The United States is ready to engage in bilateral nuclear talks with Russia and China “without preconditions,” according to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. “Rather than waiting to resolve all of our bilateral differences, the United States is ready to engage Russia now to manage nuclear risks and develop a post-2026 arms control framework,” Sullivan said in a wide-ranging speech at the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Former student leaders of China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement launched an exhibit of the Tiananmen massacre in Manhattan on Friday in a bid to keep alive the dream of freedom and democracy amid an ongoing information blackout back home.
The June 4 Memorial Hall’s opening was timed to mark the 34th anniversary of the massacre of unarmed civilians by People’s Liberation Army troops that ended weeks of mass protests on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which falls on Sunday.
“1989 was the most important turning point in recent Chinese history,” former student leader Wang Dan told journalists at the launch. “The Chinese authorities … want to cover up that history and have the world forget their crimes.”
The events of the spring and early summer of 1989 are still a hugely sensitive topic in China, where public discussion is heavily censored and public mourning for victims is banned.
Wang said remembering the Tiananmen massacre isn’t just about remembering the past, but also about aspirations for freedom and democracy for China’s future.
“We must keep up the opposition [to the regime] and hold our power in reserve for the future,” he said.
The memorial hall crams photos, contemporary news articles, banners, letters and even blood-stained items of clothing into a small venue on the fourth floor of a Sixth Avenue office building.
Bao Tong’s calligraphy
Among them is a calligraphic inscription of the words “June 4 Memorial Hall” in Chinese made specially by former top Communist Party aide Bao Tong shortly before his death in November 2022, which curator Yu Dahai said was beautifully written, but somewhat shaky, revealing Bao’s frail state of health at the time.
Bao’s last writings to be published by Radio Free Asia in June 2022 gave a detailed description of conversations among top Chinese leaders behind the scenes as a political crisis sparked by the crisis unfolded.
“The student-led mass popular protests of 1989 are the thing I am most proud to have experienced in my entire life,” he wrote in conclusion.
“Power gained by evil means is still evil,” he wrote. “And just demands that result in a massacre are still just.”
One of the exhibits is a heavy mimeograph machine used by former student leader Zhou Fengsuo to crank out notices and information for fellow protesters that was carried out of Tiananmen Square by some students from Tsinghua University – who, along with Zhou, were the last group to leave on the night of June 3, 1989.
“I asked them why they were bothering to lug along such a heavy item at a time like this, and they said they needed it to keep up the fight,” he said, adding that seeing the machine again was like “being reunited with an old friend.”
Symbol of Hope
Zhou, who founded the U.S.-based rights group Humanitarian China, said the collection of more than 100 items is a symbol of hope for his generation, whose dreams of a more democratic China were shattered by the military response.
“It doesn’t matter how big a defeat we have suffered or the struggles we have been through — we are still hopeful,” Zhou said. “The dream of a democratic China lives on.”
He said many of the items on display at the exhibit were given to him anonymously by political prisoners he had helped, or their families.
“The people who took part in these protests wanted these items displayed and preserved, but at the same time, they wanted their identities protected,” Zhou said.
And it’s not just Zhou’s Gen X veteran dissidents who are inspired by the project.
Many of those who volunteered their time to ready the exhibit for launch are younger Chinese people who were inspired by the “white paper” protests across China in November 2022.
One of them, who gave only his surname Dong, served seven months in jail for wearing a T-shirt commemorating the massacre.
“The mainstream environment in China is dominated by [government supporters],” said Dong, who also took part in the “white paper” movement.
“But since I came to New York and found a bunch of like-minded people, I found I wasn’t alone.”
‘We all want democracy’
Many of the exhibits are from later mass movements, including the now-banned candlelight vigils in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park and artwork from the 2019 protests against the city’s diminishing freedoms.
Wang said there appears to be a direct connection spanning the generations.
“Our two generations share the same values – we all want democracy for China,” Wang Dan said. “We share the same dream.”
Wang said the exhibit has already been targeted by an army of pro-Beijing trolls, who have set up large numbers of fake accounts for the June 4 Memorial Hall on Twitter.
“Online harassment is to be expected,” he said. “A memorial hall like this is clearly going to be a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party … and we have made preparations for this … with the [U.S. authorities].”
Meanwhile, the government continues to silence any attempts to commemorate the date or talk about what happened among the 1.4 billion citizens within China’s borders.
“The June 4 crackdown proved that the Chinese Communist Party is essentially a political party that relies on violence to maintain its rule,” Wang wrote in a May 29 commentary for Radio Free Asia.
“The whole world knows what happened in China, but many Chinese people don’t even know about it,” he said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wang Yun and Jenny Tang for RFA Mandarin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
In brief
In the face of criticism that China’s government was overreacting by launching a criminal investigation into comedian Li Haoshi for telling a joke about the Chinese military, a pro-government Chinese blogger has defended Beijing’s actions. The blogger, who calls herself Guyan Muchan, compared the case to that of an American stand-up comedian who joked about a U.S. military veteran.
Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) found Guyan Muchan’s comparison misleading. The U.S. comedian she mentioned aroused controversy, criticism and public discussion by joking about U.S. military personnel. But unlike Li and the production company that employs him, that U.S. comedian was not fined and did not face criminal investigation.
In depth
After receiving a public complaint, the Beijing municipal culture and tourism authority announced on May 17 that jokes told at performances by Li Haoshi on the afternoon and evening of May 13 had caused “negative social influence” by “seriously insulting the PLA,” or People’s Liberation Army. A separate investigation into Li’s employer, the Shanghai Xiaoguo Culture Media Company, cited violations of Regulations on the Administration of Commercial Performances. The bureau confiscated from the company 1.32 million yuan ($187,000) of “illegal” income made from the performances, and fined it 13.35 million yuan ($1.89 million).
On May 17, the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau also announced that it had launched a case against Li to determine if his actions constituted a criminally liable offense.
What did Li actually say?
The following excerpt of Li’s joke is based on a recording circulated on the Internet.
“We picked up two wild dogs from a mountain near our home. I wouldn’t say rescue, because on that mountain those two were really at the top of the food chain and didn’t need our help at all. The first time I saw them it didn’t even really feel like watching two dogs, but was more like a scene from some animal film set, with two cannonball-like dogs chasing a squirrel. Now normally when you see dogs, you think ‘cute’, ‘cuddly’ and all that; but when I saw these two, the only eight characters that came to my mind were ‘Zuo feng guo ying, neng da sheng zhang’ (‘Maintain exemplary conduct, fight to win.’) Classic. People are in awe when I walk those two dogs through Shanghai.”
The phrase, ‘maintain exemplary conduct, fight to win’, is a quote from a speech given by Chinese President Xi Jinping to deputies of the PLA in March 2013, in which he told the army to “listen to the Party’s command.”
Xiaoguo Culture Media rushed out an apology admitting that the joke was an “inappropriate comparison” and terminated Li’s work agreement. Comedy performances by the company were also suspended across many parts of China.
What did Guyan Muchan claim about such cases in the U.S.?
Even as voices in China and abroad criticized China’s government for overreacting to Li’s joke, influential public supporters defended the government’s handling of the situation.
Guyan Muchan, a pro-Beijing Weibo blogger with nearly 7 million followers, stated in posts on Twitter and the popular Chinese social media site Weibo on May 17 that even in the U.S. there exists a red line that military personnel cannot be insulted.
Guyan Muchan cited a controversy resulting from a 2018 Saturday Night Live (SNL) episode in which cast member Pete Davidson mocked Republican congressman Dan Crenshaw – a former U.S. Navy SEAL who lost his right eye while serving in Afghanistan – as resembling “a hitman in a porno movie.”
Guyan Muchan’s post sparked discussion amongst Chinese netizens, with one user commenting that “people who praise American freedom never mention America’s red line.”
AFCL identified another case in which a U.S. stand-up comedian stoked controversy with a joke about the U.S military. The comedian, Bill Burr, was performing in Reno, in the western U.S. state of Nevada, when he said that calling catapult officers on aircraft carriers heroes was a bit of a stretch, given that they often are doing nothing more than “warrior one” yoga poses.
Are the situations faced by Davidson or Burr comparable to that of Li?
AFCL found that although both Davidson or Burr faced criticism and stirred controversy for joking about the U.S. military, neither encountered the kind of punishment faced by Li.
Davidson’s joke prompted some netizens to boycott SNL. Democrat and Republican officials condemned the remarks as inappropriate and the then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer publicly called for SNL producer Lorne Michaels to be fired.
![Stand-up comedian Bill Burr [right] joked in 2018 that calling U.S. Navy catapult officers [left] on aircraft carriers heroes is a bit of a stretch, given that they often are doing nothing more than “warrior one” yoga poses. Credit: Associated Press [right]; AFP](https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/china-usa-comedians-06022023170220.html/afcl3.jpg "afcl3.jpg")
In the case of Burr, an audience member did express anger at his comments and asked him to show more respect toward the military. Other audience members who were veterans supported letting Burr finish his skit.
Burr didn’t apologize. In fact, he publicly berated his critics several times for trying to use the banner of patriotism to accuse him of hating America. Despite his unapologetic stance and controversial statements on other sensitive topics, Burr continues to host a podcast and perform stand-up gigs.
The fundamental reason why neither of the comedians faced legal consequences is that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution defends the right of free speech. That makes it highly unlikely that a U.S. government agency would attempt to press charges against a comic or satirist for comments made during a performance. Any ‘red lines’ that exist in humor are shaped by public opinion, not determined by law.
In conclusion
Guyan Muchan’s reference to U.S public opposition to stand-up comedians joking about the military appears to be based on an invalid comparison between the U.S. and China, where there is far less tolerance of criticism of state institutions. It fails to mention the key difference between the two systems: The U.S. government lacks the authority to punish comedians for the content of their performances, let alone launch a judicial investigation against them.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.
At the close of the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima (Japan), the foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States and the High Representative of the European Union (EU) released a long and informative statement. In a section titled ‘China’, the eight officials wrote that they ‘recognise the importance of engaging candidly with and expressing our concerns directly to China’ and that they ‘acknowledge the need to work together with China on global challenges as well as areas of common interest, including on climate change, biodiversity, global health security, and gender equality’. The diplomatic tone of the statement stands out in comparison to the heated rhetoric that these countries have adopted in recent years and is much softer than the language used at the G7 meeting itself, where the heads of government bandied about the phrase ‘economic coercion’, indirectly aimed at China.
A close reading of the speeches at the meeting suggests that there are differences of opinion amongst the leaders of the G7 countries, particularly when it comes to China and their own domestic industrial policies. Certainly, several European states are uneasy about the domestic economic consequences of prolonging the war in Ukraine and of a possible military conflict over Taiwan. It is perhaps this uneasiness that prompted US President Joe Biden to say, ‘We’re not looking to decouple from China, we’re looking to de-risk and diversify our relationship with China’.
For Europe, the notion of decoupling from China is inconceivable. In 2022, EU figures show that China was the third largest partner for goods exported from the region and the largest partner for good imported to the region, with most of the goods imported by China being high-end, value-added manufactured goods. Europe’s domestic economies have already been grievously injured by the West’s refusal to negotiate a peace agreement in Ukraine; being cut-off from the burgeoning Chinese market would be a fatal blow.
Georg Baselitz (Germany), The Brücke Chorus, 1983.
The G7 meeting reveals the gaps between the United States and its allies (Europe and Japan), but these differences of interest and opinion should not be overestimated. As part of our work at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been researching and analysing the nature of the cooperation between the United States, Europe, and Japan – the ‘Triad’, as Samir Amin called them; while our research is still ongoing, we present some of the data in this newsletter.
Following the end of the Second World War, the United States built an international system that was premised on the subordination and integration of Japan and Europe. This process of subordination and integration was evident in the military apparatus constructed by the United States, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) established in 1949 and US-Japan Security Treaty of 1951 being the lynchpins. Establishing a system of US military bases in the defeated powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – allowed Washington to set aside any talk of a sovereign military or diplomatic project for either Europe or Japan (tantrums from France, inspired by Charles De Gaulle’s grand sense of French destiny, led not to a withdrawal from NATO but only to a removal of French forces from the alliance’s military command in 1966).
There are currently 408 known US military bases in the Five Eyes countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and – because they share intelligence with each other – Israel), in Europe, and in Japan. Stunningly, Japan alone has 120 US military bases, while Germany hosts 119 of them. It is important to understand that these bases are not merely instruments of military power, but also political power. In 1965, Thomas Hughes of the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research authored an important memorandum, ‘The Significance of NATO – Present and Future’. NATO, Hughes wrote, ‘remains essential to the US as a well-established and easily available instrument for exercising American political influence in Europe’ and ultimately ‘it is important for the protection of American interests in Europe’. Such a system had already been put in place in Japan, as detailed in this US military memorandum from 1962. The network of US military bases in Europe and Japan are the symbol of their political subordination to Washington.
Yinka Shonibare (Nigeria), Scramble for Africa, 2003.
With the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida accepted the dominance of the US military over his country but hoped that the Japanese state would be able to focus on economic development. Similar doctrines were articulated in Europe.
In the post-war era, an economic bloc began to form between the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1966, Raymond Vernon published a significant journal article, ‘International Investment and International Trade in the Product Cycle’, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in which he showed how the large international corporations built a sequential structure: goods would be first produced and sold in the United States, then in Europe, and afterwards in Japan, after which they would finally be sold in other parts of the world. In 1985, Kenichi Ohmae, managing director of the global consulting firm McKinsey’s Tokyo office, shed further light on this arrangement in his book Triad Power: The Coming Shape of Global Competition. Ohmae illustrated how international corporations had to operate simultaneously in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan; increasing capital intensity, high research and development costs, a convergence of consumer taste, and the rise of protectionism made it essential for international corporations to work in these countries, which Ohmae collectively called the Triad, and then seek markets and opportunities elsewhere (where seven-tenths of the world lived).
André Pierre (Haiti), Ceremony with Issa and Suz, ca. late 1960s/early 1970s.
Samir Amin used that term – Triad – for a very different purpose. In 1980, he wrote of the ‘gradual consolidation of the central zone of the world capitalist system (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia)’, and soon thereafter began to refer to this ‘central zone’ as the Triad. The elites in Europe and Japan subordinated their own national self-interest to what the US government had begun to call their ‘common interests’. New institutions and terms emerged in the 1970s, giving shape to these ‘common interests’, including the Trilateral Commission (set up by David Rockefeller in 1973 with headquarters in Paris, Tokyo, and Washington) and the concept of ‘trilateral diplomacy’ (which brought together Western Europe, Japan, and the United States under one unified diplomatic worldview).
Intellectuals in these trilateral circles saw the United States as the central power with its vassal states (Europe and Japan) empowered to maintain control over the tributary states (such as South Korea) in order to keep the rest of the world stable. Much harsher language was used by Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the architects of the Trilateral Commission and National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter. In The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), Brzezinski wrote, ‘To put it in terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together’. You can guess who the barbarians are in Brzezinski’s imagination.
Dan Mills (USA), Current Wars & Conflicts… (with, by continent, Belligerent and Supporter groups marked with black and red circles respectively, and Asylum Seekers, Internally Displaced, Refugees, and Stateless marked with a letter for every million, and killed marked with a letter for every 250k), 2017.
In recent years, the concept of the Triad has largely fallen out of favour. But there is a need to recover this term to better understand the actual world order. The imperialist camp is not solely geographically defined; both the older term, Triad, and the more currently used term, Global North, are geopolitical concepts. The majority of the world – the Global South – now faces a US-led and dominated imperialist system that is rooted in an integrated military structure. This system is composed of three groups: (1) the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Anglo-American white settler states; (2) Europe; and (3) Japan. The Global North is home to a minority of the world’s population (14.2%) but is responsible for a clear majority of global military spending (66.0%). According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, total world military spending reached $2.2 trillion in 2022, with the Triad and its close partners responsible for $1.46 trillion of that amount (China’s military spending is $292 billion, while Russia spends $86 billion). It is this immense military power that allows the Triad to continue to assert itself over the world’s peoples, despite its weakening hold on the world economy.
In recent years, the United States has encouraged a Japanese rearmament and a German military build-up, both of which were discouraged after the Second World War, so that these ‘vassals’ can strengthen Washington’s parochial New Cold War against Russia and China as well as the newly assertive states of the Global South. Although some elites in Europe and Japan are able to see the domestic crises in their countries that are being accelerated by the US foreign policy agenda, they lack the cultural and political confidence to stand on their own two feet.
In 2016, the European Union’s High Representative Federica Mogherini laid out the concept of Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ from the United States in the EU Global Strategy. Three years later, France’s Emmanuel Macron said that NATO was suffering ‘brain death’ and that ‘Europe has the capacity to defend itself’. Today, it is clear that neither assertion – Europe’s strategic autonomy nor its capacity to defend itself – holds any water. Modest returns of Gaullism in France do not offer the kind of courage required by European and Japanese leaders to break with the trilateral bargains that were set up seventy-eight years ago. Until that courage arrives, Europe and Japan will remain entrenched in their conditions of vassalage, and the Triad will remain alive and well.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A major regional security forum is underway in Singapore amid rising tensions in the South China Sea and East Asia, with in-person communication between defense chiefs from China and the United States remaining shuttered.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had invited his Chinese counterpart, General Li Shangfu, to a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore but the Chinese minister declined.
China’s decision is “unfortunate,” Austin said before arriving in the city state which has been hosting the annual event since 2002.
“You’ve heard me talk a number of times about the importance of countries with large, with significant capabilities, being able to talk to each other so you can manage crises and prevent things from spiralling out of control unnecessarily,” the U.S. defense secretary was quoted by news agencies as saying in Tokyo on Thursday.
“I would welcome any opportunity to engage with Li,” Austin said. “I think defense departments should be talking to each other on a routine basis or should have open channels for communications.”
For its part, China said that “dialogue cannot be without principles, and communication cannot be without a bottom line.”
Chinese Ministry of Defense spokesperson Tan Kefei said on Wednesday that the “current difficulties in the exchanges between the two militaries are entirely on the U.S. side.”
“On the one hand, the U.S. keeps saying that it wants to strengthen communication, but on the other hand, it ignores China’s concerns and artificially creates obstacles, seriously undermining the mutual trust between the two militaries,” Tan said.
The spokesperson did not elaborate on the obstacles but the U.S. Indo Pacific Command on Tuesday accused a Chinese J-16 fighter jet of performing an “unnecessarily aggressive” maneuver during the intercept of a U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft last week.
Beijing responded by calling it a hyped-up accusation, saying the U.S. spy plane “made an intrusion” into the Chinese army’s training zone in the South China Sea and its “aerial forces … professionally dealt with the situation in accordance with law and regulation.”
The Chinese defense minister, who took office in March, has been on the U.S. sanction list since 2018 for the purchase of SU-35 combat aircrafts and S-400 missile system-related equipment from Russia.
This could be another obstacle for an official meeting between Gen. Li and Secretary Austin.
Focal points
In 2019 the then-Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe had his first in-person meeting with his U.S. counterpart Patrick Shanahan.
Wei also met with Lloyd Austin on the sidelines of Shangri-La Dialogue in 2022 when the forum returned after a couple years of disruption because of COVID-19.
Analysts say the absence of a U.S.-China bilateral meeting reflects the difficulties in the military-to-military relations between the two powers.
Yet “the U.S.-China competition is a focal point of the Shangri-La Dialogue, since it shapes so much of the dynamics in the region and beyond,” said Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
The Global Times, a sister publication of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily, in an editorial on Thursday said that the ball is in the U.S. court.
“Frankly speaking, the outcome and effectiveness of the Shangri-La Dialogue largely depend on how the U.S. behaves during the conference,” it warned, accusing the U.S. of always trying “to take center stage and set the tone” for the forum.
There are still hopes that, despite the rhetoric, the two delegations from the United States and China would meet “unofficially under a low-key format”, said Hoang Thi Ha, Co-ordinator for the Regional Strategic and Political Studies Program at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
Southeast Asian countries “are keen to see whether the U.S. and China would renew their communication especially via the military and defense channel,” Ha told RFA.
“It is in everybody’s interest that Washington and Beijing tone down their hostile posturing towards each other,” the analyst said.
Li Shangfu and Lloyd Austin, separately, plan to make speeches at the forum. Li will speak of China’s new security initiatives and Austin on the U.S. leadership in the Indo-Pacific.
During the three days of the Shangri-La Dialogue, 600 delegates from 49 countries will examine the complex security environment in the Asia-Pacific and the war in Ukraine.
“Other topics of discussion are the situation in Myanmar and the war in Ukraine, especially when it comes to the issue of food security,” NUS’s Ian Chong told RFA.
In his opinion, the rising tension in the Taiwan Strait will also be discussed, as “any Taiwan crisis will affect the region quite directly because of supply chains, shipping lanes, air lanes, and submarine cables going to Northeast Asia.”
“The problem, however, is that Taiwan has only a token quasi-official presence at the forum,” the analyst said, noting that China, which considers Taiwan one of its provinces, would resolutely object to any official Taiwan attendance.
“More exposure to Taiwanese experts in the Shangri-La Dialogue certainly could provide deeper insights into the situations across Taiwan Strait,” said Norah Huang, research fellow from Taiwanese think tank Prospect Foundation.
The think tank’s president, Lai I-chung, is attending the forum as a guest of the organizer, the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The Shangri-La Dialogue, in its 20 years, is “a unique meeting where ministers debate the region’s most pressing security challenges, engage in important bilateral talks and come up with fresh approaches together,” according to IISS.
Speakers at this year’s event include the ministers of defense from Germany, Australia, the U.K., Canada, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia and Cambodia.
Two key Southeast Asian players – Malaysia and Vietnam – are keeping low profiles and not making any addresses at the forum. Vietnam has also scaled down its presence, sending only a small delegation headed by a vice minister of defense.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
It’s odd agreeing with Terence Corcoran, Robert Friedland, Barrick Gold’s CEO and other leading capitalists. But they are the main force checking the out-of-control intelligence agency/military industrial complex/US Empire faction of Canada’s ruling class promoting conflict with China. Canadian foreign policy is broadly driven by two main factors: support for empire (historically British and today US) and More
The post Profit Seeking Capitalists Hold Back US Empire China Hawks appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Yves Engler.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
It’s odd agreeing with Terence Corcoran, Robert Friedland, Barrick Gold’s CEO and other leading capitalists. But they are the main force checking the out-of-control intelligence agency/military industrial complex/US Empire faction of Canada’s ruling class promoting conflict with China. Canadian foreign policy is broadly driven by two main factors: support for empire (historically British and today US) and More
The post Profit Seeking Capitalists Hold Back US Empire China Hawks appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Yves Engler.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
China is racing to complete a deep sea port project in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, despite concerns from residents who rely on the area’s waterways and say it will destroy their livelihoods.
The Kyaukphyu deep sea port and special economic zone is one of several China-backed megaprojects in Myanmar, along with the New Yangon City urban planning project, the Mee Lin Gyaing Energy Project in Ayeyarwady region and the Letpadaung Copper Mine in Sagaing region.
On May 24, Chinese Ambassador Cheng Hai urged junta Legal Affairs Minister Thidar Oo to speed ahead with the US$1.3 billion special economic zone, which is expected to begin construction following the completion of an environmental and social impact assessment in July.
The zone’s US$7.3 billion-dollar port project will be built in three phases and encompass 370 acres of land on Maday Island and 237 acres on neighboring Ramree Island.
But while Myanmar authorities promise that such projects will bring opportunities to the communities where they are located, residents are less sure. They say the projects will upset their livelihoods while generating cash the junta uses to maintain its grip on power and oppress the people.
Activists have long campaigned for a halt to the deep sea port, saying that the project was started without the consensus of residents and has failed to address the concerns of local fishermen, who say it will impact area fish stocks and cut off access to key bodies of water.
“If the projects proceed, Maday Island residents will not even be able to access the river because of the deep sea ports,” a resident of Kyauktan village on Maday Island told RFA Burmese, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“People who rely on the sea for their livelihoods like us are going to face a lot of trouble then. If they cannot create jobs for us, we are going to face a lot of difficulties.”
Some 70% of Maday’s population of about 3,000 people fish to earn a living.
A fisherman from Maday’s Ywar Ma village, who also declined to be named, echoed concerns about the local fishing industry, which he said “will face major difficulties” because of the project.
“Fishermen like us will definitely go out of business because ships and vessels will be entering the port everyday,” he said. “It would be better if they can provide fishermen with suitable employment such as daily wage-based jobs or skill-based jobs.”
In addition to the port’s potential impact on fishing, the Kyaukphyu special economic zone is expected to force as many as 20,000 people to relocate, according to a report by the International Commission of Jurists.
Tun Kyi, a spokesperson for the Maday Island District Development Association, said that it is not yet known exactly what kind of compensation will be provided for residents adversely affected by the projects.
“There have been discussions between residents and President Myint Thein of the Kyaukphyu special economic zone,” he said. “I asked how they would implement regional development, how they would create job opportunities for our region and how the local residents will fit in their projects, but no one has given specific answers for my questions.”
Key corridor project
The Kyaukphyu deep sea port and zone economic zone are key projects in the 1,700-kilometer (1,000-mile) China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, which will connect the Chinese city of Kunming in Yunnan province to Myanmar’s economic centers of Muse, Mandalay, Yangon and Kyaukphyu.
According to ISP-Myanmar, an independent research group, there are 35 China-Myanmar economic corridor projects to be implemented by China in Myanmar, including railways, motor ways, special economic zones, ports and new city projects.
A local observer of Chinese projects, who did not want to be named for security reasons, said that the Kyaukphyu deep sea port project is critical for landlocked Yunnan province.
“It is a key project … as it will open an outlet to the Indian Ocean,” he said. “But the deep sea port project will not do the work alone. The railways have to be built to connect mainland China to the trade route.”
Than Soe Naing, a political analyst, noted that China has stepped up pressure on the junta to proceed with the project barely two weeks after Cyclone Mocha made landfall in Rakhine with sustained winds reaching over 220 kilometers per hour (137 mph), killing more than 400 people and decimating much of the state.
“China’s communist government has no accountability for democracy and human rights,” he said. “Despite the devastation caused by Cyclone Mocha in Rakhine state, China is solely focusing on the successful implementation of the Kyaukphyu deep sea port project, risking the livelihoods of Myanmar’s people for its own interests.”
Attempts by RFA to contact the Chinese Embassy in Yangon for more details about the project went unanswered Thursday.
Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The speedy deployment of renewable power worldwide is set to lead the largest annual increase in new renewable capacity ever, a report released on Thursday said.
Renewable power capacity is expected to increase by a third this year and will continue to rise next year, primarily due to a stronger push by governments amid higher fossil fuel prices and energy security concerns, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its latest Renewable Energy Market update.
The Paris-based group said there would be a significant surge in the global addition of renewable capacity, with a record-breaking increase of 107 gigawatts (GW) expected in 2023, resulting in total renewable capacity of over 440 GW worldwide.
That is 24% more than projected six months earlier and double what the world added in 2019.
Furthermore, projections indicate that total global renewable electricity capacity will reach 4,500 GW, equivalent to the combined power output of China and the United States, by the following year.
China is expected to account for nearly 55% of global additions of renewable power capacity in both 2023 and 2024, consolidating “its position as the undisputed leader in global deployment,” the IEA said.
In 2022, China accounted for less than half of all new renewable power capacity worldwide.
By 2024, the report projected that China will deliver almost 70% of all new offshore wind projects globally, as well as over 60% of onshore wind and 50% of solar photovoltaic (PV) projects.
According to the IEA, the “dynamic expansion” is also occurring elsewhere in the world’s major markets.
In Europe, many countries boosted their renewables to reduce their reliance on Russian natural gas after the invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy crisis.
In the United States, the wind and solar PV markets experienced a decline last year due to trade restrictions and limitations in the supply chain. However, these markets are anticipated to rebound significantly, with an estimated growth of approximately 40% expected in 2023.
In India, renewable capacity expansion in both 2023 and 2024 is attributed to the accelerated deployment of onshore wind, hydropower, and distributed solar PV systems.
“Solar and wind are leading the rapid expansion of the new global energy economy,” IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said.
“This year, the world is set to add a record-breaking amount of renewables to electricity systems … The global energy crisis has shown renewables are critical for making energy supplies cleaner, more secure, and affordable – and governments are responding with efforts to deploy them faster.”
Birol said more robust growth faces challenges, including the “need to upgrade and expand power grids to ensure we can take full advantage of solar and wind’s huge potential.”
According to the report, solar PV additions will account for two-thirds of this year’s increase in renewable power capacity and are expected to keep growing in 2024, with high electricity prices driving faster growth of rooftop panels.
Meanwhile, wind power additions are forecast to grow by almost 70% year-on-year in 2023 after a slow couple of years. The faster growth is mainly due to the end of COVID-19 restrictions in China and recovering supply chain issues worldwide.
The IEA said that compared to solar PV, wind turbine supply chains are still not growing fast enough to match increasing demand over the medium term due to rising commodity prices and continued supply chain challenges, resulting in some reduction in profit for manufacturers.
Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Subel Rai Bhandari for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A Chinese J-16 fighter jet last week carried out “an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” near an American reconnaissance plane that was flying above the South China Sea, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.
The incident, which occurred Friday, follows a near collision of Chinese and American jets late last year over the same contested waters.
A video released by the U.S. military shows the Chinese fighter jet approaching the American plane at a high altitude before turning sharply, veering away suddenly and disappearing in the distance. The cockpit of the American plane appears to shudder as the Chinese jet passes.
The pilot of the Chinese jet “flew directly in front of the nose of the RC-135, forcing the U.S. aircraft to fly through its wake turbulence,” the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement, vowing to continue flying above the waters Beijing claims as sovereign territory.
“The United States will continue to fly, sail, and operate – safely and responsibly – wherever international law allows, and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Joint Force will continue to fly in international airspace with due regard for the safety of all vessels and aircraft under international law,” it said. “We expect all countries in the Indo-Pacific region to use international airspace safely and in accordance with international law.”
Beijing claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea despite a 2016 ruling in a case brought by the Philippines at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that rejected China’s expansive claims.
Six other Asian governments have territorial claims or maritime boundaries in the South China Sea that overlap with the sweeping claims of China. They are Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. While Indonesia does not regard itself as party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.
The United States is officially neutral in the dispute but rejects China’s vast claim and has called for sovereignty claims to be resolved peacefully. U.S. forces also frequently carry out “freedom of navigation” operations through international waters in the sea, which includes shipping lanes in the South China Sea through which more than $5 trillion of goods pass each year.
RFA has sought comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
A Chinese J-16 fighter jet last week carried out “an unnecessarily aggressive maneuver” near an American reconnaissance plane that was flying above the South China Sea, the U.S. military said on Tuesday.
The incident, which occurred Friday, follows a near collision of Chinese and American jets late last year over the same contested waters.
A video released by the U.S. military shows the Chinese fighter jet approaching the American plane at a high altitude before turning sharply, veering away suddenly and disappearing in the distance. The cockpit of the American plane appears to shudder as the Chinese jet passes.
The pilot of the Chinese jet “flew directly in front of the nose of the RC-135, forcing the U.S. aircraft to fly through its wake turbulence,” the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement, vowing to continue flying above the waters Beijing claims as sovereign territory.
“The United States will continue to fly, sail, and operate – safely and responsibly – wherever international law allows, and the U.S. Indo-Pacific Joint Force will continue to fly in international airspace with due regard for the safety of all vessels and aircraft under international law,” it said. “We expect all countries in the Indo-Pacific region to use international airspace safely and in accordance with international law.”
Beijing claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea despite a 2016 ruling in a case brought by the Philippines at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague that rejected China’s expansive claims.
Six other Asian governments have territorial claims or maritime boundaries in the South China Sea that overlap with the sweeping claims of China. They are Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. While Indonesia does not regard itself as party to the South China Sea dispute, Beijing claims historic rights to parts of that sea overlapping Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone.
The United States is officially neutral in the dispute but rejects China’s vast claim and has called for sovereignty claims to be resolved peacefully. U.S. forces also frequently carry out “freedom of navigation” operations through international waters in the sea, which includes shipping lanes in the South China Sea through which more than $5 trillion of goods pass each year.
RFA has sought comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alex Willemyns for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Chinese authorities have ordered Tibetans living in Rebgong county, in western China, to vacate their land for the construction of a hydropower dam, forcing them off the farmlands they need to make a living, two Tibetans with knowledge of the situation said.
Authorities in Lingya village, about an hour’s drive from Rebgong, issued the order on May 23, requiring seven villages in the region to move so the Chinese government can begin the first phase of construction 10 days after the notice’s issue date, said a Tibetan from Rebgong who now lives in exile.
“The land that is being confiscated by the Chinese government is farmland, which is the livelihood of Tibetans,” said the source who declined to be identified so as to speak freely about the situation. “The authorities have warned the Tibetans to not show any kind of condemnation.”
Rebgong, called Tongren in Chinese, is in Malho, or Huangnan, Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, a Tibetan-populated area of China’s Qinghai province.
Chinese authorities tightly control residents of the restive Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan-populated regions of western China, restricting their political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity.
Chinese infrastructure and development projects in these areas have led to frequent standoffs with Tibetans who accuse Chinese firms and local officials of improperly seizing land and disrupting the lives of local people. Many result in violent suppression, the detention of protest organizers and intense pressure on the local population to comply with the government’s wishes.
Local authorities will complete all basic requirements from checking land authorization documents, performing measurements and ensuring that residents have left the area within 10 days of the notice date, he said.
Another Tibetan living in exile said authorities have begun confiscating land, but they have not discussed compensation for residents forced to move.
“In a notice sent out by the Chinese authorities regarding the land grab, it mentions that those in areas that need to be vacated for dam construction must be prepared to [leave] and that they must not start any other construction in that area,” said the Tibetan, who declined to be identified for the same reason. “If people don’t abide by it, then they will not be compensated.”
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok for RFA Tibetan.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Chinese authorities have ordered Tibetans living in Rebgong county, in western China, to vacate their land for the construction of a hydropower dam, forcing them off the farmlands they need to make a living, two Tibetans with knowledge of the situation said.
Authorities in Lingya village, about an hour’s drive from Rebgong, issued the order on May 23, requiring seven villages in the region to move so the Chinese government can begin the first phase of construction 10 days after the notice’s issue date, said a Tibetan from Rebgong who now lives in exile.
“The land that is being confiscated by the Chinese government is farmland, which is the livelihood of Tibetans,” said the source who declined to be identified so as to speak freely about the situation. “The authorities have warned the Tibetans to not show any kind of condemnation.”
Rebgong, called Tongren in Chinese, is in Malho, or Huangnan, Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, a Tibetan-populated area of China’s Qinghai province.
Chinese authorities tightly control residents of the restive Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan-populated regions of western China, restricting their political activities and peaceful expression of cultural and religious identity.
Chinese infrastructure and development projects in these areas have led to frequent standoffs with Tibetans who accuse Chinese firms and local officials of improperly seizing land and disrupting the lives of local people. Many result in violent suppression, the detention of protest organizers and intense pressure on the local population to comply with the government’s wishes.
Local authorities will complete all basic requirements from checking land authorization documents, performing measurements and ensuring that residents have left the area within 10 days of the notice date, he said.
Another Tibetan living in exile said authorities have begun confiscating land, but they have not discussed compensation for residents forced to move.
“In a notice sent out by the Chinese authorities regarding the land grab, it mentions that those in areas that need to be vacated for dam construction must be prepared to [leave] and that they must not start any other construction in that area,” said the Tibetan, who declined to be identified for the same reason. “If people don’t abide by it, then they will not be compensated.”
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sangyal Kunchok for RFA Tibetan.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Earlier this month, the Philippine Coast Guard deployed five 30-foot navigational buoys near islands and reefs within its territory in the South China Sea, saying the move highlighted the nation’s “unwavering resolve to protect its maritime borders.”
Within two weeks, China had deployed three navigational buoys of its own, positioning two near Manila’s beacons at Irving Reef and Whitsun Reef, to ensure “safety of navigation.”
The tit-for-tat deployments signaled a new front in a long-running dispute over sovereignty of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, one of the world’s most important sea trade routes that is considered a flashpoint for conflict in the Asia-Pacific.
But the buoys also underscored an increasingly proactive approach by the Philippines in enforcing its maritime rights, analysts say.
“Such a move illustrates Manila’s awareness of the changing nature of regional geopolitics,” said Don McLain Gill, a Manila-based geopolitical analyst and lecturer at De La Salle University.
“The Philippines also recognizes that no other external entity can effectively endorse its legitimate interests other than itself.”
China claims nearly all of the South China Sea and has for years militarized artificial islands, while deploying coast guard boats and a state-backed armed fishing fleet around disputed areas.
In 2016, an international tribunal ruled in favor of Manila and against Beijing’s expansive historical claims to the region, but China has since refused to acknowledge the ruling.
The Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam and Taiwan all have claims in the sea — and Manila’s buoy deployment prompted an official protest from Hanoi.
Since taking office in June last year, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has been more vocal in condemning China’s aggressive actions in the region and has restored traditional military ties with the United States.
Raymond Powell, the South China Sea lead at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation, said the recent deployment of buoys showed the Philippines’ newfound determination to “proactively assert its maritime interests.”
‘A war of buoys’
While Marcos Jr. was praised by some for the deployment, others have criticized the move as needlessly provocative.
Filipino security analyst Rommel Banlaoi said the unilateral action heightened security tensions and could have “unintended negative consequences.”
“What the Philippines did was problematic because the international community recognizes the South China Sea as disputed waters,” said Banlaoi, who chairs the advisory board of the China Studies Center at New Era University’s School of International Relations.
“This might trigger a war of buoys,” he said in an interview last week with local radio station DZBB.
The Philippines National Security Adviser Eduardo Año said the deployment of buoys was meant to enforce the 2016 arbitral ruling in the Hague.
“This is not a provocation. What we call provocations are those who conduct dangerous maneuvering, laser pointing, blocking our vessels, harassing our fishermen,” he told reporters in an interview, referring to recent Chinese actions in the South China Sea.
Jay Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea, said the installation of the buoys demonstrated the Philippines was exercising jurisdiction over its waters for purposes of improving navigational safety.
“Such buoys are harmless devices that warn all other ships of potential hazards and should in no way be regarded as provocative or threatening,” Batongbacal told BenarNews.
He asked why critics were silent about China building artificial islands, installing anti-air and anti-ship missiles, and deploying missile boats and large coast guard vessels that actively interfere with Philippine boats in its maritime territory.
Angering Vietnam
Not only did the buoy deployment set off another round of recriminations between Beijing and Manila, it also triggered a rebuke from Vietnam, which claims parts of the Spratly Islands as its own.
When asked about Manila’s action, Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Pham Thu Hang said Hanoi “strongly opposes all acts violating Vietnam’s sovereign rights.”
Analysts say, however, the spat is unlikely to escalate, as Vietnam has far bigger issues to deal with in terms of China’s incursions into its territorial waters.
A Chinese survey ship, escorted by China Coast Guard and maritime militia, was found lingering within Vietnam’s exclusive economic zone for several days from May 7, often within fifty nautical miles of its southern coast.
Powell said the incursions were “much more provocative than the Philippines’ buoys.”
“I think Vietnam’s pro-forma protest over the latter will be noted and largely forgotten, both in Hanoi and in Manila,” Powell told BenarNews.
Vietnam’s reaction to the Philippines’ move was natural “due to its potential political ramifications at the domestic level,” said Gill. But he added that Southeast Asian nations had a track record of settling maritime disputes in an amicable manner.
In 2014, for example, the Philippines and Indonesia settled a maritime border dispute after two decades of negotiations by using international law, particularly the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
“Unlike China, Southeast Asian countries have illustrated a rather positive track record of being able to compromise and solve bilateral tensions between and among each other given the countries’ collective desire to maintain stability in the region,” Gill said.
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Camille Elemia for BenarNews.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
China is planning a large six-nation military exercise later this year to boost engagement and build mutual confidence with Southeast Asian partners, the Chinese military has said.
The expanded Aman Youyi-2023 (Peace and Friendship -2023) drills, however, would “remain a far cry from the more established slate of engagements by the U.S.” in the region, said an analyst.
Military delegations from China, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam had an initial planning conference for Exercise Aman Youyi-2023 in Guangzhou last week, said the Southern Theater Command of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on microblogging site Weibo.
Delegates from the six countries “reached consensus” on several topics including the theme, date, location, preset background and approaches of the exercise, said the Command.
The announcement on Weibo didn’t come with a date but sources told RFA the exercise would be held this November.
This will be the first time Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia take part together in combined drills with China. The official media in Vietnam, which has territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea, have not mentioned the event.
China’s Global Times quoted an analyst as saying that with more Southeast Asian members participating, “the Aman Youyi-2023 exercise will serve as a stabilizer for regional security.”
Zhuo Hua, an international affairs expert at the School of International Relations and Diplomacy of Beijing Foreign Studies University, said it proved that “more countries come to understand and agree with China’s views in cooperative, comprehensive and sustainable security.”
U.S.-China rivalry
Another analyst, Collin Koh from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, said that “China has always wanted to have military engagements in Southeast Asia that are on par with those by the U.S.”
However, “it remains a relatively new player in the field of defense diplomacy,” Koh told RFA.
“The scale and depth of such engagements remain a far cry from the more established slate of engagements by the U.S.,” he added.
China and Laos have just completed a joint military exercise called Friendship Shield 2023 in Laos with a combined force of nearly 1,000 troops.
In March, Cambodia and China carried out exercise Golden Dragon 2023 in Cambodia’s Kampong Chhnang province.
To compare, in April more than 17,600 members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the U.S. military took part in Balikatan 2023, an annual bilateral exercise between the two allies and the largest iteration of Balikatan to date.
A month earlier, a U.S.-led multinational exercise – Cobra Gold 2023 – was held in Thailand with more than 7,000 service members from seven full participating nations and more than 20 other nations attending as observers.
And next year, the world’s largest international maritime exercise Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) will be held with even more than the 25,000 personnel in the 2022 RIMPAC.
“Southeast Asian countries engage in these exercises to demonstrate their willingness to engage China in the defense and security realm, but this also reflects the regional countries’ desire to exercise strategic autonomy,” Collin Koh said.
“I see Aman Youyi as more geopolitically symbolic for some Southeast Asian countries, even if the objective might differ from that of Beijing,” the Singapore-based military analyst said.
Strengthening bonds
The first Aman Youyi joint exercise was held in 2014 between Malaysian armed forces and the PLA but as a tabletop exercise.
With a theme of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, it was conducted “successfully” in the Paya Indah Wetlands in Selangor, Malaysia, two years later.
The bilateral drills expanded to include Thailand in 2018 but were disrupted by the COVID pandemic in the years after.
“Enhancing military cooperation with countries including those in Southeast Asia is an important aspect of China’s military diplomacy,” the Global Times quoted Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert, as saying.
It is unclear how many military personnel from each country will take part in Aman Youyi-2023 and which drills will be conducted.
The recent Laos-China exercise Friendship Shield 2023 included “strikes on armed positions in mountainous and forest areas in order to boost joint operational capabilities in counterterrorism and the safeguarding of borders,” according to Chinese state media.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Staff.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Experts point to crackdown on national security and legal system that encourages guilty pleas
Chinese courts prosecuted 8.3 million people in the five years to 2022, a 12% increase on the previous period. There was also a nearly 20% increase in the number of protests against court rulings.
The figures released by the supreme people’s procuratorate (SPP) in March give a glimpse of how China’s notoriously opaque justice system has operated in recent years, amid a tightening domestic security environment.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
China’s presence at LIMA 2023 – whether via military platforms or commercial entities exhibiting at the Langkawi show – illustrated how the Asian superpower has expanded its footprint in Southeast Asia. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) dispatched a Type 052D destroyer, while anchored nearby was the Pakistan Navy’s brand new Type 054A/P frigate PNS […]
The post LIMA 23: China displays naval power at Langkawi Expo appeared first on Asian Military Review.
This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.
ANALYSIS: By Dennis B. Desmond, University of the Sunshine Coast
This week the Five Eyes alliance — an intelligence alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the United States — announced its investigation into a China-backed threat targeting US infrastructure.
Using stealth techniques, the attacker — referred to as “Volt Typhoon” — exploited existing resources in compromised networks in a technique called “living off the land”.
Microsoft made a concurrent announcement, stating the attackers’ targeting of Guam was telling of China’s plans to potentially disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the US and Asia region in the future.
This comes hot on the heels of news in April of a North Korean supply chain attack on Asia-Pacific telecommunications provider 3CX. In this case, hackers gained access to an employee’s computer using a compromised desktop app for Windows and a compromised signed software installation package.
The Volt Typhoon announcement has led to a rare admission by the US National Security Agency that Australia and other Five Eyes partners are engaged in a targeted search and detection scheme to uncover China’s clandestine cyber operations.
Such public admissions from the Five Eyes alliance are few and far between. Behind the curtain, however, this network is persistently engaged in trying to take down foreign adversaries. And it’s no easy feat.
Let’s take a look at the events leading up to Volt Typhoon — and more broadly at how this secretive transnational alliance operates.
Uncovering Volt Typhoon
Volt Typhoon is an “advanced persistent threat group” that has been active since at least mid-2021. It’s believed to be sponsored by the Chinese government and is targeting critical infrastructure organisations in the US.
The group has focused much of its efforts on Guam. Located in the Western Pacific, this US island territory is home to a significant and growing US military presence, including the air force, a contingent of the marines, and the US navy’s nuclear-capable submarines.
It’s likely the Volt Typhoon attackers intended to gain access to networks connected to US critical infrastructure to disrupt communications, command and control systems, and maintain a persistent presence on the networks.
Volt Typhoon is the name Microsoft and the Five Eyes intelligence agencies have given a Chinese state sponsored hacking group, which they say installed a mysterious code in Guam’s telecommunications systems. https://t.co/xEwith7ZmM
— RN Breakfast (@RNBreakfast) May 25, 2023
The latter tactic would allow China to influence operations during a potential conflict in the South China Sea.
Australia wasn’t directly impacted by Volt Typhoon, according to official statements. Nevertheless, it would be a primary target for similar operations in the event of conflict.
As for how Volt Typhoon was caught, this hasn’t been disclosed. But Microsoft documents highlight previous observations of the threat actor attempting to dump credentials and stolen data from the victim organisation. It’s likely this led to the discovery of compromised networks and devices.
Living-off-the-land
The hackers initially gained access to networks through internet-facing Fortinet FortiGuard devices, such as routers. Once inside, they employed a technique called “living-off-the-land”.
This is when attackers rely on using the resources already contained within the exploited system, rather than bringing in external tools. For example, they will typically use applications such as PowerShell (a Microsoft management programme) and Windows Management Instrumentation to access data and network functions.
By using internal resources, attackers can bypass safeguards that alert organisations to unauthorised access to their networks. Since no malicious software is used, they appear as a legitimate user.
As such, living-off-the-land allows for lateral movement within the network, and provides opportunity for a persistent, long-term attack.
The simultaneous announcements from the Five Eyes partners points to the seriousness of the Volt Typhoon compromise. It will likely serve as a warning to other nations in the Asia-Pacific region.
Who are the Five Eyes?
Formed in 1955, the Five Eyes alliance is an intelligence-sharing partnership comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US.
The alliance was formed after World War II to counter the potential influence of the Soviet Union. It has a specific focus on signals intelligence. This involves intercepting and analysing signals such as radio, satellite and internet communications.
The members share information and access to their respective signals intelligence agencies, and collaborate to collect and analyse vast amounts of global communications data. A Five Eyes operation might also include intelligence provided by non-member nations and the private sector.
Recently, the member countries expressed concern about China’s de facto military control over the South China Sea, its suppression of democracy in Hong Kong, and threatening moves towards Taiwan.
The latest public announcement of China’s cyber operations no doubt serves as a warning that Western nations are paying strict attention to their critical infrastructure — and can respond to China’s digital aggression.
In 2019, Australia was targeted by Chinese state-backed threat actors gaining unauthorised access to Parliament House’s computer network. Indeed, there is evidence that China is engaged in a concerted effort to target Australia’s public and private networks.
The Five Eyes alliance may well be one of the only deterrents we have against long-term, persistent attacks against our critical infrastructure.
Dennis B. Desmond is a lecturer, Cyberintelligence and Cybercrime Investigations, University of the Sunshine Coast. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Listen to a reading ot this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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60 Minutes Australia has been playing a leading role in saturating Australian airwaves with consent-manufacturing messaging in support of militarising to participate in a US war against China. A segment they ran a year ago is titled “Prepare for Armageddon: China’s warning to the world,” and features an image of Xi Jinping overlaid with war planes and explosions and captioned “POKING THE PANDA”. Another from a year ago is titled “War with China: Are we closer than we think?” Another from ten months ago is titled “China’s new target in the battle to control the Pacific.” Another from six months ago is titled “Inside the battle for Taiwan and China’s looming war threat.” Another from two months ago is titled “Is the Navy ready? How the U.S. is preparing amid a naval buildup in China.”
All of these segments have millions of views on YouTube alone. Now this past weekend 60 Minutes Australia has aired back-to-back segments titled “The real Top Gun: US military in heated stand-off with China” and “Five countries secretly sharing intelligence say China is the No.1 threat,” both of which are as jaw-droppingly propagandistic as anything I’ve ever seen.
“It might sound like twisted logic, but military forces everywhere argue that the greater the firepower they possess, the greater the chance of maintaining peace,” opens 60 Minutes Australia’s Amelia Adams. “In other words, massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war. Right now the theory is being tested like never before, and much of it is happening in Australia’s backyard, the Indo-Pacific region. The United States wants the world, and more particularly China, to know of its increasing presence there, and to do that it’s putting on a spectacular show.”
What follows is 19 minutes of overproduced footage displaying this “massive weaponry” while Adams oohs and ahhs and gives slobberingly sycophantic interviews to US military officials.
“There’s something utterly mesmerising about the F-35 jet,” Adams moans. “The sound, the heat, and the power put this supersonic stealth fighter in a league of its own.”
“Colonel these are some very impressive machines you’re in charge of!” she gushes to an officer on an aircraft carrier.
“Yes ma’am,” the colonel replies.
Jesus lady, do your orgasming off camera.
Contrast this glowing ecstatic revelry with Adams’ open hostility later in the segment toward a Chinese think tanker named Henry Wang, claiming that he was trying to “rewrite history” for dismissing panic about a Chinese military buildup by pointing out (100 percent correctly) that China is spending a lower percentage of its GDP on its military than western nations.
“Every command, every maneuver, is being fine-tuned on this vast blue stage, where China has proven to be a bad actor, playing a long game of intimidating Pacific nations,” Adams proclaims over helicopter footage of US war ships. “But the US and its allies aren’t having it, bolstering their defenses — and it’s an impressive display.”
I defy you to find me footage more brazenly propagandistic than this, from any point in history. This is supposed to be a news show, run by people who purport to be journalists, yet they’re engaging in propaganda that looks like it came from a Sacha Baron Cohen spoof of a third world dictatorship.
As I never tire of pointing out, the claim that the US has been militarily encircling its number one geopolitical rival defensively is the single dumbest thing the empire asks us to believe these days. The US is surrounding China with war machinery in ways that it would consider an outrageously aggressive provocation if the same thing were done in its neck of the woods, which means the US is plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is plainly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
While the first segment unquestioningly regurgitates Pentagon narratives and gives supportive interviews to military officials, the second segment unquestioningly regurgitates talking points from the western intelligence cartel and gives supportive interviews to Five Eyes spooks.
“Showing off deadly weaponry in massive war games is a tactic China and the United States both use to try to avoid full-on combat,” says 60 Minutes Australia’s Nick McKenzie in introduction. “But the truth is the two countries, as well as other nations including Australia, are already battling it out in an invisible war. There are no frontline soldiers but there are significant skirmishes. Until now these conflicts have been kept quiet, but key members of a secretive alliance of top cops from Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand are about to change that.”
“Their group is called the Five Eyes, and tonight they want you to know what they see,” says McKenzie, which is the same as saying “We’re telling you what the Five Eyes intelligence agencies told us to tell you.”
McKenzie literally just assembles a bunch of Five Eyes officials to tell Australians that China is bad and dangerous, and then disguises the western intelligence cartel advancing its own information interests as a real news story.
“There is one threat that alarms our partners more than any other,” McKenzie says over dramatic music, asking “Which state actor is the key threat to democracy in Australia and amongst the Five Eyes partners?” and presenting a montage of western intelligence operatives answering (you guessed it) China.
“The Americans describe a growing menace on our doorstep flowing from China’s increasing influence in the region,” McKenzie says, before asking an American official, “Do you see the Chinese state preying on Pacific island nations?”
“I believe so, yes,” the official responds.
Western journalism, ladies and gents.
Man, Australians are really getting pummeled with war propaganda. This is basically war porn for the U.S. military. pic.twitter.com/RRO0Htkewp
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) May 24, 2023
Australians are particularly vulnerable to propaganda because Australia has the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment (who airs 60 Minutes) and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. This vulnerability is being fully exploited as the time comes for the western empire to beat the war drums against China.
We keep being hammered by this narrative that “massive weaponry is the best deterrent to war,” when all facts in evidence say the exact opposite is true. It was the military encroachment against Russia and the conversion of Ukraine into a NATO military asset which provoked Putin to invade Ukraine, and all the militarization against China that we are seeing is only inflaming tensions and making war more likely.
And, I mean, of course it is; even a casual glance at the Cuban Missile Crisis reveals that powerful nations don’t take kindly to having menacing forces placed near their borders. So much of the propaganda indoctrination we’re subjected to in the 2020s revolves around convincing people to believe that Russia and China should react completely differently than the way the US would react if foreign proxy forces were being amassed along its borders.
So yes, Amelia Adams, claiming that aggression and militarism is the best path toward peace is absolutely “twisted logic”. It is as twisted as it gets. Because it is false. This is obvious to anyone who hasn’t yet been successfully indoctrinated into this omnicidal belief system.
We need to do everything we can to fight against this indoctrination now, because if we wait until the war actually starts it will likely be too late to resist.
___________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
ANALYSIS: By Barbara Dreaver in Port Moresby
When I was growing up in Kiribati, then known as the Gilbert Islands, New Zealand divers came to safely detonate unexploded munitions from World War II.
Decades on from when US Marines fought and won the Battle of Tarawa against Japan, war was still very much a part of everyday life.
Our school bell was a bombshell. We’d find bullet casings.
In fact, my grandmother’s leg was badly injured when she lit a fire on the beach, and an unexploded ordnance went off. There are Japanese bunkers and US machine gun mounts along the Betio shoreline, and bones are still being found — even today.
Stories are told . . . so many people died . . . these things are not forgotten.
That’s why the security and defence pacts being drawn up around the Pacific are worrying much of the region, as the US and Australia partner up to counter China’s growing influence.
You only have to read Australia’s Defence Strategic Review 2023 to see they are preparing for conflict.
The battle is climate change which is impacting their everyday life. The bigger powers will most certainly go through the motions of at least hearing their voices.
— Barbara Dreaver
Secret pact changed landscape
While in the last few years we have seen China put big money into the Pacific, it was primarily about diplomatic weight and ensuring Taiwan wasn’t recognised. But the secret security pact with the Solomon Islands changed the landscape dramatically.
There was a point where it stopped being about just aid and influence — and openly started to become much more serious.
Since then, the escalation has been rapid as the US and Australia have amped up their activities — and other state actors have as well.
In some cases, lobbying and negotiating have been covertly aggressive. Many Pacific countries are concerned about the militarisation of the region — and whether we like it or not, that’s where it’s headed.
Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister Simon Kofe said he understands why his country, which sits between Hawai’i and Australia, is of strategic interest to the superpowers.
Worried about militarisation, he admits they are coming under pressure from all sides — not just China but the West as well.
“In World War II, the war came to the Pacific even though we played no part at all in the conflict, and we became victims of a war that was not of our making,” he said.
Important Pacific doesn’t forget
“So it’s important for the Pacific not to forget that experience now we are seeing things that are happening in this part of the world, and it’s best we are prepared for that situation.”
Academic Dr Anna Powles, a long-time Pacific specialist, said she was very concerned at the situation, which was a “slippery slope” to militarisation.
She said Pacific capitals were being flooded with officials from around the region and from further afield who want to engage.
Pacific priorities are being undermined, and there is a growing disconnect in the region between national interest and the interest of the political elites.
Today in Papua New Guinea, we see first-hand how we are on the cusp of change.
They include big meetings spearheaded by the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, another one by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a defence deal that will allow US military access through ports and airports. In exchange, the US is providing an extra US$45 million (NZ$72 million) in funding a raft of initiatives, some of which include battling the effects of climate change.
Equipment boost
The PNG Defence Force is also getting an equipment boost, and there’s a focus on combatting law and order issues — which domestically is a big challenge — and protecting communities, particularly women, from violence.
There is much in these initiatives that the PNG government and the people here will find attractive. It may well be the balance between PNG’s national interest and US ambitions is met — it will be interesting to see if other Pacific leaders agree.
Because some Pacific leaders are happy to be courted and enjoy being at the centre of global attention (and we know who you are), others are determined to do the best for their people. The fight for them is not geopolitical, and it’s on the land they live on.
The battle is climate change which is impacting their everyday life. The bigger powers will most certainly go through the motions of at least hearing their voices.
What that will translate to remains to be seen.
Barbara Dreaver is TV1’s Pacific correspondent and is in Papua New Guinea with the New Zealand delegation. Republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
Too much interesting stuff happening in the life of the empire to cover in just one article today, so we’re doing a three-in-one wrap-up.
Republican congressman Michael McCaul made a very interesting admission during a Sunday interview on MSNBC, which he hastily had to walk back after the host pointed out the implications of what he was saying.
MSNBC’s Chuck Todd asked the virulent China hawk McCaul to “make the basic case” for why Americans should be willing to go to war over Taiwan, and McCaul responded by saying it was about controlling the manufacturing of microchips. When Todd pointed out that this sounded a lot like justifications that have been made for US wars and militarism to control global oil supplies, McCaul hastily corrected himself and said that protecting Taiwan is actually about “democracy and freedom”.
“Make the basic case for why Americans not only should care about what happens in Taiwan but should be willing to spill American blood and treasure to defend Taiwan,” Todd said.
McCaul responded by talking about deterrence and protecting international trade, then said, “I think more important is that TSMC [Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company] manufactures 90 percent of the global supply of advanced semiconductor chips. If China invades and either owns or breaks up, we’re in a world of hurt globally.”
“Congressman, that almost sounds like the case that would be made in the sixties, seventies and eighties for why America was spending so much money and military resources in the middle east,” Todd responded. “Oil was so important for the economy. Is this sort of the 21st century version of that?”
“You know, I personally think it is about democracy and freedom. And we need to stand up for that, like we’re doing in Ukraine,” said McCaul, visibly uncomfortable.
Nearly as funny as McCaul’s hasty self-correction was Todd’s suggestion that US militarism and wars for oil in the middle east was something that was limited to “the sixties, seventies and eighties.” As though the destruction of Iraq and Libya, the militarization against Iran, the starvation of Yemen, and the occupation of Syrian oil fields are just things the US war machine has been doing for fun and giggles in the decades since.
Also funny is the suggestion that Taiwan falling under Beijing’s control would create a “world of hurt”, as though China has been reluctant to sell manufactured products to other countries, and as though the world has not been freely purchasing those products.
"Fox News has agreed, along with other news organizations, not to publish the leaked highly classified documents"
What, just as a favor to the Pentagon or something? Being a team player? What reason would there even be to "agree" to anything in this situation? @JenGriffinFNC pic.twitter.com/SE6yMfkOty
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 11, 2023
In an article titled “White House Says Don’t Report on Pentagon Leaks,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes the following:
The White House on Monday warned media outlets against publishing information contained in the top secret documents leaked from the Pentagon and other US government agencies that have surfaced on the internet.
“Without confirming the validity of the documents, this is information that has no business in the public domain,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
“It has no business, if you don’t mind me saying, on the pages of — front pages of newspapers or on television. It is not intended for public consumption, and it should not be out there,” he added.
That was on Monday. On Tuesday morning, Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin said that “Fox News has agreed, along with other news organizations, not to publish the leaked highly classified documents which were discovered last week.”
Griffin made no mention of which “other news organizations” had agreed to this.
Western journalism, ladies and gents.
The NYPD is welcoming a new member to its ranks: a robot dog. The robotic mobile K-9 device is part of a number of technological rollouts the city said is "crucial" in keeping the city safe. https://t.co/mS7vk99Ys0 pic.twitter.com/zyoYFbyc8d
— Geopolitics & Empire (@Geopolitics_Emp) April 11, 2023
NBC New York reports that the New York Police Department has added “a robot dog” to its force, along with other robots, after previously abandoning their use in the face of public outcry.
(Before we move on, it must be said that the press really need to stop calling these things “robotic dogs” like they’re some cute cartoon character from The Jetsons. They’re not “dogs”, they’re robots. Police robots. Calling quadrupedal copbots “dogs” is a marketing ploy by those who profit from them and those who want to use them.)
Reporting that the “robotic dog” will be used “in hostage negotiations, counterterrorism incidents and other situations as needed,” NBC New York notes that the robot’s use is being pushed through despite widespread public objections.
“Mayor Eric Adams said that although the robotic dog was previously introduced during a previous administration, leaders then took a step back after public outcry. However, he said that his top concern is public safety,” the report reads.
“This announcement is also another example of the NYPD’s violation of basic norms of transparency and accountability by rolling out these technologies without providing the public a meaningful opportunity to raise concerns,” The Legal Aid Society is quoted as saying in objection to the move.
Another piece of tech called the “K5 Autonomous Security Robot” is also being rolled out alongside the quadrupedal robot, which NBC New York reports “uses artificial intelligence to provide incident notification in real-time to first responders” and will be used to conduct “automated patrol in confined areas both indoors and outdoors, such as transit stations.” So surveillance. It’s a surveillance robot.
Caitlin Johnstone: Normalizing Police Robot Murder https://t.co/cwLPSmUjY5
— Consortium News (@Consortiumnews) December 8, 2022
Every few months I’ve got to write a new article about new escalations in copbot normalization, because it’s being shoved through with such extreme aggression. It’s been decided that there need to be copbots, so the world is getting copbots.
Whenever a new story breaks about these escalations people always joke about movies where the robots turn against the humans, but that’s not the real danger here. The real danger is that these robots will be fully controlled by humans, and humans have a long track record of oppressing and abusing other humans. This isn’t Terminator or Black Mirror, this is garden variety police militarization, continuing along the same trajectory it’s been on for decades.
Every objection to police militarization as a dangerous slippery slope has been 100 percent vindicated by history, and there’s no reason to expect that to change as they start rolling out copbots. As John and Nisha Whitehead explained last year for The Rutherford Institute, this ongoing expansion of police robot militarization tracks alongside the steadily increasing militarization of police forces in the US more generally; SWAT teams first appeared in California the 1960s, by 1980 the US was seeing 3,000 SWAT team-style raids per year and by 2014 that number had soared to 80,000. It’s probably higher now.
The thing about slippery slope arguments is you can’t just dismiss them on issues where they have a proven and consistent track record of being correct. Police forces have been getting more and more militarized, especially in the US, and once they’ve secured an escalation in militarization it seldom de-escalates from there.
Since the dawn of history rulers have dreamed of having mindless obedient soldiers who will never turn against them, will never disobey orders, and will never hesitate to attack the civilians of their own country when told to do so. Copbots are the final solution to the ancient problem that there are always a whole lot more ordinary people than there are rulers, because once they’re fully militarized and fully rolled out they can be used to subdue a population of any size. Copbots are the anti-guillotine.
Humanity is in a race between the awakening of our consciousness on one hand and the plunge toward armageddon and dystopia on the other. I hope we can wake up and turn this thing around before we’re locked in to this sinking ship for good.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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Featured image via Web Summit, (CC BY 2.0, formatted for size)
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
UN rights chief voices concern over sentencing of Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong
The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, has said he is “very concerned” after China sentenced two prominent human rights lawyers to more than a decade each in jail.
Xu Zhiyong and fellow campaigner Ding Jiaxi were convicted of subversion of state power after closed-door trials and sentenced to 14 and 12 years respectively.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Xu Zhiyong and Ding Jiaxi, prominent figures advocating for improved civil rights, given lengthy jail terms in latest crackdown on dissent
A Chinese court has sentenced two prominent human rights lawyers to jail terms of more than a decade each, a relative and rights groups say, in the latest move in a years-long crackdown on civil society by President Xi Jinping.
Xu Zhiyong, 50, and Ding Jiaxi, 55, were put on trial behind closed doors in June last year on charges of state subversion at a court in Linshu county in the north-eastern province of Shandong, relatives said at the time.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
(Readers sensitive to discussion of inappropriate adult behavior toward children may want to skip this one.)
There’s a really gross video going around of the Dalai Lama kissing a young boy on the lips and telling him to suck his tongue while an adult audience looks on approvingly. A tweet from Tibet.net last month shows a video clip of the Tibetan spiritual leader with the child and says the encounter took place during his “meeting with students and members of M3M Foundation,” though Tibet.net’s clip cuts out the sexually inappropriate part of the encounter.
Here is a hyperlink to a video of the interaction. For those who understandably do not wish to see such a thing but are comfortable with a text description, here’s a new write-up from News.com.au:
The Dalai Lama has raised eyebrows after kissing a young Indian boy on the lips and asking him to “suck” his tongue at a recent event.
Footage of the bizarre interaction, which occurred last month during an event for India’s M3M Foundation, has gone viral on social media.
The leader of Tibetan Buddhism, Tenzin Gyatso, was hosting students and members of the foundation at his temple in Dharamshala, India, where he lives in exile.
In the video, the boy approaches the microphone and asks, “Can I hug you?”
The 87-year-old says “OK, come” and invites him on stage.
The Dalai Lama motions to his cheek and says “first here” and the boy gives him a hug and kiss.
He holds the boy’s arm and turns to him, saying “then I think fine here also” as he points to his lips.
The spiritual leader then grabs the boy’s chin and kisses him on the mouth as the audience laughs.
“And suck my tongue,” the Dalai Lama tells the boy, sticking out his tongue.
They press their foreheads together and the boy briefly pokes out his tongue before backing away, as the Dalai Lama gives him a playful slap on the chest and laughs.
Eye openning piece
"Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth (2003)"
by Michael Parenti https://t.co/JalkGOp3ZK
— Joe Emersberger (@rosendo_joe) April 9, 2023
What is it with power-adjacent clergymen and child molestation, anyway? As Michael Parenti noted in 2003, sexual abuse was commonplace in the tyrannical environment of feudal Tibet, over which the 14th Dalai Lama would still preside had it not been forcibly annexed by the PRC in the 1950s. While the slogan of “Free Tibet” has long been used as a propaganda bludgeon by the west against China particularly and against communism generally, the truth of the matter is that Tibet was quantifiably a far more tyrannical and oppressive place to live back when it was supposedly “free”.
I went to see the Dalai Lama a long time ago when he came to speak at Melbourne, and I remember what stood out the most for me was how completely lacking in depth or profundity it was. As someone with an intense interest in spirituality and enlightenment I always found it perplexing that someone so highly regarded in the circles I moved in had nothing to say on such matters besides superficial, Sesame Street-level remarks about being nice and trying to make the world a better place. Probably no one alive today is more commonly associated with Buddhism and spiritual awakening in western consciousness than the Dalai Lama, yet everything I’ve ever read or heard from him has struck me as unskillful, unhelpful and vapid when compared to the words of other spiritual teachers.
That confusing discrepancy cleared up after I got into political analysis and learned that the Dalai Lama is probably not someone who should be looked to for spiritual guidance, and is actually far too messed up inside to have accomplished much inner development as a person.
Take an interview he did back in September 2003, a solid six months after the invasion of Iraq. The Dalai Lama told AP that he believed the US invasion of Afghanistan was “perhaps some kind of liberation” that could “protect the rest of civilization,” as was the USA’s brutal intervention in Korea, and that the US invasion of Iraq was “complicated” and would take more time before its morality could be determined. In 2005, years after the invasion, after normal mainstream members of the public had realized the war was a disaster, the Dalai Lama still said “The Iraq war — it’s too early to say, right or wrong.”
This is plainly someone with a broken moral compass. These are basic, bare-minimum assessments that any normal person with any degree of psychological and emotional health can quickly sort out for themselves, and he still winds up basically on the same side of these issues as some of the worst people on earth.
I used to think it odd that the Dalai Lama has nothing to offer but vapid kindergarten pop spirituality, then I learned he was a well-paid CIA agent for many years.https://t.co/wBfqsLm3rt pic.twitter.com/2DmGsgll5B
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) August 5, 2020
But I guess that’s about the best anyone could expect from a literal CIA asset. His administration received $1.7 million a year from the Central Intelligence Agency through the 1960s, and it’s reported that he himself personally received $180,000 a year from the CIA for decades.
From The New York Review of Books:
Many friends of Tibet and admirers of the Dalai Lama, who has always advocated nonviolence, believe he knew nothing about the CIA program. But Gyalo Thondup, one of the Dalai Lama’s brothers, was closely involved in the operations, and [CIA veteran John Kenneth] Knaus, who took part in the operation, writes that “Gyalo Thondup kept his brother the Dalai Lama informed of the general terms of the CIA support.” According to Knaus, starting in the late 1950s, the Agency paid the Dalai Lama $15,000 a month. Those payments came to an end in 1974.
The CIA is easily the most depraved institution in the world today, so it would be reasonable to expect the moral development of someone so intimately involved with it to be a bit stunted. Ten or fifteen years ago it would’ve surprised me to learn that I would one day type these words, but it turns out the Dalai Lama is a real asshole.
It’s rare to find a spiritual teacher who has expanded their consciousness inwardly enough to have useful things to say about enlightenment, and of those who do it’s extremely rare to find one who has also expanded their consciousness outwardly enough to discuss world events from a place of wisdom and understanding as well. The Dalai Lama is as far from this as you could possibly get: he has lived his life in cooperation with the most unwise institutions on earth, and he is less inwardly developed than most people you might pass on the street.
People should stop looking up to this freak.
__________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
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Responding to a war caused by NATO expansion by expanding NATO.
Fighting Russian authoritarianism by increasing censorship.
Fighting Russian propaganda by increasing propaganda.
Pursuing peace by rejecting diplomacy.
Defending Europe from Russia by bombing European pipelines.
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Twitter has dropped its entirely appropriate designation of NPR as “state-affiliated media”, instead creating an entirely new designation, “Government Funded”, which it has also now given to the accounts of outlets like the BBC and Voice of America. You still see establishment guard dogs decrying this new label for western propaganda outlets on nonsensical pedantic grounds, but really the problem is that they’re not receiving the same “state-affiliated media” label as outlets like RT and Press TV despite being equally propagandistic. The label is designed to provide the false impression that western propaganda outlets are not propaganda outlets.
It’s actually very revealing how huffy and indignant empire apologists are getting over the “Government Funded” label, because it shows that they see it as Twitter’s responsibility to facilitate western propaganda. Imperial spinmeisters have a vested interest in maintaining the illusion that propaganda is something that only happens to other people, and any move that might disrupt that illusion even slightly is met with hostility.
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It’s one of the most shameful jobs in the entire world to spend your time doing critical reporting on the enemies of your government while ignoring your own government’s far more egregious crimes.
People talk about sex work as shameful, and in America they’ll even shame you for working a low-paying job like McDonald’s, when on all our screens every day we see people selling their own government’s ugly foreign policy in a line of work that is entire universes more shameful.
That’s why I dislike the use of the word “presstitute” to refer to these people. Not because it’s insulting to the press, but because it’s insulting to sex workers.
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Over and over and over again we see US officials talking very differently about a hot war with China over Taiwan than they talked about hot war with Russia over Ukraine. This is absolute screaming insanity, and it should enrage everyone.
Sending US troops to Taiwan is "on the table," says Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US Michael McCaul pic.twitter.com/b5EDQ7d3Rr
— AZ 🛰
(@AZgeopolitics) April 8, 2023
The US has no place flirting with the possibility of an Atomic Age world war over a longstanding inter-Chinese conflict that’s none of the west’s business. It should enrage us all that they’re talking about throwing our sons and daughters into the gears of that horrific war.
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China brokers peace deal in the middle east, CIA director flies in to babble about how this makes the US empire's feelings feel. pic.twitter.com/TqnE5gvmS3
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 6, 2023
China must be stopped before it imposes totalitarian diplomacy on Ukraine and authoritarian peace in the middle east.
We’ve got to stop China from achieving peace over there so we don’t have to stop it from achieving peace over here.
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It’s a completely false narrative that the US is “polarized” politically. On the most consequential matters both factions are always in enthusiastic agreement; the “divisions” are limited to superficial culture war issues whose outcomes will never affect anyone with real power.
Same old story. During elections, Republicans and Democrats scream that the differences between them are so seismic, civilization itself hangs in the balance. Then on the most consequential actions they can take — like hurtling into World War III — they behave exactly the same pic.twitter.com/SSDNZuDD0m
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) April 6, 2023
If anything the US could stand to be far more politically “polarized”, because it would mean actual political opposition happening in the world’s most powerful country instead of nonstop kayfabe combat while the empire marches on uninterrupted regardless of who’s in office.
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What would it mean if humans are the lone intelligence in the universe? If there are no aliens, no gods, no conscious AI waiting to emerge in the future? Well, it would mean we’ve got a lot more responsibility, for one. Nobody’s coming to the rescue. It’s on us to fix this mess.
And I think that’s probably a big part of what drives the belief that we’re not alone — not because the evidence is particularly strong, but because of how intimidating the prospect is.
That’s what I find when I look within myself, anyway. When I ask myself “What if we’re alone in this?” the very first response that comes up within me is, “Ah shit.”
Because think about what that would mean. Think about it and feel about it. Not only would it mean we’re permanently on our own when it comes to fixing all our massive problems, but we’ve also got a massive responsibility not to fuck this all up. If we’re the only intelligent life in the universe, then we’ve actually got a serious responsibility to try and preserve that life.
I mean, if we wipe ourselves out with nuclear war or environmental collapse, or with some other wonderful technology-based emergence we haven’t invented yet, then that’s bad enough by itself. But if on top that we also wiped out the only intelligent life in the universe, it’s almost infinitely worse, no? It means we didn’t just inflict that horror upon ourselves, we inflicted it upon the future of the entire universe.
And I just think that’s probably what drives a lot of the belief that there’s something else out there. The fact that we’re all kind of intimidated by the responsibility which would come with our being alone.
____________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Adobe Stock.
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
Readers should have very low confidence in the Wall Street Journal‘s assumption (2/26/23) that classified intelligence reports are helpful gauges of scientific questions.
The Wall Street Journal (2/26/23) broke the news that classified documents show the US Energy Department believes Covid emerged from a lab leak in China, which sent shockwaves through the rest of the media. Such a statement by the Energy Department “would be significant despite the fact that, as the report said, the agency made its updated judgment with ‘low confidence,’” according to the Guardian (2/26/23).
“Low confidence” is a term intelligence agencies use to signify that “information’s credibility and/or plausibility is questionable, or that the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytic inferences, or that we have significant concerns or problems with the sources.”
Speaking of low confidence, Michael Gordon, one of the Journal reporters on the byline, used to write for the New York Times. There he co-authored spurious articles with the infamous Judith Miller about imaginary Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that were used to justify the US invasion of Iraq (New York Times, 9/8/02, 9/13/02; New York Review of Books, 2/26/04; Guardian, 5/27/04; FAIR.org, 3/20/13).*
Nevertheless, this one article from a sketchy reporter, relaying a single government agency’s speculations that were self-labeled as dubious, managed to reignite the lab leak controversy, with virtually every major US news outlet returning to the story.
Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy. There is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts—“zoonotic jump” is the technical term—and pours serious cold water on the lab leak hypothesis, as well as some of the political actors who promote it.
“Officials would not disclose what the intelligence was”—but that’s good enough for the front page of the New York Times (2/26/23).
After the Journal story broke, the New York Times (2/26/23) noted that the FBI “has also concluded, with moderate confidence, that the virus first emerged accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese lab that worked on coronaviruses.” Meanwhile, “four other intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council have concluded, with low confidence, that the virus most likely emerged through natural transmission.” Other outlets trumpeted the Journal’s report, giving the impression that new evidence about the pandemic’s origins had come to light (CNN, 2/27/23; NPR, 2/27/23; CBS, 2/28/23).
While this reporting indicates that there is little consensus among government agencies about the virus’ origins, those who want to believe in the lab leak myth—like Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, to which the Journal belongs—used the report as definitive proof of Chinese carelessness, or even treachery.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (2/26/23) said the Energy Department declaration “doesn’t mean the case is definitive,” but that it adds “more evidence that the media and public-health groupthink about Covid was mistaken and destructive.” The Journal stressed that the “salient detail is that DoE’s judgment is based on ‘new’ but still secret intelligence”—which is known as the “trust us” school of journalism.
In another Journal op-ed (3/6/23), Tim Trevan, a founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting, attempted to say that money, political liberalism, careerism and social pressure clouded the scientific community’s ability to accept the lab leak hypothesis. “I am not suggesting that scientists consciously decided to thwart the truth,” he said:
You don’t have to posit conspiracy theories to explain the rush by the science establishment to exclude a lab-leak explanation to Covid. You merely have to admit that scientists are human.
Trevan offers no evidence that a lab leak caused the pandemic, to back up his insistence that scientists have been blind to the truth. He does, however, indulge in low-brow anti-Communism and orientalism, saying the “transparency” necessary for adequate laboratory safety “runs against the grain of both Communism and China’s hierarchical traditional culture.” Which is it: Is China too egalitarian in its Maoist ways, or too stuck in its backward, pre-revolutionary past?
Jonathan Turley opined at the New York Post (2/26/23) that the Journal’s scoop vindicated lab leak theorists who had been branded as racists or conspiracy nuts. Fox News (2/27/23) echoed Turley, and it gloated (2/27/23) that “reporters, pundits and media outlets” who had doubted the lab leak theory “were scolded and lampooned” as a result of the Journal report.
You really can say anything on Fox News (2/28/23) as long as it makes the right people look bad.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has promoted the racist “great replacement” myth on his show (FAIR.org, 10/20/21; NPR, 5/12/22), took the lab leak speculation and ran with it. He showcased Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan (2/28/23), who said that “the Chinese government intentionally manufactured and released” the coronavirus behind the pandemic, while Carlson suggested “the Chinese government unleashed Covid to destroy Western economies and elevate their own position globally.”
Yan’s research, while backed by MAGA ideologist Steve Bannon (Vox, 9/18/20), has been questioned by National Geographic (9/18/20) and her own Hong Kong University (7/11/20).
Her narrative nevertheless fits into the anti-China hysteria of Fox News, and has been an important player for the right’s media war since the pandemic began. As the New York Times (11/20/20) put it:
For the diaspora, Dr. Yan and her unfounded claims provided a cudgel for those intent on bringing down China’s government. For American conservatives, they played to rising anti-Chinese sentiment and distracted from the Trump administration’s bungled handling of the outbreak.
Carlson, of course, is not bothered by the reality that the pandemic negatively impacted the Chinese economy (Wall Street Journal, 1/17/23) and led to internal political unrest (Al Jazeera, 12/22/22).
Anything you can point to is “proof” when you are not trying to examine reality but instead have a story you want to tell (New York Post, 10/10/21).
Rebroadcasting reports of official government assertions aligns nicely with the Republican agenda. The Hill (2/26/23) reported that the “lack of confidence or details on the assessment didn’t stop Republicans from claiming validation and calling for urgent action against China.” And Sen. Roger Marshall (R.–Kansas) told the Washington Post (2/28/23) that the report “gives us momentum to expose the true origins of Covid.” He added, with Michael Crichton–like flair: “I think that there’s just no way this virus could have come from nature. It’s just too perfect.”
The lab leak claim has been a major feature in Republican circles, the conservative media and anti-Beijing political tendencies for years now. The New York Post editorial board (10/10/21) claimed that the alleged lab leak, and the Chinese government’s supposed attempts to cover it up, were all but proven in the fall of 2021.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R.–Arkansas), who has insisted that China must be punished for the Covid pandemic (Fox News, 4/10/20), “said part of the widespread media dismissal of the coronavirus lab-leak theory last year stemmed from liberal networks’ financial connections to the Chinese government” (Fox News, 6/7/21).
The Journal report has raised tensions. US ambassador to China Nicholas Burns (BBC, 2/28/23) said China must “be more honest about what happened three years ago in Wuhan with the origin of the Covid-19 crisis.” It should come as no surprise that reactionary corporate shock jocks like Joe Rogan, the all-star of pandemic disinformation pundits (Washington Post, 2/2/22), are fans of the theory (Fox News, 4/12/22).
The “zebra” in this case is the lab leak theory—rather than zoonotic transfer, which is the normal way new diseases are introduced to the human population (Des Moines Register, 2/19/23).
If the absence of anything new in the Energy Department statement didn’t seem to give reporters and editors pause, that’s because in a lot of media, the lab leak hypothesis is advanced not so much based on evidence—because as far as tracing the virus back to the lab, there is none—but on an appeal to the hunches, and prejudices, of readers.
For example, an opinion piece in the Des Moines Register (2/19/23) offered a list of events that are supposed to lead one to the idea that it could be true: The “Wuhan lab was working on bat coronaviruses, that gain-of-function work was being done there, [and] that there were concerns about the lab’s safety practices.” The Register op-ed, by former Republican congressmember and retired surgeon Dr. Greg Ganske, mused “that the pandemic started in the city where the lab is located, and that there has been no natural occurrence explanation of the virus.” The takeaway: “Which theory is most likely?”
This answer posed as a question is presented as though no one has ever considered it, yet a brief look at the scientific record confirms that the scientific community has looked into it.
First, it’s not proven that gain-of-function (GoF) research was, in fact, being conducted in subpar safety conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Basic research being conducted there has been misrepresented as deliberately trying to make viruses more dangerous to humans, along with other widespread falsehoods spread by disgraced science writer Nicholas Wade. Sen. Rand Paul accused Dr. Anthony Fauci, without evidence, of “lying” to Congress about the NIH not funding GoF research at the WIV (MintPress News, 9/29/21; Newsweek, 7/22/21).
However, even if it were proven the WIV was doing GoF research on the SARS-CoV-1-like coronaviruses known to be present there, like RaTG13 (which shares 96% genetic similarity with the genome of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19), that would still not bolster the lab leak theory. For GoF experiments to create SARS-CoV-2, one would need to start with a virus with at least 99% genetic similarity, and there is no evidence the Wuhan lab had anything like this (Health Feedback, 3/19/21; Cell, 9/16/21).
NPR (2/28/23) asked the right question.
One mainstream media report in the aftermath of the Journal “exclusive” cut through the noise, noting that while US government agencies bicker about which low-confidence report is correct, the scientific community is not particularly divided. “Virologists who study pandemic origins are much less divided than the US intelligence community,” NPR (2/28/23) reported, adding that “they say there is ‘very convincing’ data and ‘overwhelming evidence’ pointing to an animal origin.”
The Energy Department disclosure comes one year after two peer-reviewed studies concluded that wildlife susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 present at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan was the most likely origin of the pandemic (Science, 7/26/22, 7/26/22), and that there were likely two, not one, animal spillovers at the market, since a preponderance of the earliest known Covid-19 cases have a direct or indirect link there, instead of to the WIV, which is nearly 10 miles away.
In the earliest days of the pandemic, two distinct genetic variants of SARS-CoV-2 (known as lineages A and B) were circulating in Wuhan’s population. If the pandemic truly originated at the WIV, as many lab origin proponents suspect, one would have to posit convoluted scenarios, like one person from the WIV being infected with lineage B and immediately going to Huanan Market, not infecting anyone on the way; and another person at WIV being independently infected with lineage A, also immediately going to the market a week later. Both hypothetical spreaders would each have to leave no trace at the lab or any other location in Wuhan, to explain why the preponderance of the earliest known Covid-19 cases are clustered near the market instead of near the WIV.
This is why scientists like Angela Rasmussen and Michael Worobey (Globe and Mail, 7/28/22), for example, have concluded that “the evidence base for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is more robust and conclusive than nearly any other emergent virus in the past century.” They noted that “we have access to the home locations of the earliest known 174 COVID-19 cases in the world.” The authors noted that scientists have “never had a spatial record like this, of the ignition of any other pandemic, in human history”:
Using the data available and the scientific method in which we have been trained, we have shown that the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 originating anywhere other than the Huanan market is vanishingly slim.
The “much simpler explanation” of SARS-CoV-2 being introduced to the human population by “two separate zoonotic transmission events at the market,” the authors conclude, is much more likely in comparison.
Scientists offering new evidence about the origin of Covid-19 was a much less compelling story than spies offering new speculation (Atlantic, 3/16/23).
More recent evidence from scientists researching previously unavailable genetic material collected by Chinese investigators from swabs at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in January 2020—shortly after Chinese authorities shut that market down on suspicions it was linked to the virus’s outbreak—definitively shows that multiple animal species known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 (most notably raccoon dogs) were present at the market, since animal DNA there was found to be commingled with SARS-CoV-2 (Atlantic, 3/16/23; Zenodo, 3/20/23). This corroborates photographic and business records of illegal live animal sales being conducted there right before the pandemic’s outbreak, despite the Chinese government’s lies and stonewalling regarding the wildlife trade (Nature, 6/7/21; Science, 8/18/22).
While these findings aren’t smoking-gun evidence of an animal origin, because the data doesn’t distinguish whether the virus collected in the wildlife stall there was brought there by wildlife or by already-infected humans, they are still significant. The area in the market where most of the SARS-CoV-2 positive samples clustered was also where most of the samples containing wild animal DNA were found, whereas human genetic material was most abundant in other parts of the market (indicating the pandemic likely spread from animals to humans, rather than the other way around). This is entirely consistent with a market origin, and exactly what one would expect to find if the Huanan Market was indeed the origin of the pandemic (Nature, 3/21/23; Science, 3/21/23).
But despite the positive evidence in favor of a zoonotic origin, in comparison to no evidence whatsoever for a lab origin, the Journal ran with the Energy Department statement as though it were a scientific revelation, and the rest of the media went along for the ride. It’s easy to chalk that up as mere journalistic laziness, but one has to wonder if there is something more sinister afoot, given US corporate media’s enthusiastic participation in the US governments’ propaganda campaign to pump up China as an adversary (FAIR.org, 3/16/23).
In a media environment raising tensions over a Chinese balloon (FAIR.org, 2/10/23), and an Air Force memo about possible war with China (CounterPunch, 2/7/23), along with the Biden administration’s decision to send up to 200 more troops to Taiwan (Wall Street Journal, 2/23/23), reports on a government disclosure about a potential lab leak with no real new information create more friction between the two military giants, and bring us no closer to understanding the pandemic’s origins or how to prepare for the next viral catastrophe.
* To be fair, the other co-author, Warren Strobel, was one of the very few in corporate media to report skeptically on WMD claims, along with his partner at Knight Ridder, Jerry Landay (Extra!, 3–4/06). In recent years, however, Strobel has produced far more credulous work, including a piece whitewashing the torture record of CIA director Gina Haspel (Wall Street Journal, 5/25/19; see FAIR.org, 6/6/19).
The post Media’s Lab Leak Theorists See Spies, Not Scientists, as Arbiters of Science appeared first on FAIR.
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“China is preparing to kill Americans and we’ve got to prepare to defend ourselves,” empire propagandist Gordon Chang told Fox Business during an interview on Monday.
Chang, who has famously spent more than two decades incorrectly predicting the imminent collapse of China, bizarrely made these comments while discussing a future attack on Taiwan. Taiwan is of course not the United States and any potential war between Taiwan and the mainland would be an inter-Chinese conflict that needn’t involve a single American, and Chang is most assuredly not part of any “we” who will ever be engaged in combat with the Chinese military under any circumstances.
Chang frames his narrative as though China is menacing Americans in their homes, when in reality only the exact opposite is true: the US has been militarily encircling China for many years, and is rapidly accelerating its efforts to do so.
Philippines Announces Locations of Four New US Bases
Three bases are in the north, facing Taiwan, and one is in the South China Sea province of Palawan
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Philippines #SouthChinaSea #Taiwan #China https://t.co/9tSTxaiUk7 pic.twitter.com/3h3auIPPKo— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) April 3, 2023
Just the other day the Philippines announced the locations of four military bases the US will now have access to in its ongoing encirclement operation, most of them in the northern provinces closest to China.
Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp writes:
Three of the Philippine bases will be located in northern Philippine provinces, a move that angers China since they can be used as staging grounds for a fight over Taiwan. The US will be granted access to the Lal-lo Airport and the Naval Base Camilo Osias, which are both located in the northern Cagayan province. In the neighboring Isabela province, the US will gain access to Camp Melchor Dela Cruz.
The US military will also be able to expand to Palawan, an island province in the South China Sea, disputed waters that are a major source of tensions between the US and China. The US will be granted access to Balabac Island, the southernmost island of Palawan.
The new locations are on top of five bases the US currently has access to, bringing the total number of bases the US can rotate forces through in the Philippines to nine. The expansion in the Philippines is a significant step in the US effort to build up its military assets in the region to prepare for a future war with China.
So it’s very clear who the aggressor is here and who is preparing to attack whom. Imperial spinmeisters like Gordon Chang are just lying when they frame China’s militarizing to defend itself against undisguised US encirclement as China militarizing to attack Americans.
Fun fact: US officials used to pretend China was crazy and paranoid for saying this encirclement was happening. In the 1995 book “Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II,” William Blum wrote the following:
In March 1966, Secretary of State Dean Rusk spoke before a congressional committee about American policy toward China. Mr. Rusk, it seems, was perplexed that “At times the Communist Chinese leaders seem to be obsessed with the notion that they are being threatened and encircled.” He spoke of China’s “imaginary, almost pathological, notion that the United States and other countries around its borders are seeking an opportunity to invade mainland China and destroy the Peiping [Peking] regime”. The Secretary then added:
“How much Peiping’s ‘fear’ of the United States is genuine and how much it is artificially induced for domestic political purposes only the Chinese Communist leaders themselves know. I am convinced, however, that their desire to expel our influence and activity from the western Pacific and Southeast Asia is not motivated by fears that we are threatening them.”
Another fun fact: thanks to a 2021 revelation by Daniel Ellsberg, we now know that the secretary of state’s comments about how crazy and paranoid China was for thinking the US wanted to attack it came just eight years after the US had seriously considered acting on plans it had drawn up to launch a nuclear strike on the Chinese mainland.
Daniel Ellsberg is challenging the constitutionality of the Espionage Act—openly breaking the law to expose an insane Pentagon plan to use pre-emptive nuclear strikes on mainland China in a Taiwan conflict, despite US officials considering nuclear retaliation "very likely." https://t.co/7tCTRIr3tt
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 23, 2021
Mainstream western imperialists of all stripes have long recognized that a hard conflict with China will be necessary at some point in the future if they’re to continue their domination of the world. In his 2005 book “Superpatriot”, Michael Parenti wrote that the unipolarist neoconservative “PNAC” (Project for the New American Century) ideology that had by that point taken over US foreign policy was ultimately geared toward a future conflict with China:
“The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere — including North America — the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.”
But you can see the twinkle of this looming conflict in the eyes of western imperialists long before any of this. In a 1902 interview (which was not published until 1966 — a year after Churchill’s death), Churchill candidly voiced his support for partitioning China at some point in the future in order to preserve the dominance of the “Aryan stock” over “barbaric nations”:
The East is interesting, and to no one can it be more valuable and interesting than to anyone who comes from the West.
I think we shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them. I believe that as civilized nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.
The word “partition” here means breaking a nation up into smaller nations, i.e. balkanization. To this day we see western imperialists pushing for the partitioning of disobedient nations like Russia and Syria, and we still see this with China in the push to permanently amputate regions like Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan from Beijing.
China’s sheer size, social cohesion and geostrategic location have long been recognized as a potential problem in the future for western imperialists who wish to ensure their ability to dominate and control, and now we’re seeing that all come to a head. Churchill said of a future confrontation with China “I hope we shall not have to do it in our day” because that confrontation has always been certain to be horrific, and today in the Atomic Age this is far more true than it was in 1902.
And in fact we do not have to do it in our day, either. We don’t have to do it in any day. The only reason we’re being pushed toward a profoundly dangerous conflict with China is because it’s the only way for western imperialists to maintain their hegemonic control of this planet, but their hegemonic control of this planet has brought us to a point of endlessly escalating nuclear brinkmanship and looming ecosystemic collapse. It hasn’t exactly been working out great, is what I am saying.
There’s no reason the west can’t simply accept the existence of other powers and stop trying to dominate everyone on earth. We have long been ruled by tyrants who continually push our world toward suffering and death in the name of securing more power and control, but we don’t need to accept their rule. They do not have a healthy vision for our species, and there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them. Their rule is done as soon as enough of us decide it is.
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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The China Vegan Society and the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation say the China Vegan Food Standard Certification seeks to standardize vegan claims within the Chinese market, increase transparency and consumer trust for vegan products, and aid in supporting consumers and food producers interested in animal-free options.
The certification is also the first vegan certification to include a subcategory for vegan foods that do not contain garlic, onions, leeks, chives, and asafetida, which up to half of Chinese vegans and vegetarians avoid for religious and health reasons.
During a recent online conference, nearly 20,000 viewers learned about the first recipients of the China Vegan Food Standard Certification.
Ten companies covering diverse food categories across the full food industry received the certification, including Veggie Ark, Green Monday, Ecobuyer, Deepure, Yeyo, Seleglu, GENBEN, Su Man Xiang, Liu Wei Zhi Ji, and Shu Jia Niang Food.
The certification program’s first recipients cover a range of plant-based food offerings, from organic farming and vegan restaurants to health foods, alternative protein products, and vegan OEM manufacturers.
Representatives from each organization introduced their brands and shared their perspectives on how the certification will advance veganism in China in the short term and establish vegan industry standards to lay a crucial foundation for future development.
The certification program’s aim is to provide better-served consumers, more sustainable vegan product offerings, increased food biodiversity, the transition toward healthier food consumption and production patterns, and a better-regulated and more transparent vegan food industry.
CBCGDF Deputy Secretary General Ma Yong emphasized the historic importance of plant-based diets in China’s traditional culture and their crucial role in supporting China’s sustainable future growth.
The certification development committee included VegRadar, a vegan information service platform offering a fully WeChat-enabled restaurant locator app and multi-channel media platform, and Dao Foods, an impact-oriented incubator and investment firm that invests in plant-based and alternative protein companies based in mainland China.
In January, China took first place in the 2022 ProVeg Innovation Challenge APAC event. The country has also seen a number of alternative milestones this year including CellX announcing the first cultivated meat factory in China and Jimi Biotech unveiling the country’s first cultivated chicken. Haofood also debuted chicken made from peanuts in another industry first.
The post 10 Companies Awarded China’s First Vegan Food Standard Certification appeared first on Green Queen.
This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.
To avert the worst consequences of the climate crisis, the world must stop building new coal plants and shut down existing ones at nearly five times the current rate.
That’s according to an analysis published Wednesday by Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and nearly a dozen other groups, including Reclaim Finance, the Sierra Club, and the Alliance for Climate Justice and Clean Energy.
GEM’s ninth annual survey of the world’s existing and proposed supply of coal-fired power—the largest single source of energy-related CO2 emissions—found that “outside China, the global coal pipeline is drying up,” albeit not at a quick enough pace.
“Urgent action is necessary to ensure an end to coal and a fighting chance at a livable climate.”
Seventeen countries retired a combined 26 GW of operating coal capacity in 2022. Meanwhile, 25 GW of operating coal capacity received an announced close-by date of 2030.
However, to meet the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels—beyond which the climate emergency’s impacts will grow even deadlier, especially for humanity’s poorest members who bear the least responsibility for the crisis—coal power must be phased out completely by 2040. To stay on track while giving developing countries extra time to switch to renewables, high-income countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) must shutter their coal plants by 2030.
This “would require an average of 117 GW of retirements per year, or four-and-a-half times the capacity retired in 2022,” according to the report. “An average of 60 GW must come offline in OECD countries each year to meet their 2030 coal phaseout deadline, and for non-OECD countries, 91 GW each year for their 2040 deadline. Accounting for coal plants under construction and in consideration (537.1 GW) would require even steeper cuts.”
Lead author Flora Champenois, the project manager for GEM’s Global Coal Plant Tracker, said in a statement that “the transition away from existing and new coal isn’t happening fast enough to avoid climate chaos.”
“The more new projects come online, the steeper the cuts and commitments need to be in the future,” she noted.
Last year, the world added 45.5 GW of new coal capacity, meaning that the operating coal fleet grew by 19.5 GW overall.
“Fourteen countries commissioned new coal power in 2022,” the report notes. “More than half (59%) of the newly commissioned capacity was in China (25.2 GW), with a remaining 16% in South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), 11% in Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, and Cambodia), 9% in East Asia (Japan and South Korea), and 5% in other regions.”
Outside China, the global coal fleet continued to shrink in 2022 as planned projects were canceled and old plants closed. But coal retirements slowed down compared with previous years due in large part to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent gas prices soaring.
\u201c\ud83c\uddea\ud83c\uddfa retired only 2.2 GW last year after a record 14.6 GW, but coal is not making the comeback many expected from the energy crisis. The rebound in retirements in the next few years could make up for the lower than expected retirements in 2022.\u201d— Global Energy Monitor (@Global Energy Monitor) 1680739205
“While coal under development—or coal in pre-construction and construction—has collapsed by two-thirds since the Paris agreement, nearly 350 GW of new capacity is still proposed across 33 countries, and an additional 192 GW of capacity is under construction,” the report notes. “China’s pre-construction and construction capacity surpassed the rest of the world’s in 2021, and the gap widened in 2022. New coal capacity under development in China increased by 38% (266 GW to 366 GW), while the capacity in the rest of the world decreased by 20% (214 GW to 172 GW). China now accounts for two-thirds (68%) of global capacity under development, up from 55% a year ago.”
Wednesday’s analysis follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest warning that burning existing fossil fuels will consume the world’s remaining “carbon budget,” or the maximum amount of planet-heating pollution compatible with preventing temperature rise from exceeding 1.5°C. The IPCC has made clear the need for “rapid and deep, and in most cases immediate greenhouse gas emission reductions.”
Upon the publication of the IPCC’s assessment two weeks ago, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres outlined “an ‘Accelerated Agenda‘ renewing calls for an immediate end to new coal, and for a phaseout of existing coal by 2030 in developed countries and 2040 in the rest of the world,” GEM’s new report points out. “Under such a scenario, only 70% of OECD operating coal capacity is currently on pace (330 GW), and outside the OECD, only 6% of coal capacity has a known closure date before 2040 (93 GW).”
“Urgent action is necessary to ensure an end to coal and a fighting chance at a livable climate,” the report adds. “To accomplish this, countries need to translate announcements into plant-by-plant retirement plans as well as ramp up phaseout commitments. Details on how current and future policies and funds will be implemented to impact coal retirement dates and ensure a swift and equitable end to new coal will be essential.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
