dawut to life in prison is a cruel tragedy, a great loss for the Uyghur people, and for all who treasure academic freedom,” said John Kamm, executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/21/china/china-metoo-activist-huang-xueqin-trial-intl-hnk/index.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/22/rahile-dawut-life-sentence-uyghur-china/
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
Human rights group says Rahile Dawut lost appeal after being convicted in 2018 on charges of promoting ‘splittism’
A leading Uyghur professor who disappeared six years ago is reported to have sentenced to life in prison by Chinese authorities for “endangering state security”.
Rahile Dawut, 57, who specialises in the study of Uyghur folklore and traditions and is considered an expert in her field, lost an appeal over her sentence after being convicted in 2018 on charges of promoting “splittism”, according to the US-based Dui Hua Foundation human rights group.
This week’s News on China.
• EU investigates Chinese electric vehicles
• High-speed train to Taiwan
• G77+China Summit
• The elderly in the digital age
Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
The South and East China Seas are among China’s major security concerns in its neighborhood. Despite this, the US still hypes up competition with China in these regions to cover up the tendency of its hegemonic expansion.
The US Congressional Research Service (CRS) recently published a report which pointed out that the South China Sea in the past 10 to 15 years has become the arena of US-China strategic competition, while actions by China’s maritime forces at the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea are another concern for US observers. “Chinese domination of China’s near-seas region… could substantially affect US strategic, political, and economic interests in the Indo-Pacific region and elsewhere,” said the CRS report.
The South and East China Seas hold different strategic positions for China and the US. On one hand, as China’s military strength has rapidly progressed, the Chinese navy no longer prioritizes near-shore defense. Instead, it actively and comprehensively seeks to safeguard China’s sovereignty and security in these waters. China’s activities in the South and East China Seas are among the first indications of its rise as a global power.
On the other hand, the South and East China Seas are at the forefront of US hegemonic power. Despite being geographically distant from these waters, the US still perceives China’s near-seas region as a place to show off its military presence and political influence due to the pervasive nature of the US global hegemony. This situation is unlikely to change unless the US hegemonic strategy collapses.
It is evident that the situation in the South and East China Seas has become complicated over the years. Experts told the Global Times that Washington is the biggest driver of the intensifying China-US competition in these regions, noting the US deliberately creates problems in these regions for its own interests. In other words, the US aims to showcase the strength of its hegemony, while simultaneously containing China’s development through its Indo-Pacific Strategy.
Managing the China-US competition in those regions has become an urgent yet difficult task. When China’s growing determination to protect its national security encounters the US’ pursuit for global hegemony in the South and East China Seas, a collision can easily occur. The US will do anything to make sure its needs override China’s, leading to the emergence of more confrontations and future deterioration of bilateral relations.
The intense strategic competition between Beijing and Washington in China’s near-seas region may also affect policymaking in the US. The CRS is a major congressional think tank under the Library of Congress that serves members of Congress and their committees. Its recent report is obviously intended to clarify congressional responsibilities in the China-US strategic competition in the South and East China Seas, so that Congress can better help Washington gain an advantage over Beijing.
The US Congress has passed bills to institutionalize anti-China activities, which in itself will lead to further tensions in the bilateral relationship. This year, the South China Sea and East China Sea Sanctions Act of 2023 has already been introduced in the Senate; we cannot rule out the possibility that Congress may use more legislative resources against China’s development.
But from a strategic point of view, the US actually hopes China’s neighbors in the South and East China Seas to fight Beijing at the forefront, while the US provides strategic support from behind. The question is, as Washington’s sinister intentions of exploiting its allies and partners become increasingly prominent, how many countries will be willing to pay for US hegemonic strategy?
In the face of the US’ intense competition with China in China’s neighboring waters, China should, on one hand, strive for a more favorable international environment through diplomatic means to ensure a long-term peaceful and stable surrounding environment conducive to its development.
On the other hand, the country should not neglect the development of its hard power, including military capabilities. During critical moments, China must demonstrate its determination through action to safeguard national sovereignty, security, and interests, making it clear to those who provoke that there is no room for maneuver when it comes to issues involving China’s red line.
Peter Koenig – PressTV Interview – transcript
21 September 2023
Background
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is in China on his first visit since the war and foreign-backed insurgency gripped his country some 12 years ago.
President al-Assad arrived in the eastern city of Hangzhou where he will attend the opening ceremony of the Asian Games on Saturday. He and other foreign leaders will then meet Chinese President Xi Jinping there. The Syrian president will also travel to Beijing to discuss bilateral issues and China’s help to rebuild his war-ravaged country. Beijing, which has long provided Damascus with diplomatic support, says that Assad’s visit will push bilateral relations to a new level. The visit also comes as China expands its engagement in West Asia. This year Beijing brokered a deal that saw Saudi Arabia and Syria agree to restore diplomatic ties and reopen their respective embassies.
PressTV: Mr. Koenig, what is your take on Mr. Assad’s visit to China?
Peter Koenig: This is excellent news. President Bashar Assad’s visit to China and his meeting with President Xi Jinping will further strengthen the already good diplomatic relations, as well as cooperation, between the two countries.
China has an outstanding record in expanding diplomacy and peace initiatives. As you mentioned before, earlier this year Beijing was highly influential in re-establishing diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Syria – a move, paralleled by another Chinese initiative – re-establishing diplomatic relations and de facto peace – between Iran and the Saudis – and Yemen.
What is important, Mr. Assad’s visit will likely lead to enhanced support by China for Syria’s defense and possibly reconstruction of western initiated war-destroyed infrastructure.
Since January 2022, Syria is also part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, a fact that may further enhance China-Syria collaboration, for example, in the field of hydrocarbon exploitation and protection from western theft especially from the US and Turkey.
President Bashar al-Assad’s visit to China comes at a crucial time, just preceding the coming 3rd Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation (BRF), planned for Mid-October 2023 in Beijing.
Regarding the BRICS – although Syria is not yet a candidate for joining the BRICS – this diplomatic visit by the Syrian President to China may spark a common interest in expanding the BRICS with Syria’s presence during next year’s BRICS summit, sponsored by Russia, in October 2024.
Overall, as China is expanding her engagement in Western Asia and the Middle East, Syria’s diplomatic closeness to China is also enhanced, due to Syria’s centric geographic location, bordering Lebanon, Israel, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, and Jordan to the south.
This potentially also makes for an excellent emissary for China in the region.
PressTV: You just mentioned the Chinese diplomatic initiatives to reopen Embassies between Teheran and Riyadh and between Saudia Arabia and Syria. Do you think there is a shift of the Middle East breaking loose from the US-led western hegemony?
PK: Definitely. This is visible on all fronts. Trade relations between Saudi Arabia and China have already grown rapidly before President Xi’s diplomatic initiatives in the region, and that in local currencies. In other words, hydrocarbon deals are made in non-dollar currencies, even though the US-Dollar had been set by the US in the early 1970s as THE trading currency for OPEC.
However, a detachment from the west does not happen overnight. The shift will be gradual, as the dollar dominance will wane gradually, especially with ever-more countries trading in local currencies rather than in US-dollars which, after WWII, was made de facto the world trade currency.
In this de-dollarization, it is expected that the BRICS will play a major role. Consequently, it is also important that countries like Syria and Iran – truly interested in de-dollarization – will join the initiatives of China and Russia, as well as the stated goal of the BRICS.
The trend of disengagement from the West of the Global South, in general, and the Middle East, in particular, is irreversible. Western dollar-hegemonic “sanctions policies” have done enough harm for sovereign countries to take their destiny into their own decision making.
The East, led by China and Russia, is pursuing a brighter future for social and economic development, one of peace and harmony.
*****
Note: Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America, writes regularly for online journals, and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and he is co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis (Clarity Press, November 1, 2020). Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
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• Regulating product packaging
• Small-town bookstores
The current members of BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—along with the countries accepted for membership: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran.
BRICS is an informal grouping of emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. It provides a platform for its members to challenge the global financial system dominated by the United States and its allies in forums like the G7, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Sarang Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23), director of the Global South program at the Quincy Institute and adjunct faculty at George Washington University, notes that many countries of the Global South are frustrated with the US dollar being the de facto world currency, because it leaves their
economies at the mercy of US interest rates and sovereign measures such as quantitative easing, and enables harsh US-led sanctions regimes. For the Global South, alternative pathways of both development financing and currency settlements are attractive ways to achieve autonomy, enhance economic growth and at least partly protect themselves against the extraterritoriality of sanctions.
Relatedly, the BRICS states appear to be seeking diplomatic autonomy, taking a variety of positions on the war in Ukraine that are at odds with Washington’s preferred view (The Nation, 6/27/23) and not always in perfect sync with that of the “R” in BRICS.
In August, BRICS invited six new members to join: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. More than 40 countries expressed interest in joining BRICS, while 23 formally applied to become part of the club (Al Jazeera, 8/24/23).
Dozens of countries are trying to join BRICS, but clearly they don’t read Bloomberg (8/18/23).
The prospect of a group of nations almost entirely from the Global South working together to advance independent development sent the Bloomberg news service into attack mode. The outlet ran an op-ed by Howard Chua-Eoan (8/18/23) headlined “BRICS Is Broken and Should Be Scrapped.” His argument:
The big trouble with the BRICS is that China (with its still enormous economic clout) dominates the group—and Beijing wants to turn it into another global forum to echo its denunciations of the US and EU.
The assertion that China “dominates” BRICS is misleading. Three scholars (Conversation, 8/18/23) from Tufts University’s Rising Power Alliances project, which studies the evolution of BRICS and its relationship with the US, found that
the common portrayal of BRICS as a China-dominated group primarily pursuing anti-US agendas is misplaced. Rather, the BRICS countries connect around common development interests and a quest for a multipolar world order in which no single power dominates.
For instance, the authors note:
China has been unable to advance some key policy proposals. For example, since the 2011 BRICS summit, China has sought to establish a BRICS free trade agreement, but could not get support from other states.
Similarly, Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23) points out:
In 2015, the five [BRICS] states founded the New Development Bank, with infrastructure financing and sustainable development as its focus. Although China’s GDP is more than twice that of the rest of the BRICS states combined, it agreed to an equal partnership on governing the bank and an equal share of subscribed capital of $10 billion each.
Bloomberg (8/29/23) blames the rise of BRICS on “the US turn away from economic leadership.”
In another article, Bloomberg’s editorial board (8/29/23) worried that BRICS’ expansion “could weaken existing channels of cooperation at a time when collective action on global threats has never been more urgent.” For the authors, the BRICS countries are “sidelining the existing institutions” of “global governance,” thereby making “genuinely multilateral cooperation harder.”
The editorial’s concern is not with developing international “cooperation” or “collective action on global threats” per se; its concern is with maintaining the current global system. The root of the threat to the status quo, the editorial maintained, was lack of US leadership:
It’s no coincidence that the BRICS-11 arrives following the US turn away from economic leadership—accelerated by Donald Trump’s administration and affirmed by Joe Biden’s. The IMF and World Bank are increasingly rudderless. The WTO is all but defunct, as good as shut down by US obstruction. The organizing principle of US policy is no longer global prosperity but “Made in America.” Emerging economies can be forgiven for seeking alternatives to a global order that seems to put them last.
The timing of this shift couldn’t be worse. Higher interest rates are adding to the financial stresses confronting many low- and middle-income countries. If a new global debt crisis lies ahead, the damage won’t be narrowly confined. The costs of climate change are mounting, and the efforts of the once-and-future BRICS in containing them will be pivotal. These challenges are unavoidably global and demand a cooperative global response.
All this makes the fracturing of the multilateral order truly dangerous. Prodded by the BRICS enlargement, the US and its partners should work urgently to repair it.
The editors are wildly misreading BRICS’ appeal. As Martin Wolf put it in the Financial Times (5/23/23), “What brings its members together is the desire not to be dependent on the whims of the US and its close allies, who have dominated the world for the past two centuries.” Likewise, Shidore (The Nation, 8/17/23) wrote:
The multiple failures of the US-led world order to substantially support two core requirements of Global South states—economic development and safeguarding sovereignty—are creating a demand for alternative structures for ordering the world.
Astrid Prange made a similar point in Deutsche Welle (4/10/23):
In 2014, with $50 billion (around €46 billion) in seed money, the BRICS nations launched the New Development Bank as an alternative to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. In addition, they created a liquidity mechanism called the Contingent Reserve Arrangement to support members struggling with payments.
These offers were not only attractive to the BRICS nations themselves, but also to many other developing and emerging economies that had had painful experiences with the IMF’s structural adjustment programs and austerity measures. This is why many countries said they might be interested in joining the BRICS group.
Contrary to the Bloomberg editorial’s claims, it’s not the US’s so-called “turn away from economic leadership,” or the stalling of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, that makes BRICS attractive. It’s precisely that the “multilateral order” Bloomberg refers to is US-led, and that the US has used its stranglehold on these institutions to exploit and control poorer nations.
Bloomberg (8/28/23) criticizes BRICS for lack of democracy; meanwhile, at the IMF, countries with 14% of the world’s population get 59% of the votes.
Bloomberg (8/28/23) also ran a piece by Giovanni Salzano, headlined “BRICS Enlargement Is Going to Worsen Its Democracy Problem.” The piece comments that, of the six states invited to join BRICS,
only Argentina can be considered a democracy—albeit a flawed one. That means the enlargement would leave the group dominated by non-democratic countries, with seven of them headed by hybrid or authoritarian regimes.
Leaving aside the “democracy problem” of states at the core of the US-led world system—such as Canada and the US itself—Salzano offers an overly narrow conception of democracy. He exclusively focuses on the internal political systems of the BRICS nations, ignoring whether BRICS might help address the dearth of democratic procedures in existing international organizations.
For example, as Al Jazeera (8/22/23) pointed out:
The five BRICS nations now have a combined gross domestic product (GDP) larger than that of the G7 in purchasing power parity terms. In nominal terms, the BRICS countries are responsible for 26% of the global GDP. Despite this, they get only 15% of the voting power at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
BRICS countries account for roughly 40% of the world’s population (Reuters, 8/24/23) while the G7 is home to just 10% (FT, 5/23/23). Jason Hickel (Al Jazeera, 11/26/20) of the London School of Economics observed:
The leaders of the World Bank and the IMF are not elected, but are nominated by the US and Europe…. The US has de facto veto power over all significant decisions, and together with the rest of the G7 and the European Union controls well over half of the vote in both agencies. If we look at the voting allocations in per capita terms, the inequalities are revealed to be truly extreme. For every vote that the average person in the global North has, the average person in the global South has only one-eighth of a vote (and the average South Asian has only one-20th of a vote).
It’s too early to say whether BRICS will help countries in the Global South to develop on their own terms. But Bloomberg’s opposition to the group is probably a good sign.
The post Bloomberg Hits BRICS as US Power Challenged appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
In December 1954, the African American novelist Richard Wright, then living in Paris, happened to idly pick up a newspaper. He later wrote in his book The Color Curtain that what he saw in that newspaper so “baffled” him that he had to read the news item twice: 29 free and independent nations of Asia and Africa were planning to meet in Bandung, Indonesia, “to discuss racialism and colonialism.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
The West is writing a script about its relations with China as stuffed full of misdirection as an Agatha Christie novel.
In recent months, US and European officials have scurried to Beijing for so-called talks, as if the year were 1972 and Richard Nixon were in the White House.
But there will be no dramatic, era-defining US-China pact this time. If relations are to change, it will be decisively for the worse.
The West’s two-faced policy towards China was starkly illustrated last week by the visit to Beijing of Britain’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly – the first by a senior UK official for five years.
While Cleverly talked vaguely afterwards about the importance of not “disengaging” from China and avoiding “mistrust and errors”, the British parliament did its best to undermine his message.
The foreign affairs committee issued a report on UK policy in the Indo-Pacific that provocatively described the Chinese leadership as “a threat to the UK and its interests”.
In terminology that broke with past diplomacy, the committee referred to Taiwan – a breakaway island that Beijing insists must one day be “reunified” with China – as an “independent country”. Only 13 states recognise Taiwan’s independence.
The committee urged the British government to pressure its Nato allies into imposing sanctions on China.
The UK parliament is meddling recklessly in a far-off zone of confrontation with the potential for incendiary escalation against a nuclear power, a situation unrivalled outside of Ukraine.
But Britain is far from alone. Last year, for the first time, Nato moved well out of its supposed sphere of influence – the North Atlantic – to declare Beijing a challenge to its “interests, security and values”.
There can be little doubt that Washington is the moving force behind this escalation against China, a state posing no obvious military threat to the West.
It has upped the stakes significantly by making its military presence felt ever more firmly in and around the Straits of Taiwan – the 100-mile wide waterway separating China from Taiwan that Beijing views as its doorstep.
Senior US officials have been making noisy visits to Taiwan – not least, Nancy Pelosi last summer, when she was house speaker. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is showering Taiwan with weapons systems.
If this weren’t enough to inflame China, Washington is drawing Beijing’s neighbours deeper into military alliances – such as Aukus and the Quad – to isolate China and leave it feeling threatened. The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, describes this as a policy of “comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression against us”.
Last month, President Biden hosted Japan and South Korea at Camp David, forging a trilateral security arrangement directed at what they called China’s “dangerous and aggressive behavior”.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s “Pacific Defence Initiative” budget – chiefly intended to contain and encircle China – just keeps rising.
In the latest move, revealed last week, the US is in talks with Manila to build a naval port in the northernmost Philippine islands, 125 miles from Taiwan, boosting “American access to strategically located islands facing Taiwan”.
That will become the ninth Philippine base used by the US military, part of a network of some 450 operating in the South Pacific.
So what’s going on? Is Britain – along with its Nato allies – interested in building greater trust with Beijing, as Cleverly argues, or backing Washington’s escalatory manoeuvres against a nuclear-armed China over a small territory on the other side of the globe, as the British parliament indicates?
Inadvertently, the foreign affairs committee’s chair, Alicia Kearns, got to the heart of the matter. She accused the British government of having a “confidential, elusive China strategy”, one “buried deep in Whitehall, kept hidden even from senior ministers”.
And not by accident.
European leaders are torn. They fear losing access to Chinese goods and markets, plunging their economies deeper into recession after a cost-of-living crisis precipitated by the Ukraine war. But most are even more afraid of angering Washington, which is determined to isolate and contain China.
That divide was highlighted by French President Emmanuel Macron following a visit to China in April, when he urged “strategic autonomy” for Europe towards Beijing.
“Is it in our interest to accelerate [a crisis] on Taiwan? No. The worse thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the US agenda and a Chinese overreaction,” he said.
Macron soon found himself roundly rebuked in Washington and European capitals.
Instead, a dirty double game is being played. The West makes conciliatory noises towards Beijing, while its actions turn ever more belligerent.
Cleverly himself alluded to this deceit, observing of relations with China: “If there is ever a situation where our security concerns are at odds with our economic concerns, our security concerns win out.”
After Ukraine, we are told, Taiwan must be the locus of the West’s all-consuming security interest.
Cleverly’s meaning is barely veiled: Europe’s clear economic interests in maintaining good relations with Beijing must be suborned to Washington’s more malevolent agenda, masquerading as Nato security interests.
Forget Macron’s “autonomy”.
Notably, this game of misdirection draws on the same blueprint that shaped the long build-up to the Ukraine war.
Western politicians and media repeat the preposterous claim that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” only because they created a cover story beforehand, as they now do with China.
I have set out in detail before how these provocations unfolded. Bit by bit, US administrations eroded Ukrainian neutrality and incorporated Russia’s large neighbour into the Nato fold. The intention was to covertly turn it into a forward base, capable of positioning nuclear-tipped missiles minutes from Moscow.
Washington ignored warnings from its most senior officials and Russia experts that cornering Moscow would eventually provoke it into a pre-emptive strike against Ukraine. Why? Because, it seems, that was the goal all along.
The invasion provided the pretext for the US to impose sanctions and wage its current proxy war, using Ukrainians as foot soldiers, to neutralise Russia militarily and economically – or “weaken” it, as the US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin explicitly terms Washington’s key aim in the Ukraine war.
Moscow is seen as an obstacle, alongside China, to the US maintaining “full-spectrum global dominance” – a doctrine that came to the fore after the Soviet Union’s collapse three decades ago.
Using Nato as sidekick, Washington is determined to keep the world unipolar at all costs. It is desperate to preserve its global, imperial military and economic might, even as its star wanes. In such circumstances, Europe’s options for Macron-style autonomy are non-existent.
The public’s continuing ignorance of Nato’s countless provocations against Russia is hardly surprising. Reference to them is all but taboo in Western media.
Instead, the West’s belligerent manoeuvrings – as with those now against China – are overshadowed by a script that trumpets its faux-diplomacy, supposedly rebuffed by “madman” Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This disingenuous narrative was typified by western double-dealing over accords signed in 2014 and 2015 in the Belarussian capital Minsk – after negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv to stop a bloody civil war in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbass.
There, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and separatist Ukrainians of Russian origin began facing off in 2014, immediately after yet more covert meddling. Washington assisted in the overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow. In response, ethnic Russians demanded greater autonomy from Kyiv.
The official story is that, far from inflaming conflict, the West sought to foster peace, with Germany and France brokering the Minsk accords.
One can argue about why those agreements failed. But following Russia’s invasion, a disturbing new light was shed on their context by Angela Merkel, German chancellor at the time.
She told Die Ziet newspaper last December that the 2014 Minsk agreement was less about achieving peace than “an attempt to give Ukraine time. It also used this time to get stronger, as you can see today… In early 2015, Putin could easily have overrun them [areas in Donbas] at the time. And I very much doubt that the Nato countries could have done as much then as they do now to help Ukraine.”
If Russia could have overrun Ukraine at any time from 2014 onwards, why did it wait eight years, while its neighbour grew much stronger, assisted by the West?
Assuming Merkel is being honest, Germany, it seems, never really believed the peace process it oversaw stood a chance. That suggests one of two possibilities.
Either the initiative was a charade, brokered to buy more time for Ukraine to be integrated into Nato, a path that was bound to lead to Russia’s invasion – as Merkel herself acknowledges. Indeed, she accepts that Ukraine’s accession process into Nato launched in 2008 was “wrong”.
Or Merkel knew that the US would work with Kyiv’s new pro-Washington government to disrupt the process. Europe could do little more than delay an inevitable war for as long as possible.
Neither alternative fits the “unprovoked” narrative. Both suggest Merkel understood Moscow’s patience would eventually run out.
The theatre of the Minsk accords was directed at Moscow, which delayed invading on the assumption the talks were in good faith, but also at western publics. When Russia did finally invade, they could be easily persuaded Putin never planned to embrace western “peace” overtures.
As with Ukraine, the cover story concealing the West’s provocations towards China has been carefully directed from Washington.
Europeans like Cleverly are parading around Beijing to make it look like the West desires peaceful engagement. But the only real engagement is the crafting of a military noose around China’s neck, just as a noose was crafted earlier for Russia.
The security rationale this time – of protecting far-off Taiwan – obscures Washington’s less palatable aim: to enforce US global dominance by smashing any economic or technological threat from China and Russia.
Washington can’t remain military top dog if it doesn’t also maintain a chokehold on the global economy to fund its inflated Pentagon budget, equivalent to the combined spending of the next 10 nations.
The dangers to Washington are only underscored by the rapid expansion of Brics, a bloc of emerging economic powers headed by China and Russia. Six new members will join the current five in January, with many more waiting in the wings.
An expanded Brics offers new security and economic axes on which these emerging powers can organise, profoundly weakening US influence.
The new entrants are Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. China already brokered an unexpected reconciliation between historic foes Iran and Saudia Arabia in March, in preparation for their accession.
Brics+ will only strengthen their mutual interests.
That will be no comfort in Washington. The US has long favoured keeping the two at loggerheads, in a divide-and-rule policy that rationalised its continuous meddling to control the oil-rich Middle East and favoured Washington’s key regional military ally, Israel.
But Brics+ won’t just end the US role in dictating global security arrangements. It will gradually loosen Washington’s stranglehold on the global economy, ending the dollar’s dominance as the world reserve currency.
Brics+ now controls a majority of the world’s energy supplies, and some 37 percent of global GDP, more than the US-led G7. Opportunities to trade in currencies other than the dollar become much easier.
As Paul Craig Roberts, a former official in Ronald Reagan’s treasury, observed: “Declining use of the dollar means a declining supply of customers for US debt, which means pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and the prospect of rising inflation from rising prices of imports.”
In short, a weak dollar is going to make bullying the rest of the world a considerably more difficult prospect.
The US isn’t likely to go down without a fight. Which is why Ukrainians and Russians are currently dying on the battlefield. And why China and the rest of us have good reason to fear who may be next.
• First published at Middle East Eye
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Storage tanks for radioactive water at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (Photograph: Issei Kato/Reuters)
Japan cannot possibly outlive the atrocity of dumping radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. In fact, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is an example of how nuclear meltdowns negatively impact the entire world, as its toxic wastewater travels across the world in ocean currents. The dumping of stored toxic wastewater from the meltdown in 2011 officially started on August 24th, 2023. Meanwhile, the country restarts some of the nuclear plants that were shut down when the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant exploded.
Fukushima’s broken reactors are an example of why nuclear energy is a trap that can’t handle global warming or extreme natural disasters. Nuclear is an accident waiting to happen, for several reasons, including victimization by forces of global warming.
According to Dr. Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, former secretary to the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Internal Radiation, and Visiting Fellow, University of Sussex: “It’s important to understand that nuclear is very likely to be a significant climate casualty. For cooling purposes nuclear reactors need to be situated by large bodies of water, etc. …” Essentially, global warming is nuclear energy’s Waterloo; it has already seriously endangered France’s 56 nuclear reactors with partial shutdowns because of extreme global warming. Nuclear reactors cannot survive global warming. See “the nuclear energy trap” link at the end of this article.
TEPCO’s treacherous act of dumping radioactive water into a wide-open ocean is a deliberate violation of human decency, as it clearly violates essential provisions of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) General Safety Guide No. 8 (GSG-8).
Japan should be forced to stop its diabolical exercise of potentially destroying precious life. Shame on the IAEA and shame on the member countries of the G7 for endorsing this travesty. They’ve christened the ocean an “open sewer.” Hark! Come one, come all, dump your trash, open toxic spigots, bring chemicals, bring fertilizers, bring plastic, bring radioactive waste that’s impossible to dispose… the oceans are open sewers. It’s free! Yes, it’s free but only weak-minded people would allow a broken-down crippled nuclear power plant to dump radioactive waste into the world’s ocean. It is a testament to human frailty, weakness, insipience, not courage.
According to Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D., Institute for Energy and Environmental Research:
The IAEA is an important United Nations institution. Like the rest of the Expert Panel, the author of this paper has been reluctant to criticize the IAEA. Yet, its outright refusal to apply its own guidance documents in full measure is stark. Its constricted view of the dumping plan has allowed it to evade its responsibilities to many countries. Its eagerness to assure the public that harm will be “negligible” has been carried to the point of grossly overstating well-known facts about tritium. The serious lapses of the IAEA in the Fukushima radioactive water matter have made criticism unavoidable. (“TEPCO’s ALPS-treated Radioactive Water Dumping Plan Violates Essential Provisions of IAEA’s General Safety Guide No. 8 (GSG-8) and Corresponding Requirements in Other IAEA Documents”, June 28, 2023)
Greenpeace rejects Japan’s claim that all nuclear isotopes except tritium have been removed from the wastewater. It claims that at least one other radioactive isotope, Carbon-14, remains, and that many more, including Strontium 90 and Cesium 137, remain as yet untreated in most of the storage tanks. (Richard Broinowski, “More Fallout from Fukushima”, Pearls and Irritations, July 8, 2023)
Japan is signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: “Japan’s policy to release wastewater into the Pacific Ocean constitutes a violation of Japan’s obligations under UNCLOS Article 192, which requires state parties to ‘protect and preserve the marine environment.’ Additionally, Japan’s pollution of the marine environment from land-based sources violates UNCLOS Article 207.” (Victoria Cruz-De Jesus, “Preserving the Sea in a Radioactive World: How Japan’s Plan to Release Treated Nuclear Wastewater into the Pacific Ocean Violates UNCLOS“, American University International Law Review, Vol. 27, Issue 4, 2023)
Adding insult to injury, Japan considered several available waste disposal measures that, in part, would have complied with portions of its treaty obligations under UNCLOS Article 192 and Article 207 but ultimately settled for the cheapest, easiest, most convenient, yet most harmful, policy, dumping it into the Pacific Ocean, which conveniently is “right next door.” Japan could have chosen (1) geosphere injection or (2) underground burial as options that lessen the risks of nuclear waste released into the environment, or they could build more storage tanks. But both #1 and #2 options are considerably more expensive.
As a result, Japan’s outrageous disregard for nature has only served to highlight the insanity surrounding nuclear energy:
The Japanese Government and TEPCO falsely claim that discharge is the only viable option necessary for eventual decommissioning. Nuclear power generation, which experiences shutdowns due to accidents and natural disasters, and perpetually requires thermal power as a backup, cannot serve as a solution to global warming. (Japan Announces Date for Fukushima Radioactive Water Release, Greenpeace International Press Release, August 22, 2023)
According to Greenpeace, which has strong expertise in nuclear energy: “As of 8 June 2023, there were 1,335,381 cubic meters of radioactive wastewater stored in tanks, but due to the failure of the ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System) processing technology, approximately 70% of this water will have to be processed again. Scientists have warned that the radiological risks from the discharges have not been fully assessed, and the biological impacts of tritium, carbon-14, strontium-90 and iodine-129, which will be released in the discharges, have been ignored,” (Ibid.)
It seems inconceivable, but true, at a time when the world’s oceans are confronted with immense stress (1) inordinate record-setting heat (2) illegal overfishing to the point of near exhaustion of major fishing stock (3) human trash accumulating in vast swirls of rotting garbage, e.g., the Great Pacific Garbage Patch three times the size of France; plus four more major garbage patches in the oceans (4) rampant levels of agricultural pesticides and fertilizers, (5) tons of plastic and (6) industrial discharges. In the face of so much stress, Japan has the nerve to add toxic radioactive muck from a crippled nuclear power plant. Oh, please!
“For years, we have looked at the ocean as a dumping ground. Because it was out of sight and out of mind, we have treated it like a universal sewer.” (Jean Michel Cousteau, St. Petersburg Times) Cousteau has spent a lifetime fighting to expose ocean abuse, saying it needs to stop “if marine life, and therefore everything on the planet, is going to survive.” Alas, Japan is violating everything Cousteau ever stood for.
As a result of indiscretions, will Japan essentially self-destruct its economy as boycotts of products follow in the footsteps of its blatant disregard for the health of the ocean?
China has banned all seafood from Japan, calling the release a “selfish and irresponsible act.” Chinese social media registered 800,000,000 views on Weibo, filled with anger. China is Japan’s largest buyer of seafood accounting for one-half of Japan’s seafood exports.
Major Japanese cosmetics manufacturers have seen sales drop along with public share prices as Chinese internet users began compiling lists of Japanese brands to boycott, attracting 300,000,000 views on Weibo. The boycott could be a “trigger for Chinese consumers to switch away from Japanese premium cosmetics brands,” said Wakako Sato, an analyst for Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities Co. (“Controversial Fukushima Nuclear Waste Plan Spurs Chinese Boycott of Japanese Cosmetics”, Time, June 22, 2023)
On Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, users have circulated lists of Japanese brands ranging from cosmetics to food and beverages. urging people not to buy those products.
South Korea and Hong Kong are banning Japanese seafood from Fukushima and nine other prefectures. North Korea’s Foreign Ministry called the release a “crime against humanity,” which Japan can only view as the most humiliating insult of all time.
Is Japan setting a dangerous precedent? According to the New York Times, d/d August 22, 2023: “If Japan dumps its tainted Fukushima water in the ocean, what’s to stop other countries from doing the same?” Indeed, this may be one of the most deadly consequences of TEPCO’s dumping, with G7 approval.
“We’ve seen an inadequate radiological, ecological impact assessment that makes us very concerned that Japan would not only be unable to detect what’s getting into the water, sediment and organisms, but if it does, there is no recourse to remove it… there’s no way to get the genie back in the bottle,” marine biologist Robert Richmond, a professor with the University of Hawaii, told the BBC’s Newsday programme.” (“Fukushima: What are the Concerns Over Waste Water Release?” BBC News, August 25, 2023)
TEPCO admits to some level of radiation when it releases water from storage tanks. According to a CNN news article, Japan claims other countries are also guilty of releasing tritium-laced water into the ocean. So, why can’t they also do it? However, this misses the point that nobody should be allowed to release radioactive water into the oceans. Furthermore, TEPCO’s concentrations, with 60 highly toxic radioactive isotopes, hopefully treated by ALPS (Advanced Liquid Processing System) processing technology, makes other dumpers look like pipsqueaks. Even worse yet, Greenpeace/Japan, and others, have strong reservations about the effectiveness of ALPS, and consider: Who’s measuring?
The U.S. National Association of Marine Laboratories, with over 100 member laboratories, issued a position paper strongly opposing the toxic dumping because of a lack of adequate and accurate scientific data in support of Japan’s assertions of safety.
And regardless of Japan’s attempts to downplay the dumping as inconsequential, it has been scientifically established that even very low doses of radioactivity bio-accumulate in the human body, as well as in marine life, over time leading to physical deterioration because of DNA damage.
At high doses, ionizing radiation can cause immediate damage to a person’s body, including, at very high doses, radiation sickness and death. At lower doses, ionizing radiation can cause health effects such as cardiovascular disease and cataracts, as well as cancer. It causes cancer primarily because it damages DNA, which can lead to cancer-causing gene mutations. (National Cancer Institute)
How is it possible to justify dumping any amount of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean? Is the world’s consciousness so low, so lacking a moral compass, that it’s okay to dump the most toxic material on the planet into the oceans?
Stop destroying the oceans!
And please contemplate the dire ramifications of the nuclear energy trap.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The federal government must share more information about its ban on Chinese technology to help build a more resilient economy and society, according to the threat intelligence lead of the country’s biggest cyber firm CyberCX. Federal government agencies last year begun ripping equipment made or controlled by Chinese firms, including cameras and drones, while public…
The post Govt urged to explain growing China tech ban appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
Amid a summer of extreme heat across the Northern Hemisphere, an international report led by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revealed Wednesday that greenhouse gas concentrations, global sea level, and ocean heat content hit record highs last year. “This report is a truly international effort to more fully understand climate conditions around the globe and our capacity to…
We, the undersigned organizations, call on the Chinese authorities to immediately and unconditionally release prominent human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng ahead of the sixth anniversary of his disappearance on August 13.
And as we near “The International Day of the Disappeared” on August 30, we also condemn the Chinese government’s use of enforced disappearances as a tactic to silence and control activists, religious practitioners, Uyghurs and Tibetans, and even high-profile celebrities, entrepreneurs, and government officials. [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/08/31/enforced-disappearances-in-china/]
Gao Zhisheng was one of the first human rights lawyers to emerge in the early 2000s and he became an important leader of China’s rights defense movement. He took on cases to help migrant workers and defend spiritual practitioners, including Falun Gong adherents and Christians. Gao wrote open letters to China’s top political leadership to call attention to the plight of Falun Gong practitioners and the abuse he had suffered while defending them.
In 2006, Gao was sentenced to three years in prison on the charge of “inciting subversion of state power,” and after being released on parole, he was repeatedly disappeared for extended periods and tortured by police between 2007 and 2011. In December 2011, state media reported that Gao had been imprisoned in the Uyghur region to serve out his sentence after violating terms of his parole. He was then released in 2014 but remained under house arrest.
Gao’s relatives in China, as well as fellow rights lawyers and activists, who previously remained in contact with him, have not heard from him since August 13, 2017. Ever since then, Chinese authorities have, implausibly, claimed that Gao is not under any “criminal coercive measures.”
Over the past six years, Gao has effectively remained in a state of enforced disappearance.
Gao Zhisheng’s wife, Geng He, although living in the United States, has continued to advocate for him, pleading with the Chinese government to allow the world to “see him if he’s alive, or see his corpse if he’s dead”. Most recently, she has demanded that he be put on trial if he is guilty, and at the very least, that his lawyers should be allowed to meet with him and family members should have videoconferences.
However, the Chinese government has not provided Geng He with even this minimum amount of information.
On several occasions United Nations bodies and human rights experts have sought information about Gao Zhisheng’s status, but the Chinese government has refused to clarify his situation. Most recently, in 2020, the Chinese government responded to a letter from six UN Special Rapporteurs by claiming that, “In August 2014 Mr. Gao was released, having served his sentence. Since his release, the public security authorities have not taken any coercive measures against him.”
Gao Zhisheng’s case has been treated under the humanitarian mandate of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (case no. 10002630). The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had also previously issued an opinion in 2010 stating that Gao’s detention was arbitrary under international law and calling for his immediate release, but Gao has remained under control of the authorities ever since.
Enforced disappearances of other human rights defenders
While Gao Zhisheng’s case is arguably the most famous and well-documented case of prolonged enforced disappearance in blatant violation of international law, there are several other noteworthy cases:
Former human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng and his wife Xu Yan were detained in April 2023 as they were taking the subway to attend an event at the European Delegation in Beijing. They have been arrested and charged with “inciting subversion of state power,” but authorities have prevented lawyers from visiting them, and their 18-year-old son is under “house arrest.” See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/tag/yu-wensheng/
Human rights activist Jia Pin has been missing since September 24, 2022. He was last known to have been traveling to Beihai City in Guangxi. His friends do not know where he is, although some speculate that he may have been taken away by Henan provincial police.
Protester Peng Lifa, was taken away by authorities on October 13, 2022 after engaging in a one-man protest on the Sitong Bridge in Haidian District in Beijing against China’s stringent COVID measures and against the rule of Xi Jinping. There have been no reports about where Peng Lifa is being held.
Jiangsu-based human rights defender Tao Hong has been a victim of enforced disappearance since September 9, 2022, after she signed a open petition showing concern for the death of Mao Lihui, a petitioner who police claimed died via self-immolation while detained in a hotel. Before being detained, Tao Hong told friends on WeChat that she “absolutely wouldn’t commit suicide” – as a pre-emptive warning not to believe authorities should she mysteriously turn up dead.
Journalist Yang Zewei, who goes by the pen name Qiao Xinxin, was presumably taken away in Laos on May 31 by what is believed to have been a joint Chinese and Laotian policing effort. Earlier in the year he had launched a campaign to urge for the dismantling of the Great Firewall, an action he labeled as the #BanGFW movement. Before being detained Yang had tweeted that authorities were harassing his relatives in his hometown, and he also declared that he would not commit suicide in detention. On August 8 it was confirmed that he had been returned to China and was being held at the Hengyang Detention Center in Hunan.
Falun Gong practitioners Chen Yang (陈阳) and Cao Zhimin from Hunan province have been held incommunicado since October 2020, after being detained when studying spiritual scriptures with fellow believers. Yang had previously been jailed for four years for his activism and Cao had been held with her five-year-old daughter at an extralegal detention facility in 2010. According to the couple’s daughter, now a teenager studying in the United States, relatives in China have been unable to meet with them since their detention and lawyers hired were stopped from representing the couple. They are believed to have been sentenced to prison in November 2022, but the length of sentence remains unknown, no formal notification was sent to the family, and no news is available on their condition in custody.
Enforced disappearances of Uyghurs and Tibetans
The Chinese Communist Party, composed solely of Han Chinese officials at the highest levels of decision making, continues to use systemic enforced disappearances of non-Han groups to control, intimidate, and silence them. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2023/08/18/un-experts-demand-detailed-information-on-nine-tibetan-environment-defenders/
In the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), also known as the Uyghur region or East Turkistan by Uyghurs, there likely remain hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs who are subjected to arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance through the legal system. In 2022, the Xinjiang High People’s Procuratorate, stated that 540,826 people had been prosecuted in the region since 2017. In November 2022, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) urged China to “immediately release all individuals arbitrarily detained in the XUAR, and to provide relatives of those detained or disappeared with detailed information about their status and well-being.”
As the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has noted, there is almost no public data about the criminal justice system in the region since 2020 and the government has not made public criminal verdicts or provided relevant information to the OHCHR. Furthermore, as a UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD) opinion noted in a 2022 decision finding that three Uyghurs – Qurban Mamut, Ekpar Asat and Gulshan Abbas – had been arbitrarily detained and were victims of enforced disappearance, no verdicts were ever made public and the Chinese government did not respond to the UN with any information regarding the proceedings, “it is unclear if they have indeed stood trial at all.” In another case from 2022, the WGAD issued an opinion that found that Abdurashid Tohti, Tajigul Qadir, Ametjan Abdurashid and Mohamed Ali Abdurashid had been arbitrarily detained. The Chinese government refused to provide any information about the detention and or of any legal proceedings against them, and the WGAD was “disturbed at the total secrecy which appears to surround the fate and whereabouts” of the four people.
In Tibet, the Panchen Lama, Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, has been missing since May 17, 1995. In 2022, UN human rights experts have raised their concerns regarding the arrest, detention and subsequent enforced disappearance of Tibetan writer Mr. Lobsang Lhundup (pen name of Dhi Lhaden), musician Mr. Lhundrup Drakpa, and teacher Ms. Rinchen Kyi, in connection with their cultural activities advocating for Tibetan language and culture. Dhi Lhaden and Rinchen Kyi were subsequently released.
On August 10, UN experts urged Chinese authorities to provide clarification on the situation regarding nine imprisoned Tibetan environmental human rights defenders, including information about why they were imprisoned, where they were detained, and their current health conditions. The nine defenders are Anya Sengdra, Dorjee Daktal, Kelsang Choklang, Dhongye, Rinchen Namdol, Tsultrim Gonpo, Jangchup Ngodup, Sogru Abhu and Namesy.
Disappearances as a form of governance [see also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/08/31/enforced-disappearances-in-china/]
Even powerful and famous people in China are not immune to becoming victims of disappearances:
..
More broadly, the Chinese authorities appeared to have increasingly adopted disappearances as a form of governance. In 2012, the government amended the Criminal Procedure Law to allow for the police to hold suspects in non-detention facilities for up to six months, depriving those investigated for national security crimes of access to lawyers, family members, or other detainees – a practice known as “residential surveillance in a designated location” (RSDL). The government continues to use RSDL, despite numerous UN independent experts urging its abolition because it is a form of secret detention and enforced disappearance, and therefore incompatible with China’s human rights obligations and despite countless cases of torture and other ill-treatment occurring in RSDL having been exposed.
In 2018, the National Supervision Law created a “retention in custody” (or liuzhi) system to subject Chinese Communist Party members and public employees to incommunicado detention for up to six months for disciplinary infractions and alleged dereliction of duty, including, but not limited to, corruption. The system is run by a non-judicial, non-law enforcement body, the National Supervision Commission (NSC) and precedes formal detention and arrest.
As humanity approaches the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), we urge the Chinese government to take seriously the fundamental principles of human rights enshrined in the UDHR.
Unconditionally and immediately free Gao Zhisheng, and all others who are victims of enforced disappearance, and pending that release, allow for Geng He and other family members as well as Gao Zhisheng’s lawyers to communicate with him through in-person visits and/or videoconferencing.
Provide other relatives of those detained or disappeared with detailed information about their status and well-being.
End the practice of enforced disappearance, which gravely impacts some of the core rights articulated in the UDHR, such as the right not to be subjected to torture, the right not to be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention, and even the right to life.
Abolish RSDL (Articles 72-75 of the Criminal Procedure Law) and liuzhi (Article 22 of the National Supervision Law), and any other laws and regulations providing for practices tantamount to enforced disappearance.
Cosigned by, in alphabetical order:
ARTICLE 19
Campaign For Uyghurs
China Aid
China Against the Death Penalty (CADP)
Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD)
Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW)
Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation
Dialogue China
European Criminal Bar Association
FIDH – International Federation for Human Rights
Freedom House
Friends of Falun Gong (FoFG)
Front Line Defenders
Hans Gaasbeek, Coordinator of the Foundation Day of the Endangered Lawyer
Human Rights in China (HRIC)
Human Rights Now
Humanitarian China
International Association of People’s Lawyers (IAPL) Monitoring Committee on Attacks on Lawyers
International Observatory for Lawyers in Danger (OIAD)
International Service for Human Rights (ISHR)
Judicial Reform Foundation
Lawyers’ Rights Watch Canada
New School for Democracy Association
PEN America
PEN International
Safeguard Defenders
Symone Gaasbeek-Wielinga, President of the Dutch League for Human Rights
Taipei Bar Association Human Rights Committee
Taiwan Bar Association Human Rights Protection Committee
Taiwan Support China Human Rights Lawyers Network
Tencho Gyatso, President of The International Campaign for Tibet
Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy
The Rights Practice
The World Uyghur Congress (WUC)
Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP)
By Kalinga Seneviratne in Suva
While Japan’s discharge of nuclear waste waters into the Pacific from its Fukushima nuclear plant has been drawing flak across the Pacific, a high-powered delegation of Chinese ocean and marine scientists and Asia-Pacific scholars from Shandong Province visited Fiji to promote South-South cooperation to mitigate climate change — the Pacific island nations’ biggest security threat.
Facilitated by the Chinese Embassy in Suva, Shandong Province and Fiji signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to exchange scholars and experts from the provincial institution to assist the Pacific Island nation in the agriculture sector.
At the signing event, Agriculture Minister Vatimi Rayalu said Fiji and China had a successful history of cooperating in agriculture.
He told the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation that this initiative was critical to agricultural production to promote heightened collaboration among key stakeholders and help Fiji connect to the vast Chinese market.
Shandong Province has a 3000 km coastline with a population of 100 million. It is China’s third largest provincial economy, with a GDP of CNY 8.3 trillion (US$1.3 trillion) in 2021—equivalent to Mexico’s GDP.
The province has also played a major role in Chinese civilisation and is a cultural center for Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese Buddhism.
On August 30, during a day-long conference at the University of the South Pacific under the theme of sustainable development of small island states, scholars from Shandong Province and the Pacific exchanged ideas on cooperation in the sphere of the ocean and marine sciences, and education, development and cultural areas.
Chinese assistance welcomed
In a keynote address to the conference, Fiji’s Education Minister Aseri Radrodro welcomed China’s assistance to foster a scholars exchange programme and share best practices for improved teaching and learning processes.
He said: “We are restrategising our diplomatic relations via education platforms disturbed by the pandemic.”
Emphasising that respect is an essential ingredient of Pacific cultures, he welcomed Chinese interest in Pacific cultures.
Also, he invited China to assist Fiji and the region in areas such as marine sciences, counselling, medical services, IT, human resource management, and education policies and management.
“Overall, sustainable development for Small Island States requires a realistic approach that integrates social, economic, and environmental considerations and collaborations among governments, civil society, international organisations, and the private sector that is essential for achieving sustainable development goals,” he told delegates.
Radrodro invited more Chinese scholars to visit the Pacific to increase cultural understanding between the regions and suggested developing a school exchange programme between Fiji and China for young people to understand each other.
The Chinese ambassador to Fiji, Zhou Jian, pointed out that China and the Pacific Island Countries (PICs), were connected by the Pacific Ocean and in a spirit of South-South cooperation, China already had more than 20 development cooperation projects in the region (he listed them) and 10 sister city arrangements across the region.
Building a human community
Pointing out that his province’s institutions have some of the prominent scholars in the world on climatic change action and marine technology, the Vice-Chairman of Shandong Provincial Committee, Wang Shujian, said he hoped that these institutions would help to build a human community with a shared future in the Pacific.
Many Chinese speakers reflected in their presentations that their cooperative ventures would be in line with the Chinese government’s current international collaboration push known as the “Global Development Initiative”.
This initiative has eight priority areas: poverty alleviation, food security, pandemic response and vaccines, financing for development, climate change and green development, industrialisation, digital economy, and connectivity in the digital era.
Jope Koroisavou of the Ministry of iTaukei (indigenous) affairs explained that the “Blue Pacific” leaders in the region talk about is a way of life that “bridges our past with our future,” and it was important to re-establish the balance between taking and giving to nature.
He listed three takeaways in this respect: cultural resilience and preservation, eco-system stewardship and conservation, and community component and inclusive decision-making.
Professor Yang Jingpeng from the Centre for South Pacific Studies at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications acknowledged that they needed to learn from indigenous knowledge, where indigenous people were closely connected to the environment.
Bio-diversity, climate action, South-South cooperation
“They play an important role in protecting biodiversity,” he noted. “Their knowledge of nature will be greatly beneficial to address climatic change”.
He expressed the wish that under South-South cooperation, their centre would be able to work with this knowledge and scientific methodologies to mitigate climatic change.
Mesake Koroi of the FBC noted that Pacific Islanders needed to get over the idea that because indigenous villagers practice subsistence farming, they were poor when, in fact, they were rich in traditional knowledge, which was important to address the development and environmental challenges of today.
“Using this traditional knowledge, people don’t go out fishing when the winds are blowing in the wrong direction or the moon is not in the correct place”, he noted.
“In my village, 10,000 trees will be planted this year to confront climatic change.”
On an angry note, he referred to Japan’s dumping of nuclear-contaminated water to the Pacific Ocean using a purely “scientific” argument, which he described as “inexcusable vulgar, crude and irresponsible”.
He asked if science said was so safe, why did they not use it for irrigation in Japan?
Nuclear tests suffering
Koroi lamented that historically, major powers had used the Pacific for nuclear testing without respect for the islanders’ welfare — who had to suffer from nuclear fallouts.
“The British, French, and Americans are all guilty of these atrocities, and now the Japanese”, noted Koroi.
Since China was coming to the Pacific without this baggage, he hoped this would transform into a desire to work with the people of the Pacific for their welfare.
Professor He Baogang, of Deaking University in Australia, noted that though the Chinese mindset acknowledged that dealing with climate change was a human right (health right) issue, it still needed to be central to their approach to the problem.
“This should be laid down as important, ” he argued, and suggested that this could be demonstrated by working on areas such as putting green shipping corridors into action.
“China and Pacific Island countries need to look at an agreement to decarbonise the shipping industry,” he argued. “This conference needs to address how to proceed (in that direction)”.
Pointing out that there was a long history — going back to more than 8000 years — of Chinese ancestry among some Pacific people, pointing out that some Māori traditional tattoos were similar to the Chinese tattoos, Professor Chen Xiaochen, executive deputy director, Centre for Asia-Pacific Studies, East China Normal University, noted “now we are looking for common ground for Pacific development needs”.
Knowing each other better
In an informal conversation with IDN, one of the professors from China said that the time had come for the people of China and the Pacific to come to know each other better.
“Chinese students hardly know about Pacific cultures and the people,” he told IDN, adding, “I suppose the Pacific people don’t know much of our cultures as well.”
He believes closer collaboration with universities in Shandong Provincial would be ideal “because it is a centre of Chinese civilisation”.
“Now the Pacific is looking north,” noted Professor Xiaochen, adding, “my flight from Hong Kong was full of Chinese tourists coming South to Fiji”.
Kalinga Seneviratne is a visiting consultant with the University of the South Pacific journalism programme. IDN-InDepthNews is the flagship news service of the nonprofit Inter Press Syndicate. Republished in collaboration with Asia Pacific Report.
Energy bill amendment requires large solar energy projects to prove supply chain free of slave labour
The UK risks becoming a dumping ground for the products of forced labour from Xinjiang province in China if it rejects reforms by members of the foreign affairs select committee with cross-party support, ministers have been warned.
An amendment to the energy bill, due to be debated on Tuesday, would require solar energy companies to prove their supply chains are free of slave labour.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Chinese authorities have banned a book on the history of the Mongols, citing “historical nihilism” – a term indicating a version of history not in keeping with the official party line – in what appeared to be a concerted attack by Beijing on ethnic Mongolians’ identity.
Orders have been sent out to remove “A General History of the Mongols” by scholars in the Mongolian Studies department of the Inner Mongolia Institute of Education should be removed from shelves, the pro-Beijing Sing Tao Daily newspaper reported.
It cited an Aug. 25 directive from the Inner Mongolian branch of the government-backed Books and Periodicals Distribution Association.
The move comes after President Xi Jinping called for renewed efforts to boost a sense of Chinese national identity in a visit to the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Xi vowed to double down on China’s hardline policies toward the 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs who live in the region, warning that “hard-won social stability” would remain the top priority, along with making everyone speak Mandarin rather than their own languages.
And his warnings seemed to apply to other regions, too.
“Forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation is a focus of .. all work in areas with large ethnic minority populations,” Xi said in comments paraphrased by state media reports.
“Education on standard spoken and written Chinese must be resolutely carried out to enhance people’s consciousness and ability to use it,” he said.
Ethnic Mongolians, who make up almost 20 percent of Inner Mongolia’s population of 23 million, increasingly complain of widespread environmental destruction and unfair development policies in the region, as well as ongoing attempts to target their traditional culture.
Clashes between Chinese state-backed mining or forestry companies and herding communities are common in the region, which borders the independent country of Mongolia, with those who complain about the loss of their grazing lands frequently targeted for harassment, beatings, and detention by the authorities.
Historical narrative
The banned book, published in 2004, was previously lauded for its work in “connecting the history of Mongolia from ancient times to the medieval period, making the history of Mongolia more complete,” according to a Baidupedia entry still available on Friday.
“Systematizing, organizing, and using a scientific approach can help the world better understand China’s five thousand years of glorious history, strengthen the unity of the Chinese nation, and make Chinese culture and history more prosperous,” said the entry, which must have once been approved by government censors.
Analysts said the book is already fairly nationalistic in tone, and describes the Mongols as part of the Chinese nation.
But the ban comes as the authorities are increasingly concerned about a growing sense of Mongolian identity among ethnic Mongolians living in China.
“A lot of Mongolian scholars and Mongolians in general don’t like this book because it describes the Mongols as a people of China,” Yang Haiying, a professor at Shizuoka University in Japan, told Radio Free Asia. “The Mongols have never considered themselves to be a Chinese people.”
Nonetheless, the book is now considered to contribute to a pan-Mongolian identity because it didn’t go far enough in making the Mongols appear to be historically part of the Chinese nation, Yang said.
A pro-government comment on the social media platform Weibo hit out at the book for “historical nihilism.”
“Criticizing the pan-Mongolian nationalist trend is conducive to #cultivating the consciousness of the Chinese national community, conducive to #ethnic exchanges, exchanges, and integration#, and conducive to #forging a strong sense of the Chinese nation’s community !,” user @XiMay1 wrote on Aug. 29.
Ending Mongolian instruction
At the start of the academic year in 2020, China announced it would end Mongolian-medium instruction in schools, prompting angry protests and a wide-ranging crackdown across the region.
Taiwan-based strategic analyst Shih Chien-yu said the banning of the book sends a more general message to China’s ethnic Mongolians.
“There are still a lot of Mongolian cadres in the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party of China, a lot of Mongolian intellectuals and officials, while most of the ethnic minority intellectuals in the various central nationalities colleges and university-level schools are Mongolian,” he said.
“The main reason for banning the book is to warn them that they should believe they still have any clout within the regime,” Shih said. “Don’t put up any resistance behind our backs, because we can take away your power at any time.”
In 2018, Chinese authorities detained Lhamjab A. Borjigin, a prominent ethnic Mongolian historian who gathered testimony of a historical genocide campaign by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, prosecuting him on charges of separatism.
He was handed a one-year suspended jail term for “separatism” and “sabotaging national unity,” then released under ongoing surveillance.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
By Shayal Devi in Suva
Fiji owes the Export-Import (Exim) Bank of China about $374.9 million, states the Ministry of Finance’s government debt report for the third quarter of 2022/2023.
This comes as China has drawn a spate of criticism regarding the motivations behind its assistance to Pacific island countries.
The Chinese Embassy in Fiji says all assistance provided has been based on the requests of Pacific Island countries aimed to make people’s lives better.
Fiji’s total debt stands at $9.6 billion, and Fiji’s debt to China amounts to about 3.8 percent of total debt, and 10.5 percent of external debt.
In response to the claims, the Chinese Embassy in Fiji issued a statement saying China was committed to providing all possible assistance to other developing countries within the framework of South-South co-operation.
The statement also said the country never attached any “political strings” and fully respected the wishes and needs of recipient countries.
“Since the 1980s, China has been assisting Fiji in many areas on the basis of the Fijian government requests, including building roads, bridges, jetties, schools, hospitals, stadiums, hydropower stations and many other facilities,” the statement read.
“China often takes into account the debt-paying ability and solvency of recipient countries, so avoiding creating too high a debt burden to recipient countries.”
The embassy also stated all relevant projects were conducted with careful feasibility studies and market research to ensure they delivered the desired economic and social benefits.
“It’s clear that China’s foreign loans is reasonable and helpful, not the cause of the debt crisis of any other countries.”
Shayal Devi is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
The United States is gunning for war with China. By cozying up to Taiwan and arming it to the teeth, President Joe Biden is undermining the “One China” policy which has been the cornerstone of U.S.-China relations since 1979. The Biden administration is enlisting South Korea and Japan to encircle China. The U.S. military is conducting provocative military maneuvers that exacerbate the conflict in…
Abdel Hadi el-Gazzar (Egypt), The Popular Chorus or Food or Comrades on the Theatre of Life, 1948 (post-dated 1951).
On the last day of the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, the five founding states (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) welcomed six new members: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The BRICS partnership now encompasses 47.3 percent of the world’s population, with a combined global Gross Domestic Product (by purchasing power parity, or PPP,) of 36.4 percent. In comparison, though the G7 states (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) account for merely 10 percent of the world’s population, their share of the global GDP (by PPP) is 30.4 percent. In 2021, the nations that today form the expanded BRICS group were responsible for 38.3 percent of global industrial output while their G7 counterparts accounted for 30.5 percent. All available indicators, including harvest production and the total volume of metal production, show the immense power of this new grouping. Celso Amorim, advisor to the Brazilian government and one of the architects of BRICS during his former tenure as foreign minister, said of the new development that ‘[t]he world can no longer be dictated by the G7’.
Certainly, the BRICS nations, for all their internal hierarchies and challenges, now represent a larger share of the global GDP than the G7, which continues to behave as the world’s executive body. Over forty countries expressed an interest in joining BRICS, although only twenty-three applied for membership before the South Africa meeting (including seven of the thirteen countries in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC). Indonesia, the world’s seventh largest country in terms of GDP (by PPP), withdrew its application to BRICS at the last moment but said it would consider joining later. Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo’s comments reflect the mood of the summit: ‘We must reject trade discrimination. Industrial downstreaming must not be hindered. We must all continue to voice equal and inclusive cooperation’.
Tadesse Mesfin (Ethiopia), Pillars of Life: Waiting, 2018
BRICS does not operate independently of new regional formations that aim to build platforms outside the grip of the West, such as the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Instead, BRICS membership has the potential to enhance regionalism for those already within these regional fora. Both sets of interregional bodies are leaning into a historical tide supported by important data, analysed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research using a range of widely available and reliable global databases. The facts are clear: the Global North’s percentage of world GDP fell from 57.3 percent in 1993 to 40.6 percent in 2022, with the US’s percentage shrinking from 19.7 percent to only 15.6 percent of global GDP (by PPP) in the same period – despite its monopoly privilege. In 2022, the Global South, without China, had a GDP (by PPP) greater than that of the Global North.
The West, perhaps because of its rapid relative economic decline, is struggling to maintain its hegemony by driving a New Cold War against emergent states such as China. Perhaps the single best evidence of the racial, political, military, and economic plans of the Western powers can be summed up by a recent declaration of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU): ‘NATO and the EU play complementary, coherent and mutually reinforcing roles in supporting international peace and security. We will further mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens’.
Alia Ahmad (Saudi Arabia), Hameel – Morning Rain, 2022
Why did BRICS welcome such a disparate group of countries, including two monarchies, into its fold? When asked to reflect on the character of the new full member states, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said, ‘What matters is not the person who governs but the importance of the country. We can’t deny the geopolitical importance of Iran and other countries that will join BRICS’. This is the measure of how the founding countries made the decision to expand their alliance. At the heart of BRICS’s growth are at least three issues: control over energy supplies and pathways, control over global financial and development systems, and control over institutions for peace and security.
Houshang Pezeshknia (Iran), Khark, 1958
A larger BRICS has now created a formidable energy group. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are also members of OPEC, which, with Russia, a key member of OPEC+, now accounts for 26.3 million barrels of oil per day, just below thirty percent of global daily oil production. Egypt, which is not an OPEC member, is nonetheless one of the largest African oil producers, with an output of 567,650 barrels per day. China’s role in brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in April enabled the entry of both of these oil-producing countries into BRICS. The issue here is not just the production of oil, but the establishment of new global energy pathways.
The Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative has already created a web of oil and natural gas platforms around the Global South, integrated into the expansion of Khalifa Port and natural gas facilities at Fujairah and Ruwais in the UAE, alongside the development of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030. There is every expectation that the expanded BRICS will begin to coordinate its energy infrastructure outside of OPEC+, including the volumes of oil and natural gas that are drawn out of the earth. Tensions between Russia and Saudi Arabia over oil volumes have simmered this year as Russia exceeded its quota to compensate for Western sanctions placed on it due to the war in Ukraine. Now these two countries will have another forum, outside of OPEC+ and with China at the table, to build a common agenda on energy. Saudi Arabia plans to sell oil to China in renminbi (RMB), undermining the structure of the petrodollar system (China’s two other main oil providers, Iraq and Russia, already receive payment in RMB).
Juan Del Prete (Argentina), The Embrace, 1937–1944
Both the discussions at the BRICS summit and its final communiqué focused on the need to strengthen a financial and development architecture for the world that is not governed by the triumvirate of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Wall Street, and the US dollar. However, BRICS does not seek to circumvent established global trade and development institutions such as the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the World Bank, and the IMF. For instance, BRICS reaffirmed the importance of the ‘rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organisation at its core’ and called for ‘a robust Global Financial Safety Net with a quota-based and adequately resourced [IMF] at its centre’. Its proposals do not fundamentally break with the IMF or WTO; rather, they offer a dual pathway forward: first, for BRICS to exert more control and direction over these organisations, of which they are members but have been suborned to a Western agenda, and second, for BRICS states to realise their aspirations to build their own parallel institutions (such as the New Development Bank, or NDB). Saudi Arabia’s massive investment fund is worth close to $1 trillion, which could partially resource the NDB.
BRICS’s agenda to improve ‘the stability, reliability, and fairness of the global financial architecture’ is mostly being carried forward by the ‘use of local currencies, alternative financial arrangements, and alternative payment systems’. The concept of ‘local currencies’ refers to the growing practice of states using their own currencies for cross-border trade rather than relying upon the dollar. Though approximately 150 currencies in the world are considered to be legal tender, cross-border payments almost always rely on the dollar (which, as of 2021, accounts for 40 percent of flows over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT, network).
Other currencies play a limited role, with the Chinese RMB comprising 2.5 percent of cross-border payments. However, the emergence of new global messaging platforms – such as China’s Cross-Border Payment Interbank System, India’s Unified Payments Interface, and Russia’s Financial Messaging System (SPFS) – as well as regional digital currency systems promise to increase the use of alternative currencies. For instance, cryptocurrency assets briefly provided a potential avenue for new trading systems before their asset valuations declined, and the expanded BRICS recently approved the establishment of a working group to study a BRICS reference currency.
Following the expansion of BRICS, the NDB said that it will also expand its members and that, as its General Strategy, 2022–2026 notes, thirty percent of all of its financing will be in local currencies. As part of its framework for a new development system, its president, Dilma Rousseff, said that the NDB will not follow the IMF policy of imposing conditions on borrowing countries. ‘We repudiate any kind of conditionality’, Rousseff said. ‘Often a loan is given upon the condition that certain policies are carried out. We don’t do that. We respect the policies of each country’.
Amir H. Fallah (Iran), I Want To Live, To Cry, To Survive, To Love, To Die, 2023
In their communiqué, the BRICS nations write about the importance of ‘comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council’. Currently, the UN Security Council has fifteen members, five of which are permanent (China, France, Russia, the UK, and the US). There are no permanent members from Africa, Latin America, or the most populous country in the world, India. To repair these inequities, BRICS offers its support to ‘the legitimate aspirations of emerging and developing countries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including Brazil, India, and South Africa to play a greater role in international affairs’. The West’s refusal to allow these countries a permanent seat at the UN Security Council has only strengthened their commitment to the BRICS process and to enhance their role in the G20.
The entry of Ethiopia and Iran into BRICS shows how these large Global South states are reacting to the West’s sanctions policy against dozens of countries, including two founding BRICS members (China and Russia). The Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter – Venezuela’s initiative from 2019 – brings together twenty UN member states that are facing the brunt of illegal US sanctions, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. Many of these states attended the BRICS summit as invitees and are eager to join the expanded BRICS as full members.
We are not living in a period of revolutions. Socialists always seek to advance democratic and progressive trends. As is often the case in history, the actions of a dying empire create common ground for its victims to look for new alternatives, no matter how embryonic and contradictory they are. The diversity of support for the expansion of BRICS is an indication of the growing loss of political hegemony of imperialism.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Exclusive: Report says optics of western firms organising Xinjiang tours amid ‘crimes against humanity are disastrous’
Uyghur advocates have called on western tourism companies to stop selling package holidays that take visitors through Xinjiang, where human rights abuses by authorities have been called a genocide by some governments.
The request comes as China reopens to foreign visitors after the pandemic, and as its leader, Xi Jinping, calls for more tourism to the region.
By Blessen Tom, RNZ journalist, and Liu Chen , RNZ journalist, for IndoNZ
The upcoming general election in Aotearoa New Zealand is poised to witness an unprecedented influx of around 250,000 first-time voters.
Data from the Electoral Commission shows that around 60,000 individuals will be eligible to vote for the first time this year after turning 18 since the 2020 election.
However, a more sizeable chunk of voters is expected to come from the roughly 200,000 individuals who will be eligible to vote for the first time after being issued fast-track residency visas in 2021.
Forty-nine-year-old Deepa Tripathi Chaturvedi is one such voter.
Having arrived in New Zealand in 2017 after a 20-year career as a broadcast journalist in India, Chaturvedi is looking forward to voting for the first time outside of India.
“I’m really excited to vote,” she says. “It’s my first time voting outside India. Secondly, I’d really like to see a change.”
Chaturvedi is concerned about the mounting cost of living in New Zealand, describing it as an increasingly arduous endeavor.
“Living in New Zealand is becoming incredibly difficult,” she says.
Home hopes look dim
Despite her reasonably steady income, the prospect of being able to purchase a home of her own looks dim.
“I believe in having my own place, but I just can’t afford it,” she says.
Chaturvedi is also concerned about the government’s immigration policies.
“I think it’s important to value your migrants and the current policies don’t reflect that,” she says.
Chaturvedi understands the importance of participating in the election.
Although Chaturvedi is unfamiliar with New Zealand’s mixed member proportional (MMP) electoral system, she wishes to educate herself about it before voting.
Chaturvedi also draws comparisons between voting in India and New Zealand.
Long queues in India
“There are voting booths in India I think every 2km, so it’s very convenient,” she says. “But the queues can be quite long. ”
Unlike New Zealand, which allows advance votes to be submitted, voters can only cast their ballots on election day in India.
She hopes that she won’t have to stand in long queues when she votes in Auckland for the upcoming October election.
Aravind Narayan Suresh, a 28-year-old IT professional and 2021 resident visa holder, shares Chaturvedi’s excitement about the upcoming election.
Having migrated to New Zealand as a student, Suresh is eager to take part in the democratic process once again.
“I have only voted in India and, now that I have an opportunity here, I’d love to participate in the democratic process again,” he says.
His optimism is tempered by the economic challenges he currently faces, including the high cost of living and petrol prices.
“I have my wife over here and I can’t support her with one job, so I’m thinking of doing two,” he says.
Awaiting a work visa
Suresh’s wife is a civil engineer but cannot work in New Zealand because she is still waiting to receive a work visa.
“We have been waiting for seven months,” he says.
Suresh understands his right to vote gives him an opportunity to effect change – whether his preferred choices win or lose.
He also emphasizes the importance of diverse and inclusive representation among candidates in Parliament, believing it reflects the values of the community.
“I think it’s really important to see representatives of the community at the parliament.”
Like Chaturvedi, Suresh is also educating himself about New Zealand’s MMP electoral system but says he has found the overall enrollment process to be relatively straightforward.
Jaikrishna Anil Kanmani, another first-time voter, is looking forward to the election with a touch of nostalgia for the vibrant electoral atmosphere in India.
NZ elections ‘a little dull’
“I feel like the elections in New Zealand are a little dull compared to India,” he says. “It’s a public holiday (in India) and everybody is on the streets.”
He describes New Zealand’s MMP system as confusing and wishes to learn more about the mechanics of it as the election draws near.
“There are members in Parliament who didn’t win their electorates,” he says. “That seemed weird at first to me.”
He says he’s learning more about the electoral system to better understand how it all works.
Concerns about New Zealand’s housing crisis resonate with Kanmani, prompting him to dismiss the idea of purchasing a home due to exorbitant costs.
“I’ve completely dropped the idea of buying a house,” he says. “With the current living costs and the wages, we earn, there’s no way I would be able to put a down payment for a house.”
Serena Wei, who arrived in New Zealand from China in 2018, confesses to being overwhelmed by the array of political parties and candidates.
“I’m still a little confused now,” Wei says. “On the day of the general election, should I vote for a political party or a person? Because I have never experienced it, and I don’t know how to vote.”
As a mother of two, she worries about the country’s education system and its recent reforms.
“The current reforms make the curriculum and exams less difficult,” she says. “If everyone is moving forward, our country is stagnant, and we may lose touch with the progressing countries.”
Emma Chan has recently obtained her New Zealand residency and is looking forward to the election.
“I believe that actively engaging in democratic voting is a fundamental responsibility as a member of the community, contributing to both my own future and the collective well-being of everyone,” Chan says, speaking on condition of using a pseudonym to protect her identity.
Chan highlights the inherent relationship between key issues such as safety, economic development, education and race relations. She emphasises the government’s role in formulating holistic, long-term policies to address these concerns.
Snowee Jiang, who has previously volunteered for elections but has never voted, wants to vote this year to have a say on social issues.
Jiang, who received the fast-track residency visa in 2021, seeks genuine representation in elected officials rather than a political spectacle. She also urges greater Chinese voter participation through enhanced awareness campaigns.
“I hope that the Chinese can increase the proportion of voting,” she says. “Many people will not vote, and many people don’t care. I hope there will be more publicity in this regard.”
According to the Electoral Commission, 3,871,418 Kiwis are eligible to vote on both the general and Māori rolls in this year’s election and, as of August 2023, about 88 percent had already enrolled.
Advance voting starts on October 2, and election day is Saturday, October 14.
Official results for the general election will be declared on November 3.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
POLITICAL BYTES: By Ian Powell
There is a reported apparent rift within cabinet between Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Defence Minister Andrew Little over Aotearoa New Zealand’s position in the widening conflict between the United States and China.
While at its core it is over relative economic power, the conflict is manifested by China’s increased presence in the Pacific Ocean, including military, and over Taiwan. Both countries have long Pacific coastlines.
However, the United States has a far greater and longstanding economic and military presence (including nuclear weapons in South Korea) in the Pacific.
Despite this disparity, the focus is on China as being the threat. Minister Mahuta supports continuing the longstanding more independent position of successive Labour and National-led governments.
This goes back to the adoption of the nuclear-free policy and consequential ending of New Zealand’s military alliance with the United States in the mid-1980s.
On the other hand, Minister Little’s public utterances veer towards a gradual shift away from this independent position and towards a stronger military alignment with the United States.
This is not a conflict between socialist and capitalist countries. For various reasons I struggle with the suggestion that China is a socialist nation in spite of the fact that it (and others) say it is and that it is governed by a party calling itself communist. But that is a debate for another occasion.
Core and peripheral countries
This conflict is often seen as between the two strongest global economic powers. However, it is not as simple as that.
Whereas the United States is an imperialist country, China is not. I have discussed this previously in Political Bytes (31 January 2022): Behind the ‘war’ against China.
In coming to this conclusion I drew upon work by Minqi Li, professor of economics at the University of Utah, who focussed on whether China is an imperialist country or not.
He is not soft on China, acknowledging that it ” . . . has developed an exploitative relationship with South Asia, Africa, and other raw material exporters”.
But his concern is to make an objective assessment of China’s global economic power. He does this by distinguishing between core, semi-periphery, and periphery countries:
“The ‘core countries’ specialise in quasi-monopolistic, high-profit production processes. This leaves ‘peripheral countries’ to specialise in highly competitive, low-profit production processes.”
This results in an “…unequal exchange and concentration of world wealth in the core.”
Minqi Li describes China’s economy as:
“. . . the world’s largest when measured by purchasing power parity. Its rapid expansion is reshapes the global geopolitical map leading western mainstream media to begin defining China as a new imperialist power.”
Consequently he concludes that China is placed as a semi-peripheral county which predominately takes “. . . surplus value from developed economies and giving it to developing economies.”
In my January 2022 blog, I concluded that:
“Where does this leave the ‘core countries’, predominately in North America and Europe? They don’t want to wind back capitalism in China. They want to constrain it to ensure that while it continues to be an attractive market for them, China does not destablise them by progressing to a ‘core country’.”
Why the widening conflict now?
Nevertheless, while neither socialist nor imperialist, China does see the state playing a much greater role in the country’s economy, including increasing its international influence. This may well explain at least some of its success.
So why the widening conflict now? Why did it not occur between the late 1970s, when China opened up to market forces, and in the 1990s and 2000s as its world economic power increased? Marxist economist and blogger Michael Roberts has provided an interesting insight: The ‘New Washington Consensus’.
Roberts describes what became known as the “Washington Consensus” in the 1990s. It was a set of economic policy prescriptions considered to constitute the “standard” reform package promoted for economically struggling developing countries.
The name is because these prescriptions were developed by Washington DC-based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the United States Treasury.
The prescriptions were based on so-called free market policies such as trade and finance liberalisation and privatisation of state assets. They also entailed fiscal and monetary policies intended to minimise fiscal deficits and public spending.
But now, with the rise of China as a rival economic global power globally and the failure of the neoliberal economic model to deliver economic growth and reduce inequality among nations and within nations, the world has changed.
What World Bank data reveals
Roberts draws upon World Bank data to highlight the striking nature of this global change. He uses a “Shares in World Economy” table based on percentages of gross domestic production from 1980 to 2020.
Whereas the United States was largely unchanged (25.2 percent to 24.7 percent), over the same 40 years, China leapt from 1.7 percent to 17.3 percent. China’s growth is extraordinary. But the data also provides further insights.
Economic blocs are also compared. The G7 countries declined from 62.5 percent to 47.2 percent while the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also fell — from 78 percent to 61.7 percent.
Interestingly while experiencing a minor decline, the United States increased its share within these two blocs — from 40.3 percent to 52.3 percent in G7 and from 32.3 percent to 40 percent in OECD. This suggests that while both the G7 and OECD have seen their economic power decline, the power of the United States has increased within the blocs.
Roberts use of this data also makes another pertinent observation. Rather than a bloc there is a grouping of “developing nations” which includes China. Over the 40 year period its percentage increased from 21.5 percent to 36.4 percent.
But when China is excluded from the data there is a small decline from 19.9 percent to 19.1 percent. In other words, the sizeable percentage of growth of developing countries is solely due to China, the other developing countries have had a small fall.
In this context Roberts describes a “New Washington Consensus” aimed at sustaining the “. . . hegemony of US capital and its junior allies with a new approach”.
In his words:
“But what is this new consensus? Free trade and capital flows and no government intervention is to be replaced with an ‘industrial strategy’ where governments intervene to subsidise and tax capitalist companies so that national objectives are met.
“There will be more trade and capital controls, more public investment and more taxation of the rich. Underneath these themes is that, in 2020s and beyond, it will be every nation for itself — no global pacts, but regional and bilateral agreements; no free movement, but nationally controlled capital and labour.
“And around that, new military alliances to impose this new consensus.”
Understanding BRICS
This is the context that makes the widening hostility of the United States towards China highly relevant. There is now an emerging potential counterweight of “developing countries” to the United States’ overlapping hegemons of G7 and the OECD.
This is BRICS. Each letter is from the first in the names of its current (and founding) members — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Around 40 countries have expressed interest in joining this new trade bloc.
These countries broadly correspond with the semi-periphery countries of Minqi Li and the developing countries of Roberts. Predominantly they are from Africa, Asia, Middle East, and Central and South America.
Geoffrey Miller of the Democracy Project has recently published (August 21) an interesting column discussing whether New Zealand should develop a relationship with BRICS: Should New Zealand build bridges with BRICS?
Journalist Julian Borger, writing for The Guardian (August 22), highlights the significant commonalities and differences of the BRICS nations at its recent trade summit: Critical BRICS trade summit in South Africa.
Al Jazeera (August 24)has updated the trade summit with the decision to invite Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to join BRICS next January: The significance of BRICS adding six new members .
Which way New Zealand?
This is the context in which the apparent rift between Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta and Defence Minister Andrew Little should be seen.
It is to be hoped that that whatever government comes into office after October’s election, it does not allow the widening conflict between the United States and China to water down Aotearoa’s independent position.
The dynamics of the G7/OECD and BRICS relationship are ongoing and uncertainty characterises how they might play out. It may mean a gradual changing of domination or equalisation of economic power.
After all, the longstanding British Empire was replaced by a different kind of United States empire. It is also possible that the existing United States hegemony continues albeit weakened.
Regardless, it is important politically and economically for New Zealand to have trading relations with both G7 and developing countries (including the expanding BRICS).
Ian Powell is a progressive health, labour market and political “no-frills” forensic commentator in New Zealand. A former senior doctors union leader for more than 30 years, he blogs at Second Opinion and Political Bytes, where this article was first published. Republished with the author’s permission.