With the Australian general election largely done and dusted, and with a clear (if still-to-be-quantified) mandate, Anthony Albanese faces greater and more immediate international challenges than any Australian Prime Minister since the Cold War began.
Between climate change and an increasingly truculent — not to say belligerent — China, Pacific island countries are searching for reassurance, safety and support. Reassurance that we are valued and respected, and that a rules based order has the same rules for everyone else as it has for us.
Safety, from the increasingly violent buffeting of climate change, and from the risk of losing our balance in the increasingly straitened geopolitical space we occupy. And support for our own self-determination, territorial integrity and survival.
Each if these will have significant impacts on the Albanese government’s domestic policies.
Each will have lasting impact on the Pacific islands region.
Let’s hope they’ve got a plan in place. They do not have the luxury of time.
Part of this fight will have to happen while they’re still strapping on the gloves. We’ve already looked at some of the challenges Penny Wong is likely to face when she (almost certainly) becomes Foreign Minister.
In this issue, we’ll enumerate some of the immediate challenges faced by Wong and her cabinet colleagues.
PIF Secretariat in shambles
The Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat is in a shambles right now, in no small part because of Australia’s call for a vote during the selection of its most recent Secretary-General, rather than enduring more painstaking but traditional method of consensus-building our leaders learned in the village meeting house.
The voting split the membership, and the Micronesian contingent still have not reconciled themselves completely.
There is little Australia can do to fix that. But they can offer unconditional support to the body itself, and for the idea it embodies. They can formally uphold the Boe Declaration, which lists climate change as the single greatest security threat faced by the Pacific islands region, by re-basing (sorry) their security stance on this premise.
They can fund and support the Blue Pacific strategy. They can fund the Secretariat’s climate indemnity scheme. They can show our reluctant leaders that the PIF is worth being part of.
More importantly, they can promote our voices in Washington and at the UN. Our plight on the world stage resembles the challenges women have faced since… forever. Ignored, subverted, explained to, denied agency over our own body politic. We don’t need people to speak for us. We need people to listen when we speak for ourselves.
Endorsement and sponsorship for voices like those of our esteemed Pacific Elders would go a long way to achieving that.
Even more ambitiously: Is a Pacific COP possible? I’d be pleasantly surprised if this Labor government proved willing to spend the time and effort reaching a landmark such as this.
Port Vila’s Bauerfield airport … flooded for the first time in living memory. Image: The Village Explainer
Immense time, resources needed The time and resources required would be immense, and would compete with dozens of looming challenges in the foreign relations/defence space.
Despite the massive victory it could bring, the opportunity costs are immense. If a COP were achieved, it would build a legacy that could be relied on for years to come, but as we’ve stated before, all this would have to be achieved with a lethargic, hidebound DFAT bureaucracy.
It’s sadly much easier to imagine Australia lurching from crisis to crisis, as it has for decades.
In terms of bilateral relations, the stakes are even higher. It is clear now that China intends to build on its perceived momentum in the Pacific, and to test Labor’s mettle from the very start.
Wang Yi’s tour of four (or five?) Pacific island nations is only days away. His diplomats have been working hard to replicate the success they achieved with Solomon Islands PM Manasseh Sogavare, who signed an unprecedented security agreement that would allow personnel to be stationed in-country and ships to visit and re-victual.
It doesn’t appear that Wang will get what he wants. The pressure is on in Kiribati, but the government there has paid a hefty political price for its whole-throated support of China.
Since 2020, it’s been feeling much more phlegmatic than it was in the past.
Chinese base in Kiribati a worry
Good thing, too. A Chinese base in Kiribati is one that even I worry about. Having AA/AD capabilities just a hop, skip and a jump from Honolulu would force a fundamental re-evaluation of the US Navy’s Pacific stance.
I’ve pooh-poohed talk of bases in Vanuatu and Solomon Islands in the past. I worry about Kiribati.
Vanuatu, at least, has managed to keep dancing on the head of an increasingly pointy pin. Resisting pressure at the highest level to include an overt security component in Wang Yi’s gift bag, it has instead signed on to a massive upgrade for its Luganville airport, which will allow wide-body aircraft to fly there directly from Asia.
The island of Espiritu Santo has some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. An upgrade to its international airport is part of Vanuatu’s 2018 tourism development strategy.
Yes, it’s undeniably true that any airport that can handle an A330 NEO can also handle a C17 or a Xi’an Y-20. But Vanuatu has — for the moment, at least — avoided explicitly allowing any such flights, except possibly for humanitarian reasons.
Vanuatu’s example is illuminating. They appear to have translated a high-stakes geopolitical gambit into an economic development gain that fits the country’s plans, and which will provide a massive economic boost to its moribund tourist industry.
But they are faced with increased stridency from all sides, and if they lose the space to manoeuvre, either through rising geopolitical tensions or because climate change pushes us past the point of resilience, then we will be more at risk ourselves, and more of a risk to our neighbours.
A precarious truth in the Pacific
This precarious truth applies even more so in Solomon Islands, in PNG, in Fiji … in fact everywhere in the region. Security begins with stability and predictability. We need to know we’ll be around in a generation’s time before we make any other promises.
And we need to know that Australia’s promises will be kept this time, rather than sacrificed at the altar of domestic politics, as they have under every Liberal and Labor government since the millennium began.
Can Penny Wong unilaterally undo these all tensions? No. But she can fight for a foreign policy that changes Australia’s trajectory, rather than one that attempts to change ours.
Rather than trying to align us to Australia, she can fight to align Australia to confront our common existential threats, to listen to how we expect to address them, and then to be a proper friend, and act on our words.
The Village Explainer by Dan McGarry is a semi-regular newsletter containing analysis and insight focusing on under-reported aspects of Pacific societies, politics and economics. Republished with permission.
Exclusive: Politicians accuse China of organising a ‘Potemkin-style tour’ for Michelle Bachelet
A group of 40 politicians from 18 countries have told the UN high commissioner for human rights that she risks causing lasting damage to the credibility of her office if she goes ahead with a visit to China’s Xinjiang region next week.
Michelle Bachelet is scheduled to visit Kashgar and Ürümqi in Xinjiang during her trip, which starts on Monday. Human rights organisations say China has forced an estimated 1 million or more people into internment camps and prisons in the region. The US and a number of other western countries have described China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority living there as genocidal, a charge Beijing calls the “lie of the century”.
You first have to lose an election on principle if you want to win one on principle.
This was how Labor rationalised the miscalculations that led to its “Don’s Party” disappointment in 1969, followed by the 1972 triumph of the “It’s Time” campaign.
Half a century later, the idea of sticking with unpopular policy seems romantic, unthinkable. Principles are not just old-hat in an era of professionalised politics, but absurd.
Swamped by voter-attitude metrics, modern democratic leaders are not leaders in the traditional sense. Rather, they are followers.
Followers of market researchers and media proprietors who disabuse them of ambitious conceits like national leadership, or anything that might tempt them to make changes based on electoral judgment, the national interest, or even ideology.
Still, a few months ago, one starry-eyed fool (to wit, this author) described the looming 2022 federal election as the most important national choice to be put before voters since that 1972 hinge-point.
If it was an invitation to Labor leader Anthony Albanese to paint in bold brushstrokes, he didn’t receive it.
Instead, Labor’s risk-averse policy presentation has largely mirrored the reform-shy government it seeks to replace. This makes for the least policy-divergent choice in the 50 years since 1972.
The 2022 election more closely resembles a velodrome match-sprint where the two riders have almost stopped on the banked section, each terrified of leading off and being overtaken in the final dash for the line.
Whitlam’s re-imagining The 1972 comparison gets even harder when you look at former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s first month in office.
He promised to establish diplomatic relations with Peking (now Beijing), following his audacious trip to “Red China” in 1971. Imagine this (or any) opposition making a play of similar foreign policy gravity today.
Whitlam’s bold Australian re-imagining, which historian Stuart McIntyre later characterised as “a nationalism attuned to internationalism”, kick-started a lucrative economic co-dependency that has propelled Australian prosperity to this day. Hungry for commodities and services imports, China’s staggering growth has also insulated Australia through global shocks like the Asian Financial Crisis, Global Financial Crisis, and the covid-19 pandemic.
While the Coalition would no doubt have come to it eventually, Whitlam acted without hesitation or American permission. Crucially, he backed his capacity to explain it to the country, despite the danger of being tagged as soft on communism.
Again, leaders taking decisions and then relying on their persuasive powers to win arguments seems fanciful amid the timidity of contemporary politics.
A shot of adrenaline In those first days, Whitlam also ended conscription, withdrew from Vietnam, granted independence to Papua New Guinea, and set about ratifying long-deferred international conventions on basic labour conditions, racial non-discrimination, and nuclear weapons proliferation.
With his pared back, don’t-frighten-the-horses agenda, Albanese might have less to do over a whole term, and Whitlam was only getting started.
Before his government crashed, Whitlam would end the White Australia Policy, scrap royal honours, appoint the first women’s adviser, reform draconian divorce laws, champion multiculturalism, dramatically ratchet up funding for the arts and humanities, abolish university fees, revive urban development, and more.
To a slumbering post-war Australia, it was a shot of late 20th Century adrenaline and the results were startling. Australian historian Manning Clark described it as the “end of the Ice Age”.
But in 1975, it ended in ignominy. As McIntyre later observed, “the golden age was over”.
History rhyming, not repeating So far, the case for equivalence between 1972 and 2022 is not obvious, right?
But what if it is not Labor that now represents the radical option but the status quo? What if changing governments offers the safer, more conventional course for nervous voters? As Mark Twain noted, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese … speaking to the media at a Perth hospital on day 36 of the campaign. Image: Lukas Coch/AAP
Labor’s 1972 manifesto was inspiring, but it was the urgency with which its modernising promise was articulated after 23 years of Coalition rule that had impatient voters energised. The McMahon Coalition government was a no ideas factory in the lead-up to the 1972 election, although it did not exhibit the insidious corrosive streak of its modern-day equivalent.
This is the rhyme. While the 2022 election is not about the magisterial reform possibilities of an incoming government, it is about the urgent need to rescue longstanding governing norms around transparency, accountability, ministerial standards, trust and the honesty, and of course, the viability of the public service.
It is in this critical sense that the two elections might be compared.
Divide and dither The radicalism absent from Labor’s 2022 manifesto is made up for in the unspoken but no-less transformative erosion of standards by the government. The Coalition is primarily intent on the political dividends of division, on courting the applause of media vassals, religious conservatives, and a populist Nationals rump.
Morrison’s approach can be described as divide and dither.
It finds its expression in the Coalition’s reflexive recourse to politics over policy — frequently at the direct expense of the national interest such as in the weaponisation of climate change and more recently, the attempts to weaken the outward presentation of domestic bipartisanship on national security.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison … visiting a Tasmanian paving business on day 39. Image: Mick Tsikas/AAP
The former is a classic of the genre. Morrison’s hollow embrace of net zero by 2050 ahead of Glasgow last year was greeted by political insiders as a triumph of prime ministerial skill, when all it really did was expose how utterly pointless the Coalition’s decade-long negation had been.
Moreover, it brought no revision to interim targets nor adjusted any other policy architecture.
Its real aim — in which it was successful — was the neutralisation of a Coalition stance that had morphed into a clear electoral negative.
The latter, national security, was tickled along last Friday in Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s ultra-earnest press conference transparently called to (re)frighten voters about a Chinese “warship” that was “hugging” Australia’s north-western coast at a distance of 400 kilometres.
Manufactured wars and textimonials Divide and dither revels in manufactured culture wars over transgender teens and identity politics, fumes about supposed attacks on faith, and white-ants efforts to build support for a First Nations Voice in the Constitution.
Witness the government’s pillorying responses to anti-discrimination campaigners with dismissive throw-aways like “all lives matter”.
Divide and dither’s existence was spectacularly laid bare in a series of explosive “textimonials” regarding Morrison’s character from his own colleagues — people much closer to him than voters, including Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. These described him variously as a “hypocrite and a liar”. A New South Wales Liberal senator called him a “bully with no moral compass”.
It’s there, too, in the vicious campaigns against “fake” independent women – simply for standing for office. In a democracy.
The Liberals’ refusal to acknowledge and address female under-representation has invited the very rebellion it now faces from high-calibre female candidates in safe Liberal seats.
The overall impression is of a government shamelessly enabled by a pseudo-independent media that makes no serious attempt to govern for all Australians.
No change means no consequences In light of these multiple failures, in opting for no change, Australian voters would be saying there is no cost for governing like this.
Albanese has not had an ambitious campaign, unlike his predecessor Bill Shorten, who lost the 2019 election to Morrison. Image: Toby Zerna/AAP
The Coalition’s take-out would be — keep misleading and pork-barrelling and fomenting useless culture wars.
Policy failure over the last eight years — including a massive cut to the ABC’s international funding — has weakened Australia’s voice in the Pacific to its lowest ebb since the Menzies government established the first radio shortwave service across the region more than 80 years ago. Now, with China’s media expansion and the recent Solomon Islands crisis, it is obvious that Australia can’t afford to waste any more time in properly re-establishing its media presence and engagement with our Pacific neighbours. A new parliamentary report outlines a way forward, but the Coalition government has not yet pledged any substantial funding. Labor has promised an extra $8 million a year for the ABC’s international operations if it wins the federal election tomorrow. Former ABC international journalist Graeme Dobell, now with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), outlines the latest developments.
ANALYSIS:By Graeme Dobell
Australia’s polity grapples with the need to remake and rebuild our media voice in the South Pacific.
Domestic political battles and budget cuts have degraded the central role Australia played in islands journalism in the 20th century. Australia’s media voice in the South Pacific is at its weakest since Robert Menzies launched the shortwave radio service in 1939.
Now we must reimagine that role and empower that voice for the 21st century — a new model of talking with, not to, the South Pacific.
The policy failure that has so weakened our voice in the past decade had one deeply familiar element — recurring Oz amnesia about our interests, influence and values in the islands.
See the amnesia lament offered by a Canberra wise owl, Nick Warner, in his Financial Review op-ed about “Australia’s long Pacific stupor’”: “For two generations, since the end of World War II, Australia has squandered the chance to build deep and enduring relations with our neighbours in the South Pacific. And now it’s almost too late.”
This is a candid view from the heart of the Canberra system. You don’t get much more plugged in and powerful than Warner, who served as our top diplomat in Papua New Guinea, led the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands, and then headed the Department of Defence, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and the Office of National Assessments.
‘Stupor’ history framing
Warner’s “stupor” history frames his diagnosis of how China could clinch a security treaty with Solomon Islands:
“China is now seemingly entrenched in Solomons and will also be looking for other opportunities for a base elsewhere in the Pacific. But, for better or worse, Pacific politics seldom provide certainty. It’s not too late for Australia to shore up its place in the South Pacific and to protect its strategic interests.”
The need to “shore up our place” that Warner points to brings us back to a specific example of the stupor/amnesia — the degrading of our media voice in the islands and the role of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
In the South Pacific, Radio Australia and the international television service, ABC Australia, still do great work. But they have only a third of the budget they enjoyed a decade ago. Underline that stupor/amnesia fact: spending on the ABC as our Indo-Pacific media voice has been cut by two- thirds.
Political payback in Canberra produced a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight tragedy in the South Pacific. The Abbott aim was to scratch the anti-Aunty itch, but he badly wounded a major instrument of Australian foreign policy. The damage was compounded when the ABC turned off shortwave in 2017; here again was a domestic focus that damaged our regional interests.
Aunty as the villain
In this long-running melodrama with elements of dark comedy, a valiant ABC is also a victim — with foes instead seeing Aunty as villain. What a long run the drama has had: three generations of Murdochs have warred with Aunty, starting in the 1930s with Keith Murdoch’s bitter fight against the creation of an independent ABC news service.
Labor’s idea is a good first step to restart Australia’s conversation with the islands, Jemima Garrett writes, but it “seems to be simply pushing out more ‘Australian content’ and crowding the regional airwaves with ‘Australian voices’. This is ‘soft power’ in a crude form – a one-way monologue when what is needed is a dialogue — a 21st century conversation in which Australia and Australians talk ‘with’ and not ‘to’ our Pacific neighbours.”
Preferring hard power to soft power, Prime Minister Scott Morrison called Labor’s policy “farcical”, saying that in the South Pacific, “I sent in the AFP [Australian Federal Police]. The Labor Party wants to send in the ABC, when it comes to their Pacific solution.”
Australia, of course, needs it all—the AFP and the Australian Defence Force, but also the ABC.
In this argument, I declare my love of Aunty. I worked as a journalist for Radio Australia and the ABC (1975–2008) and had the huge privilege of spending much time as a correspondent in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.
I did break the habit of a lifetime by putting the boot into Aunty when it switched off shortwave. The ABC had damaged its international role, set by parliamentary charter, in favour of its domestic responsibilities.
Soft-power thinking Labor’s soft-power thinking is work in the minor key compared to the recent effort of parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade.
In the final sitting week before the start of the election campaign, the committee issued its report “Strengthening Australia’s relationships in the Pacific”. The media recommendations were the most ambitious to come out of Canberra in many a day:
“The Committee notes the media environment within the Pacific is becoming more contested, and recognises Australia has a national interest in maintaining a visible and active media and broadcasting presence there. The Committee recommends the Australian Government considers steps necessary to expand Australia’s media footprint in the Pacific, including through:
– expanding the provision of Australian public and commercial television and digital content across the Pacific, noting existing efforts by the PacificAus TV initiative and Pacific Australia;
– reinvigorating Radio Australia, which is well regarded in the region, to boost its digital appeal; and
– consider[ing] governance arrangements for an Australian International Media Corporation to formulate and oversee the strategic direction of Australia’s international media presence in the Pacific.’
I own up to the idea for the creation of an Australian international media corporation, contained in my submission [No 21] to the inquiry. The committee’s findings and the idea of a new international body, to build on the ABC foundations, will be the next column in these musings on the Oz media voice in the South Pacific.
This article was first published in The Strategist journal of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). Graeme Dobell is ASPI’s journalist fellow and this is republished with the author’s permission.
Multi-role combat vehicles (MRCVs) give a good range of options (and savings) over fleets of role specific combat vehicles. The main battle tank, infantry fighting vehicle, and self-propelled howitzer are commonly looked upon as defining an army’s combat capabilities. These are, however, highly mission role specific systems which also carry a considerable support burden. Their […]
On 11 May 2022, an Israeli sniper fired at the head of the veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh as she reported on an Israeli military raid on a refugee settlement in Jenin (part of the Occupied Palestine Territories). The snipers continued to fire at the journalists who were with her, preventing them from aiding her. When she finally arrived at Ibn Sina Hospital, she was pronounced dead.
After Abu Aqleh’s death, the Israeli military raided her home in occupied East Jerusalem, where they confiscated Palestinian flags and attempted to prevent mourners from playing Palestinian songs. At her funeral on 13 May, the Israel Defence Forces attacked the massive turnout of family and supporters – including her pallbearers – and grabbed Palestinian flags held by the crowd. The murder of Abu Aqleh, who had been a highly respected journalist for Al Jazeera since 1997, and the violence by the Israeli forces at her funeral reinforce the apartheid nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Palestinian leader Dr Hanan Ashrawi tweeted that the attack on Palestinian flags, posters, and slogans exposes ‘the insecurity of the oppressor’. The assault on these cultural icons, Ashwari went on to explain, shows Israelis’ ‘fear of our symbols, fear of our grief & anger, fear of our existence’.
The raid that Abu Aqleh was covering when she was killed took place in Jenin, the home of Palestine’s remarkable Freedom Theatre. On 4 April 2011, Juliano Mer-Khamis, one of the theatre’s founders, was shot dead not far from where Abu Aqleh was killed. ‘Israel is destroying the neurological system of [Palestinian] society’, Mer-Khamis said, and this neurological system ‘is culture, identity, communication … We have to stand up again on our feet’, he said. ‘We are now living on our knees’.
Front: Actors of a Beijing opera troupe perform. Back: Drama students of the Lu Xun Academy of Arts rehearse a play in a structure they built themselves.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]
Eight decades ago, in the heart of China, hundreds of Chinese intellectuals and artists from cities such as Shanghai gathered in Yan’an, which had become a red base for the Communist Party of China (CPC). In 1942, in and around the caves of this city, a serious discussion took place about the paralysis of Chinese culture in the face of three serious challenges: the sclerotic nature of the Chinese feudal system, the viciousness of Western-led imperialism, and the harshness of the Japanese fascist occupation. Cultural workers had to confront these facts of history as well as the historical tasks that they presented. In Yan’an, the debate circled around the confounding assertion that artists could work without confronting the major historical processes of our time. Imagine, for example, a Palestinian artist who works today without being gripped by the force of Israeli apartheid.
The CPC’s head of the propaganda department, Kai Feng, invited artists to gather in the central Party office for three weeks to debate the state of art and culture during the revolutionary war. Mao Zedong, a leader of the CPC, listened to the interventions, made his own commentary, and the following year published Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Our dossier no. 52 (May 2022), Go to Yan’an: Culture and National Liberation, is an assessment of the Yan’an debate and its implication for our times. The dossier, illustrated by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s art department, looks back at the debates in Yan’an in order to illuminate our conjuncture and insist on the centrality of cultural work for our movements today.
Top: A singing troupe performs the Yangge opera, Brother and Sister Reclaiming the Wasteland. Bottom: Fine arts students take sketching lessons.
Credit: Yan’an Literature and Art Memorial Hall [延安文艺纪念馆] and Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]
Artists root their imagination in their lived experiences. The Freedom Theatre in Jenin does not perform plays that are a mirror of café life in Tel Aviv or New York; their plays go deep into the imagination of occupied Palestine. In Yan’an, our dossier explains, ‘urban intellectuals … had to go through their own transformation in order to close the gap between themselves and the peasant masses. This transformation was at the heart of the Yan’an Forum … together, they could turn into an effective political force’.
On 23 May 1942, Mao took the floor at the Yan’an Forum to offer his concluding remarks to the artists and intellectuals that had left cities such as Shanghai and made their way into the interior. Here, Mao said, new forms of life were being created, a new buoyancy that straightened the spines of the people and produced new forms of social life. ‘To arrive in a base area’, Mao said, ‘is to arrive in a period of rule unprecedented in the several thousand years of Chinese history, one where workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the popular masses hold power … the eras of the past are gone forever and will never return’. He meant that the imagination must be stretched to tell stories of and for the newly upright Chinese people. The purpose of art, the intellectuals at Yan’an argued, is to be relevant to these major historical events.
To make his point, Mao quoted the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), who understood these changes and reflected on them in his poetry:
Fierce-browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers,
Head-bowed, like a willing ox I serve the children.
Mao described the enemy, these ‘thousand pointing fingers’, as the vampirish imperialists and cadaverous feudal landlords. The ‘children’ were the working classes, the peasantry, and the popular masses. Lu Xun’s words show that the artist – the ‘willing ox’ – must never submit to the old granite block of oppression, Mao explained; he or she must be willing to accompany the people in their struggle for freedom.
It is the struggle that enabled the popular masses to stand upright, to refuse to bow down to the centuries of humiliation of seeing their labour subordinated to the accumulation of wealth by the elites. Artistic practice and intellectual activity must reflect these broad changes which are present today in China’s mass campaign to abolish absolute poverty, in Indian farmers’ refusal to submit to the Uberisation of their livelihoods, in South African shack dwellers’ bravery to stand firm against political killings, and in the massive mobilisation of Palestinians at the funeral of Shireen Abu Aqleh.
Yangge singing troupes perform for the people at the 1943 Spring Festival celebration.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台] and China Youth Daily [中国青年报]
The debates at Yan’an cleared the way for artists and writers to germinate intense cultural activity, to disseminate new ideas into the cultural domain, to lift the conversation from the day-to-day to new horizons, and to create new political spaces and epochs. This cultural work called upon intellectuals and artists to focus on the future, no longer merely concerned with their own temperament (‘art for art’s sake’), to work for a new horizon, and to inaugurate a new humanity. There was no obligation to collapse their work solely into a political project, since that would reduce their capacity to go beyond the dilemmas posed by the present. Artists and intellectuals needed to support movements, but also to retain the space to create a passionate fervour in society that could fuel a new culture.
Mao’s interventions at Yan’an made it clear that intellectual and artistic activity would not by themselves change the world. Artists and intellectuals allude to reality, draw attention to certain problems, and provide an understanding of them. But art alone cannot remedy all problems. For that, it is necessary to turn to the organisations and movements that churn society into something new. If art forms must carry the enormous burden of political theory and praxis, they are often diminished. Art must breathe in the sensibilities of the working class and the peasantry and breathe out new cultural propositions. Alongside the tide of humanity that refuses to submit to oppression, this leads us into new possibilities.
Malak Mattar (Palestine), Last Scene Before Flying with the Dove to Paradise, 2019.
Asma Naghnaghiye, a young girl who participated in a Freedom Theatre camp, spoke of the beauty of cultural work ‘In one of the exercises in the theatre I imitated a bird who flies above my neighbourhood and then above Jenin and then above the sea. It was a like a dream’. That dream of the future converts the present into a place of struggle.
It’s very cute how empire apologists talk about driving Putin from Ukraine so there can be peace, like that’s a real thing. Like if it happened the war would just stop, and the US alliance wouldn’t with absolute certainty continue the attack and work to topple Moscow by any means necessary.
There’s zero reason to take on faith the MSM narrative that Ukraine is kicking Putin’s ass and victory is imminent, but even if that did happen there’d be less than zero reason to believe the fighting would stop there. If anything it would get much more dangerous from that point.
This doesn’t end with Russia leaving Ukraine, it ends with Putin being replaced with a Yeltsin-like US vassal and the eventual balkanization of the Russian Federation. Really it doesn’t end until Beijing has been subverted and the US empire secures total global hegemony. Or when the empire collapses. Or when we all get nuked and die.
Marjorie Taylor Greene being better than progressive Democrats on Ukraine is noteworthy not because it makes Greene look good but because it makes those progressive Democrats look really, really, really bad.
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People who think Tucker Carlson is fighting the establishment are exactly the same as people who think “the Squad” is fighting the establishment. Exactly the same. Same people, slightly different bumper stickers.
It’s obvious that every member of the “populist right” who’s now getting praise for being correct about Ukraine will function as virulent empire propagandists once the imperial crosshairs inevitably move from Moscow to Beijing. We know this because of their rhetoric about China today.
Do you know what happens to mainstream media figures who provide real resistance to empire agendas? They get fired. Ask Phil Donahue or Chris Hedges. The fact that Tucker Carlson is a top pundit on imperial media (Murdoch media no less) means he’s an agent of the empire.
This belief that there are factions of the mainstream media working against the empire is as naive as the belief that there are factions of mainstream US politicians working against the empire. The empire doesn’t platform people who pose a threat to it. This isn’t complicated. The TV man is not your friend.
I run into far too many people who oppose war and can’t understand why I’m saying things about issues like China which disagree with what they’re being told by their “populist antiwar” heroes on the right. The propaganda campaign against China isn’t going to get better; it’s going to get much, much worse, and it’s important to start fighting it early. Because it’s going to be bad.
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There's actually a very well-known international law enforcement body whose job it is to do this, but the US doesn't recognize its authority. The US literally thinks it owns the world. https://t.co/xXEnzsh759
They’re not worried about the spread of disinformation, they’re worried about the spread of information. Your rulers are not concerned that you’ll start learning wrong things about Covid or Ukraine, they are worried you’ll start learning true things about your rulers.
The imperial power structure which runs Silicon Valley, and which is imprisoning Julian Assange, and which literally just admitted it’s circulating disinformation about Russia, is not worried about disinformation. And it’s hilarious that anyone is pretending otherwise.
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“No no you don’t understand, if the US and its allies didn’t give weapons to Al Qaeda and Nazi militias, the bad guys might win.”
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The one single time the US had a monopoly on nuclear weapons at the same time it was at war, it used them. Not because it needed to, but as a show of force. That was the dawn of the modern US empire. That’s how it was born. And it never got any saner from there.
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There is a kind of poetic beauty, I guess in the way the US empire was birthed onto the world stage by a nuclear blast and will probably die in the same way.
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Psychological abuse is still abuse. Psychological tyranny is still tyranny. The fact that a large amount of the tyranny in so-called free democracies expresses as mass-scale psychological manipulation does not make it less tyrannical, it just makes it more photogenic.
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All of religion and almost all spirituality is glorified escapism at best and tyrannical psychological domination at worst, and humanity would be better off without it. But what remains just might save the world.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.
If the conflicts of interest are real, and the stakes are felt to be high enough, then war between the United States and China is a real possibility, and our foreign policy must be oriented toward avoiding it.
On 16 May 2022 Safeguard Defenders announced the opening of its first Asian office in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei.
“With our focus on the decline in human rights in China and other authoritarian states in the region, Taiwan was an obvious choice because of its open society and geographic proximity. Only recently emerging from its own authoritarian past, this progressive democracy has now become a popular base for civil society and media, particularly as Hong Kong’s human rights situation rapidly deteriorates under Beijing’s control.”
The story behind Safeguard Defenders goes back to 2009, the year when a small NGO called China Action was founded in Beijing by human rights activists Peter Dahlin from Sweden and Michael Caster from the U.S. and a small group of Chinese rights lawyers and other human rights defenders (HRD). ,,China Action was shuttered in 2016 after Chinese authorities targeted it in a major crackdown and when many of its staff and partners were detained, disappeared or imprisoned, including Peter. The foundation for Safeguard Defenders was laid in 2016, and was publicly launched in 2017. The organisation has inherited the mission of China Action, but with an expanded scope to support the survival and effectiveness of civil society and HRDs in some of Asia’s most hostile environments, including China.
Coming in the next few months, Safeguard Defenders will have several key and ground-breaking reports on China on issues including the practice of sending political prisoners to psychiatric hospitals, the latest violations of human rights in the name of Covid, and how Beijing has weaponized exit bans. It will also be launching a brand new website. Follow on Twitter.
American rhetoric during the first Cold War relied on an idealized image of U.S. institutions. Today, political elites are more likely to emphasize their vulnerability.
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research releases a new dossier on the legacy of the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art eight decades later.
On 2 May 1942, hundreds of China’s top writers, artists, and communist leaders gathered to discuss the most urgent cultural questions of the time. Dossier no. 52, Go to Yan’an! Culture and National Liberation, explores the history and enduring legacy of the three-week forum as well as the text that Mao Zedong published the following year summarising the fruit that it bore, entitled Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Why did tens of thousands of artists and writers make the long journey to the remote city of Yan’an, what were the intellectual debates of the time, and how did the cultural developments help bring the Chinese people and nation to revolution?
Talks is perhaps one of the most important systematisations emerging from the Third World on the role of art and culture and its theory, practice, mistakes, and lessons. It can be read as an exploration of Marxist aesthetics in the national liberation tradition, a proposal for socialist cultural policy, a manual for cadres carrying out cultural tasks, and a piece of literary theory or literature itself. Eight decades have passed since Mao gave his lectures on literature and art. What relevance does the Yan’an spirit hold today, especially for artists, writers, and intellectuals who seek to serve people’s struggles?
Don’t miss our latest dossier, Go to Yan’an: Culture and National Liberation.
The Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (1942) called on intellectuals to serve the people, with the development of mass culture that ensured that peasants’ subjectivity was at the centre of China’s Revolution. … The story of Yan’an is not just a China story; it belongs to the Third World, to twentieth century history, to the socialist movement, and to all the poor people in the world.
– Lu Xinyu, professor at East China Normal University
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. It seeks to bridge gaps in knowledge about the political economy and social hierarchy to facilitate the work of political movements and engage in the ‘battle of ideas’ to fight against bourgeois ideology, which has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.
The Kanak people will not accept France’s attempt to “recolonise” New Caledonia, a pro-independence delegate has told the United Nations.
Addressing a UN Decolonisation Committee seminar on the Pacific in Saint Lucia, Dimitri Qenegei said since 2020 the French President, Emmanuel Macron, and his Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu had been taking unilateral decisions.
Qenegei said the signatories to the 1998 Noumea Accord stopped having their annual meetings in 2019 and the date for the referendum on independence last year was set without the consent of the Kanak people.
Paris decided to go ahead with the third and last referendum last December under the Noumea Accord despite pleas by the pro-independence camp to delay the vote because of the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the Kanak people.
France insisted that the timetable for the vote had to be upheld.
Amid a boycott by the pro-independence camp, fewer than half of the voters took part in the referendum but of those who did vote more than 96 percent were in favour of staying with France.
Qenegei said Macron declared after the referendum that New Caledonia showed it wanted to stay French although it was known that 90 percent of Kanaks wanted independence.
Claims of manipulation and lies To therefore proclaim that New Caledonia chose to stay French was not legitimate, he said, adding that it was a “manipulation and a lie” by France and the heirs of the colonial system.
He said France, as the administrative power, had reorientated its policies to the methods of bygone centuries to hold on to its non-autonomous territories.
Qenegei said France had reneged on its undertaking given in 1998 to accompany New Caledonia to its decolonisation.
He pointed out that in case of three rejections of independence in the referenda under the Noumea Accord, the political parties needed to be convened to discuss the situation.
Qenegei said nowhere did it say that in a case of three “no” votes, New Caledonia remained French.
He said on the international stage, France had been losing influence, which prompted President Macron in 2018 to work towards an Indo-Pacific axis from Paris to Noumea that included India and Australia.
However, he said France suffered a first humiliation when Australia backed out of a multi-billion dollar contract for French submarines.
New Caledonia becoming independent would be another blow to the military axis aimed at containing China, he said.
Parallel drawn with China Qenegei drew a parallel between China and France, saying France decried the possibility of Chinese troops in Solomon Islands as imperialism while France had placed troops in New Caledonia to “contain the Kanaks”.
While France criticised China’s lending policies, Qenegei said France regarded its loans to New Caledonia, given with interest to be paid, as something different.
Qenegei said the recent French policies were nothing but a return to the source of colonisation.
He warned that France’s intention to open up the electoral rolls to French people who arrived after 1998 was the ultimate weapon to drown the Kanak people and recolonise New Caledonia.
The Kanaks would be made to disappear and that would not be accepted but inevitably lead to conflict.
Qenegei said his outline was not a threat a but a call for help to bring the administrative power to its senses.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The Kanak people won’t accept France’s attempt to recolonise New Caledonia, a pro-independence delegate has told the United Nations. https://t.co/UBRq27EyTi
One in 25 people sentenced to prison on terrorism-related charges in Konasheher, Xinjiang province, where Communist party represses Muslim minority
Nearly one in 25 people in a county of the Uyghur heartland of China has been sentenced to prison on terrorism-related charges, in what is the highest known imprisonment rate in the world, an Associated Press review of leaked data shows.
A list obtained and partially verified by the Associated Press cites the names of more than 10,000 Uyghurs sent to prison in just Konasheher county, one of dozens in southern Xinjiang. In recent years, China has waged a brutal crackdown on the Uyghurs, a largely Muslim minority, which it has described as a “war on terror”.
The first in-depth multi-year study looking at correlations between dairy consumption and cancer rates has been undertaken in China. Findings point to a higher risk of liver and female breast cancer in people eating larger amounts of dairy.
Previous studies have focussed on Western countries and suggested that dairy can lower colorectal cancer likelihood but increase prostate risk. No concrete connections have been made to breast cancer or other varieties. Inconsistent results have been explained by the variety of dairy consumption levels, types of dairy eaten and individuals’ abilities to metabolise the products.
Photo by Cats Coming at Pexels.
How the study was conducted
A research team from Oxford Population Health at Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences conducted the study. They were looking specifically into whether dairy products affect the risk of cancer in Chinese individuals, using data collected from more than 510,000 individuals. Information was originally collated for the China Kadoorie Biobank Study.
The participants were 59 percent female and 41 percent male, aged between 30 and 79 across ten regions in China, with everybody completing a questionnaire to reveal how often they eat specific foods, including dairy. From here, respondents were grouped as regular dairy eaters (at least once per week), monthly and those who never or very rarely consume dairy. Participants were followed for an average of 11 years.
Alongside dairy consumption, other factors known to affect cancer risk were assessed, including age, wealth, gender, lifestyle factors and other pre-existing conditions. All new cancer cases were recorded, including those that were not fatal. The results were published in BMC Medicine.
Photo by National Cancer Institute at Unsplash.
Does dairy increase the risk of cancer?
China does not traditionally enjoy a lot of dairy. Just 20 percent of participants were considered as regular consumers, followed by 11 percent eating it on a monthly basis and 69 percent claiming non-consumer status. Of those that did consume dairy, milk was the primary source, with an average daily amount registered as 38 grams overall and 81 grams in regular consumers. For context, the U.K. average is 300 grams a day.
29,277 new cases of cancer were recorded during the study. The largest proportion was lung cancer, followed by female breast, with 2,582 cases. Stomach, colorectal and liver cancer all racked up more than 3,000 cases. Individuals who regularly ate dairy were found to have a significantly increased risk of breast and liver cancer. For each 50g consumed, the likelihood increased by 17 and 12 percent, respectively. Increased risk of lymphoma was also noted, though not to a significant degree. No correlation was found between dairy consumption and colorectal, prostate or other cancers.
Photo by National Cancer Institute at Unsplash.
What the findings mean
Liver and breast cancer are the most common forms within China. Both account for more than 350,000 new cases each year and while the new study cannot prove causation linked to dairy consumption, common-sense connections have been made. One explanation is that growth factors contained in dairy might accelerate cell proliferation. Female hormones present in cow’s milk have previously been floated as having a potential impact on breast cancer risk, meanwhile the fats contained therein could impact liver cancer likelihood.
As an added complication, most Chinese individuals cannot effectively metabolise dairy products due to lack of lactase, an enzyme that breaks down the sugar lactose, found in all conventional dairy. This can lead to a process whereby dairy is broken down into core ingredients that can also affect cancer risk. This poses an increasingly large problem, as dairy consumption is on the rise in China.
“This was the first major study to investigate the link between dairy products and cancer risk in a Chinese population,” Dr Maria Kakkoura, nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford Population Health and lead author of the study said in a statement. “Further studies are needed to validate these current findings, establish if these associations are causal, and investigate the potential underlying mechanisms involved.”
Photo by Becerra Govea Photo from Pexels.
Putting animal-based diets under the microscope
The average daily consumption of meat in China is twice the recommended 40 to 75 grams per day. Alongside the ammonia pollution that meat production in such quantities is cited to create, resulting in 90,000 deaths a year, an increase in cancer risk is all but guaranteed as well.
In January this year, the E.U. released a report that connected red meat consumption to cancer risk. As a result, the E.U. Commission has set aside a budget of €170 million to promote green food systems, with red and processed meat heavily reduced or eliminated.
NBC’s Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China.
CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military-industrial complex corporations Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp has described as the de facto US embassy in Taiwan.
The war game simulates a conflict over Taiwan which we are informed is set in the year 2027, in which China launches strikes on the US military in order to open the way to an invasion of the island. We are not told why there needs to be a specific year inserted into mainstream American consciousness about when we can expect such a conflict, but then we are also not told why NBC is platforming a war machine think tank’s simulation of a military conflict with China at all.
It happens that the Center for a New American Security was the home of the man assigned by the Biden administration to lead the Pentagon task force responsible for re-evaluating the administration’s posture toward China. That man, Ely Ratner, is on record saying that the Trump administration was insufficiently hawkish toward China. Ratner is now the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the Biden administration.
It also happens that the Center for a New American Security has openly boasted about the great many of its other “experts and alumni” who have assumed senior leadership positions within the Biden administration.
It also happens that CNAS co-founder Michele Flournoy, who appeared in the Meet the Press war games segment and was at one time a heavy favorite to become Biden’s Pentagon chief, wrote a Foreign Affairs op-ed in 2020 arguing that the US needed to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”
It also happens that CNAS CEO Richard Fontaine has been featured all over the mass media pushing empire narratives about Russia and China, telling Bloomberg just the other day that the war in Ukraine could serve the empire’s long-term interests against China.
“The war in Ukraine could end up being bad for the pivot in the short-term, but good in the long-term,” Fontaine said. “If Russia emerges from this conflict as a weakened version of itself and Germany makes good on its defense spending pledges, both trends could allow the US to focus more on the Indo-Pacific in the long run.”
NBC News teaming up with neocon think tank CNAS whose top donors from 2020-2021 were Northrop Grumman and the Pentagon. Other notable donors include Raytheon, Taiwan's de facto embassy in the US, and Lockheed Martin. https://t.co/23GJv8INtOhttps://t.co/DBSNEc5zXY
It also happens that CNAS is routinely cited by the mass media as an authoritative source on all things China and Russia, with no mention ever made of the conflict of interest arising from their war machine funding. Just in the last few days here’s a recent NPR interview about NATO expansion with CNAS senior fellow Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a Washington Post quote from CNAS fellow Jacob Stokes about the Chinese threat to Taiwan, a Financial Times quote from CNAS “Indo-Pacific expert” Lisa Curtis (who I’ve previously noted was cited by the mass media for her “expert” opposition to the US Afghanistan withdrawal), and a Foreign Policy citation of the aforementioned Richard Fontaine saying “The aim of U.S. policy toward China should be to ensure that Beijing is either unwilling or unable to overturn the regional and global order.”
As we’ve discussed previously, citing war machine-funded think tanks as expert analysis without even disclosing their financial conflict of interest is plainly journalistic malpractice. But it happens all the time in the mass media anyway, because the mass media exist to circulate propaganda, not journalism.
This is getting so, so crazy. That the mass media are now openly teaming up with war machine think tanks to begin seeding the normalization of a hot war with China into the minds of the public indicates that the propaganda campaign to manufacture consent for the US-centralized empire’s final Hail Mary grab at unipolar domination is escalating even further. The mass-scale psychological manipulation is getting more and more overt and more and more shameless.
This is headed somewhere very, very bad. Hopefully humanity wakes up in time to stop these lunatics from driving us off a precipice from which there is no return.
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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. 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 American husband Tim Foley.
Shanghai-based cellular agriculture startup CellX has secured a $10.6 million Series A funding round with funding earmarked for recruitment efforts and optimizing the company’s platform technologies to achieve scale while decreasing unit costs. New backers included Joyvio Capital and SALT, amongst others, with previous investors Lever VC, Better Bite Ventures and Agronomics all joining again. The round Total investment to date now exceeds $15 million, making it the most well funded cultivated meat company in the country.
CellX, which was founded in 2020 by Ran Liu and Ziliang Yang, is focused on creating pork, beef, and chicken using cellular agriculture. The round notably attracted participation from Joyvio Capital, which is backed by large conglomerate Joyvio Group of Legend Holdings in China and SK Group in South Korea.
CellX pork prototype. Photo by CellX.
“Eat meat, not animals”
CellX’s slogan comes from co-founder and CEO Ziliang Yang’s personal philosophy. He has observed a flexitarian eating regimen for many years and says he now wants to make it easier for fellow consumers to follow suit, without compromising on what they enjoy.
“Cellular agriculture uses next-generation technologies to create new proteins and new materials in a more sustainable way. Compared to traditional animal agriculture, cellular agriculture uses significantly fewer resources and emits less carbon,” Yang said in a statement. “Cultivated meat has by far the largest market with the most carbon reduction promises within cellular agriculture, and it is also CellX’s current focus. We started with domestic pig breeds and have quickly expanded to beef and poultry.”
Environmental benefits of cultivated meat
Data suggest cultivated meat—if produced using renewable energy sources—will see massive reductions in emissions compared to conventional meat also produced using renewable energy. In terms of global warming impacts, beef’s footprint could be slashed by up to 92 percent, with a 95 percent land use savings.
When it comes to pork production, cultivated alternatives help decrease emissions by up to 50 percent, with a 72 percent reduction in land demand. It should be noted that the conventional meat emissions figures used to generate this comparison are considered “highly ambitious” and lower than those currently reported.
CellX cultivated meat.
Pressing ahead for progress and price parity
CellX is looking to develop multiple meat varieties. To ensure fast progress it is leveraging four technologies simultaneously: cell lines, media, bioprocess, and end product.
“A stable cell line and a low-cost culture media are critical pre-requisites to large scale production at low cost”, Dr. Binlu Huang, CellX’s co-founder and scientific lead said in a statement.
CellX says that it has made significant progress in its cell line research and media development – and managed to secure an immortalized cell line as well as a low-cost media formula.
Instead of working on mincemeat, CellX says it is mastering the taste and texture of conventional whole-cuts and believes this will be key when it comes to consumer acceptance of cultivated products.
Driving industry acceptance from another angle, CellX has been a consistent presence in relative industry groups. The company attended the first Cellular Agriculture Forum in April of this year and is contributing to the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture.
Source: CellX
Government support for China’s cultivated scene
Earlier this year, China’s government voiced its support for the growing cultivated sector with improved access to funding for scaling and product development identified as key by nonprofit think tank the Good Food Institute APAC. It bodes well that previous recipients of similar support include solar technology developers and electric vehicle manufacturers, both of which are now huge industries. More could still be allocated, but this is widely expected to come as consumer acceptance grows.
The Russia-Ukraine war has quickly turned into a global conflict. One of the likely outcomes of this war is the very redefinition of the current world order, which has been in effect, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union over three decades ago.
Indeed, there is a growing sense that a new global agenda is forthcoming, one that could unite Russia and China and, to a degree, India and others, under the same banner. This is evident, not only by the succession of the earth-shattering events underway, but, equally important, the language employed to describe these events.
The Russian position on Ukraine has morphed throughout the war from merely wanting to “demilitarize” and “denazify” Ukraine to a much bigger regional and global agenda, to eventually, per the words of Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, “put an end to the unabashed expansion” of NATO, and the “unabashed drive towards full domination by the US and its Western subjects on the world stage.”
On April 30, Lavrov went further, stating in an interview with the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, that Russia’s war “contributes to the process of freeing the world from the West’s neocolonial oppression,” predicated on “racism and an exceptionality.”
But Russia is not the only country that feels this way. China, too, even India, and many others. The meeting between Lavrov and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on March 30, served as a foundation of this truly new global language. Statements made by the two countries’ top diplomats were more concerned about challenging US hegemony than the specifics of the Ukraine war.
Those following the evolution of the Russia-China political discourse, even before the start of the Russia-Ukraine war on February 24, will notice that the language employed supersedes that of a regional conflict, into the desire to bring about the reordering of world affairs altogether.
But is this new world order possible? If yes, what would it look like? These questions, and others, remain unanswered, at least for now. What we know, however, is that the Russian quest for global transformation exceeds Ukraine by far, and that China, too, is on board.
While Russia and China remain the foundation of this new world order, many other countries, especially in the Global South, are eager to join. This should not come as a surprise as frustration with the unilateral US-led world order has been brewing for many years, and has come at a great cost. Even the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, though timid at times, has warned against this unilaterality, calling instead on the international community to commit itself to “the values of multilateralism and diplomacy for peace.”
However, the pro-Russian stances in the South – as indicated by the refusal of many governments to join western sanctions on Moscow, and the many displays of popular support through protests, rallies and statements – continue to lack a cohesive narrative. Unlike the Soviet Union of yesteryears, Russia of today does not champion a global ideology, like socialism, and its current attempt at articulating a relatable global discourse remains, for now, limited.
It is obviously too early to examine any kind of superstructure – language, political institutions, religion, philosophy, etc – resulting from the Russia-NATO global conflict, Russia-Ukraine war and the growing Russia-China affinity.
Though much discussion has been dedicated to the establishing of an alternative monetary system, in the case of Lavrov’s and Yi’s new world order, a fully-fledged substructure is yet to be developed.
New substructures will only start forming once the national currency of countries like Russia and China replace the US dollar, alternative money transfer systems, like CIPS, are put into effect, new trade routes are open, and eventually new modes of production replace the old ones. Only then, superstructures will follow, including new political discourses, historical narratives, everyday language, culture, art and even symbols.
The thousands of US-western sanctions slapped on Russia were largely meant to weaken the country’s ability to navigate outside the current US-dominated global economic system. Without this maneuverability, the West believes, Moscow would not be able to create and sustain an alternative economic model that is centered around Russia.
True, US sanctions on Cuba, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and others have failed to produce the coveted ‘regime change’, but they have succeeded in weakening the substructures of these societies, denying them the chance to be relevant economic actors at a regional and international stage. They were merely allowed to subsist, and barely so.
Russia, on the other hand, is a global power, with a relatively large economy, international networks of allies, trade partners and supporters. That in mind, surely a regime change will not take place in Moscow any time soon. The latter’s challenge, however, is whether it will be able to orchestrate a sustainable paradigm shift under current western pressures and sanctions.
Time will tell. For now, it is certain that some kind of a global transformation is taking place, along with the potential of a ‘new world order’, a term, ironically employed by the US government more than any other.
NOGs (such as Human Rights Watch and the Human Rights Foundation) have condemned the arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zen, as well as the lawyer Joseph Zen, the singer Denise Ho and the scholar Hui Po-Keung, for having maintained contacts with foreign forces in Hong Kong.
HRW Senior China researcher Maya Wang, said that “the arrest of a 90-year-old cardinal is the latest example of the city’s human rights freefall in recent years.”
The four, along with former lawmaker Cyd Ho, who is already in jail, were part of the 612 Humanitarian Aid Fund, which provided medical, legal and psychological help to protesters arrested during the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Kong.
Denise Ho, Margaret Ng, and others affiliated with Stand News, an independent pro-democracy online publication, were previously arrested by national security police in December 2021 under allegations of publishing “seditious” and “inflammatory” materials. Denise Ho formerly served on the board of Stand News, but stepped down in November 2021. Meanwhile, the 612 Humanitarian Support Fund ceased operations in October 2021 after national security police and Chinese state-backed media requested information on its beneficiaries and donors.
Maya Wang has specified that Hong Kong has “long been a regional leader in openness and respect for the rule of law, but now competes for the first places in Asia for repression and political prisoners.”
“The people of Hong Kong have been unequivocal in their demand for human rights, and governments around the world should be unequivocal in their response to that call,” concluded the HRW researcher.
NATO sanctions have affected trade, nonetheless, China and Russia continue to co-operate on energy, military, and space technology and dedollarization; BRI partner Argentina is invited to the next BRICS summit in June; John Lee Ka-chiu will be Hong Kong’s next chief executive; there is an online exercise boom.
A bridge being built by China across Pangong Lake in a disputed section of northwest India could further inflame tensions between the two countries, experts on the border dispute said.
The bridge, which spans about 500 meters (1,640 feet), is situated south of a position occupied by China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on the north bank of the lake in Ladakh, an area that India contends China has illegally occupied since 1962. The area has been the site of clashes between the countries, as has the so-called Line of Actual Control in eastern Ladakh that separates Indian-controlled territory from Chinese-controlled territory.
The bridge will cut the travel distance between the PLA position and a military base in Rutog (in Chinese, Ritu) county, Ngari prefecture, in far-western Tibet Autonomous Region by about 150 kilometers (93 miles), making it easier for Chinese troops to counter Indian forces if future flare-ups arise.
A black dot marks the site of the new bridge over Pangong Lake on the border with India and China. Credit: RFA graphic/Datawrapper
In January, geo-intelligence expert Damien Symon first used satellite imagery to show that China was building a bridge across Pangong Lake the eastern Ladakh territory it controls. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin that month said the construction would safeguard China’s security.
“China building bridge over Pangong Lake is a key area for the Indian border,” said Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. “Despite land agreements between the two, China has been carrying out military activities in the border area. The bridge will make it easier for Chinese troops to access the region.”
Sana Hashmi, a visiting fellow at the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation in Taipei whose research focuses on China’s foreign policy and territorial disputes, said that the border dispute will be at the forefront of China-India relations going forward.
“This only shows that China has no real intention of resolving the dispute and that the tensions are only going to grow,” she told RFA in a written statement.
India is responding to the bridge construction by boosting its defense capabilities and seeking cooperation with like-minded countries, Sana Hashmi said.
This satellite image with a detail inset shows China’s bridge over Pangong Lake on the border with India and China, April 24, 2022. Credit: EO Browser, Sinergise Ltd.
Kunchok Tenzin, a councilor from the Pangong Lake area, said the bridge’s construction has raised concern among locals, who fear they could be hurt if a clash between India and China breaks out.
“The Indian government should make the development of border areas a priority and ensure the safety of the local residents,” he said.
Monk Kunchok Rigchok from Pangong Monastery said that people know the bridge may pose a threat in the future.
“Though there is no fear as we have lived here our whole lives, but the Indian government must remain on alert because China has illegally occupied land in the region,” he said. “They may target our place soon.”
Tenzin Lhundup, a Pangong Lake resident who lives by the border, said he was born in the area and intends to live there until he dies.
“We are not scared of the Chinese, as they have been visiting this area even during the pandemic lockdown,” he said.
Translated by Tenzin Dickyi for RFA’s Tibetan Service. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Trinley Choedon.
Plans to double Japan’s defence budget to around £86bn may mark the final winding down of the country’s anti-militarist posture. But the move will only make the world more dangerous, according to one Japanese foreign policy expert. University of East Anglia scholar Ra Mason also said that the US is driving the shift.
Writing in The Conversation, Mason said that the defence hike reflected those in European countries and signalled a bonanza for arms firms.
Imperial ambitions?
Mason said the change:
had been prompted by the conflict in Ukraine, but also reflected growing regional pressure from China, North Korea and Russia.
However, the pressure to militarise is not necessarily home grown. As Mason wrote:
The US has been pressuring Japan for some time to increase its defence spending to share the security bill in the Asia-Pacific region.
Japan’s post-war constitution still bans particular kinds of militarist behaviour, including the possession or development of nuclear weapons. However, in recent years defence reforms have still gone ahead under different governments. Article 9 of the constitution was created to prevent Japan becoming a military power again. Article 9 reads:
Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.
In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.
Recent polls suggest that while many Japanese people oppose abandoning it, a clear majority of elected politicians back reform.
Other experts also point to the gradual move away from a pacifist-type foreign policy over many years. Japan deployed troops to Iraq and Afghanistan (albeit in support roles) and it’s navy sank a North Korean ship in 2001. And, as the Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out:
Pressure from Washington has only increased since the 9/11 attacks.
US influence
Mason argued that US relations have been key to the change:
In the current era, relations with Washington have been paramount. But with America seemingly overstretched and in decline, Tokyo’s move to strengthen its military and deepen the alliance poses questions about Japan’s security identity.
There is an increasing danger for Japan of:
entrapment into American proxy wars and increasing economic involvement in the US “military-industrial complex”, the system by which the defence sector encourages arms spending and war.
Big-money reforms
Mason added that the current push for a more militarist Japan would allow big profits for defence firms. Much as we have seen in the West since the war in Ukraine began:
Mason also argued that Japan’s ministers are using goodwill over Ukraine to fuel militarism at home. Japan has taken refugees, and large donations have been made to help those affected by the war. But, he warns, that goodwill should not be used to ramp up Japanese militarism in the region.
Japan’s involvement in international politics since WW2 has been very different to other former imperial powers. It would be a tragedy if that shifted to a more aggressive foreign policy, but this seems to be occurring despite public pride in Japan’s role in the world. There will be few winners from a re-militarised Japan, least of all the Japanese people.
Always looking, and sounding, a touch unhinged, the beetroot-coloured Barnaby Joyce, leader of the Australian Nationals and, for a time now, deputy prime minister, has made a splash. With the federal elections being held on May 18, he does not have much time to commit mischief and befuddle the political vultures. But the National Press Club gave him a chance to make some trouble, a task accomplished with some success.
At stages during his address, it seemed that trouble had followed Joyce. There was sniffing and sniffling. Then a nosebleed, brief intermission and tissues. The Twitterati thought this ominous; political commentators searched for omens about previous pre-election mishaps. “I know you are going to get 1001 photos of me with a Kleenex up my nose, congratulations,” he chirped, on being handed a fresh tissue.
Of more interest, and some bafflement, was the speech itself, a filling of meaty prejudices and concerns about China, a fairly dismissive take on climate change, and a warning about the threat posed by a number of independent candidates that are knocking at the door of traditional conservative seats.
As far as Beijing is concerned, Joyce presents the classic Australian paradox: a pathological suspicion of the Yellow Horde and its strategic interests, but a delight at the voracious appetite they show for Australian commodities. In recent years, Australia’s skewed and distorted pattern of wealth has developed on the back of that particular interest. The same can also be said about the China student market and witless Australian universities lazily disposed to easy cash.
The role played by China in aiding Australian wealth did feature, if only to enable Joyce to speculate wildly as to who would replace it as top customer in the importing of iron ore exports. This proved particularly pertinent on the issue of how Australian commodities were essentially going into Chinese war-making capabilities.
In his answer, Joyce recalled “talking to one of the large miners” and saying that “we have a big new customer.” That customer: Germany. “Germany is a big new customer. And I imagine Germany is using the iron ore for a whole range of things and of course, one the other Germany is redoing, rearming.” When “rearming” and “Germany” are used, however disjointedly, in a sentence, ghosts of wars past stir nervously.
Not, it would seem, now. A Teutonic replacement would be welcome in the face of Beijing’s regional ambitions. Chinese military expansion, Joyce stated unequivocally, was “without a shadow of a doubt” the most important issue facing Australians.
Inventively, and with a flourish, he took the view that China’s conduct in seeking security ties with countries such as the Solomon Islands was simple: the encirclement of Australia. “It is quite obvious through their desire to have military bases that they are starting a process of encircling Australia and that there is a wish, at the very least, to intimidate, or worse, to supplicate Australia.”
Joyce has never quite had the mind or sense to understand the historical basis of China’s own concern of encirclement, a psychic disturbance very much aided by the United States and the recent AUKUS security pact. The same can be said about his understanding of independent candidates, whom he rubbishes as being incapable of understanding national security.
Such novel, absurd and dangerous interpretations on the wishes of a power can become, at a moment’s notice, the bricks and mortar for conflict. “The thing that China will respect is strength. That’s why I say we have to become as strong as possible as quickly as possible. And respecting strength means you have to be strong across all facets of what you do.”
Giving the impression of being far-eyed and sagacious, Barnaby spoke of his role in preventing previous efforts by Chinese entities to acquire Australian assets and muscle in on domestic matters. “I refer to my successful endeavours to stop a Chinese state-owned enterprise takeover of Rio Tinto, our largest iron ore exporter, back as far as 2009.” He then boasted of his support for “changes in foreign investment laws which the Labor Party opposed.”
When asked about the touchy issue of climate change and disagreement within his own party and his Liberal coalition partners, he was unperturbed. Metropolitan, ecology-minded types, despite being threatened by the so-called “teal independents”, would not have their way on the issue of preventing coal projects. “Because what we are doing is … we have got to make sure our nation earns as much money as possible. We can’t do that if we shut down coal exports.” What vision, what clarity.
What about the issue of the Coalition’s “safeguard mechanism” in responding to climate change? In a sense, this looks suspiciously like a version of the demonised carbon tax, an idea considered pestilential in pro-fossil fuel circles. The mechanism requires polluting companies to purchase carbon credits or, in lieu of that, reduce emissions. “It’s like the ceiling on this,” the cryptic Barnaby intoned. “It’s out of the way but it stops you going through the roof. They [Labor] are going to bring the ceiling down to about head level for tall people. And about 215 [companies] are going to start belting their heads on the fans and the lights and being fatally attacked based on that.”
In all the hyperbolic, and at points inscrutable venting, Joyce struggled with the correct pronunciation of Labor opposition leader Anthony Albanese, the man vying to be the next Prime Minister. Several attempts were made, none quite hitting the mark. Labor will be hoping that such misfiring will translate into electoral returns. Given Joyce’s previous successes, this will prove a tall order, notably in regional Australia.
Asia Research and Engagement (ARE) has conducted a baseline study looking at the disclosure levels of Asia’s top animal protein companies, and according to its findings, only 16 percent of the biggest organisations put responsible sourcing policies front and centre of their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure. This represents a significant misalignment with expected sustainability goals.
158 Asian companies listed in the food and beverage, hospitality, retail, and catering sectors, across 10 markets, were assessed in terms of their animal protein sourcing procedures. Key takeaways include 13 percent acknowledging antimicrobial use and associated resistance risks, none referenced deforestation linked to animal agriculture and just 11 percent cited animal welfare. 18 percent discussed sustainable sourcing connected to seafood.
Photo by Isabel Retamales at Unsplash.
What the findings mean
Of all the companies analysed, 72 percent have active ESG reports in place. The majority of these reports were found to avoid discussing issues connected to animal protein sourcing, focussing instead on things such as water and energy use and packaging material selection.
“With Asia projected to account for 60% of the growth in global animal protein demand by 2030[1], companies cannot afford to overlook the impacts of protein production across their food supply chains,” Kate Blaszak, director of sustainable proteins at ARE said in a statement. “As protein buyers, they have the ability to influence production practices, shape consumer demand, and play a key role in the necessary transition to a more responsible and sustainable food system.”
Photo by Jo-Anne McArthur at Unsplash.
What are the major risks that companies are avoiding talking about?
Animal agriculture is used to fulfill the global demand for meat. Animals are reared, slaughtered, and exported to customers all over the world. Asia is a leading manufacturer and importer of meat. In 2021, more than $31 billion of product was imported, while 2020 saw 77.5 million metric tonnes produced. This vast demand is affecting issues such as global deforestation and subsequent carbon emissions.
But Asia is widely failing to implement sustainable animal protein sourcing policies. These are designed to minimise further deforestation, improve animal welfare standards and by proxy, reduce the risk of antibiotic resistance in humans. 70 percent of tree felling already witnessed in the Amazon was undertaken for animal agriculture practices.
As Asia lags behind in responsible sourcing policy drafting, the E.U. has already begun to tighten its restrictions. Due diligence in business supply chains will now necessarily include responsible ESG sourcing and reporting.
“We look towards such reports for summary acknowledgement of risks as an initial step towards responsible disclosure,” Paul Milon, head of stewardship Asia Pacific for BNP Paribas Asset Management said in a statement. “Forest protection and biodiversity preservation should be top priorities for corporates sourcing animal protein. Inaction could lead to severe consequences, not only on climate change, conservation or diseases, but also directly on companies. Investors and regulators are increasingly expecting alignment with emerging sustainability disclosure standards and frameworks, such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).”
Photo by Christian Lue at Unsplash.
Putting China, Malaysia, and Indonesia on blast
The report hones in on China and Indonesia as Asia’s biggest markets for both animal protein consumption and production. Despite this, neither country disclosed any sourcing strategies. Similarly, Malaysia and Indonesia both failed to account for animal welfare standards and microbial use. This, despite both being large manufacturers of meat through traditional farming methods.
There is hope, however. Organisations in Hong Kong and Japan are starting to incorporate responsible concerns into their procurement strategies and Thailand fared very well in the report, with companies scoring higher than average for their responsible seafood sourcing reporting. The Philippines underperformed in the same area.
Asia produces 89 percent of all farmed fish, 90 percent of crustaceans, 58 percent of pigs and 35 percent of chickens for global meat consumption. It is in a prime position to lead ESG disclosure standards across the world, but only if buyers and producers align with sustainable practices.
Shanghai’s Haofood has announced distribution partnership with Chinese convenience store giant Lawson that will see its new satay nugget stick product being stocked in 2,300 stores across the country, to give consumers easy access to alternative protein products. Shops in the Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces will be the first cities to get the satay sticks.
According to Haofood, the partnership timely, given an observable rise in flexitarian, vegetarian, and vegan diet adoption across China. Millennials are thought to be driving this trend, due to increased environmental awareness. Personal health is considered to be another motivation.
Haofood builds on recent funding success
The distribution deal with Lawson is another win for Haofood. The plant-based chicken manufacturer, known for its peanut-based plant-based protein, recently celebrated a $3.5 million seed funding round. At the time, the company stated that the investment would be used to increase its reach throughout Asia.
“I am thrilled to be partnering with Lawson and look forward to bringing a different experience to our customers with our new satay nugget on a stick,” Astrid Prajogo, Founder and CEO of Haofood said in a statement. “At Haofood, our goal is to make plant-based chicken products accessible to people. We set our focus on China, the world’s most populous country for a start, as we believe that there can be a significant impact on carbon footprint reduction as customers here turn towards alternative meat products.”
China’s need for increased food security
China remains the most populous country on the planet. It registered 1.41 billion people in 2020 and while population growth has slowed in recent years, the need to address food security concerns remains. This has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and natural disasters.
On the 2021 Global Food Security Index, China ranked 13th out of 113 countries. It has shown significant improvement over the last decade but more still needs to be done. This is why when President Xi referenced alternative proteins in a speech, the world’s media took it as a sign that China could be gearing up to become a powerhouse of plant-based and cultivated proteins. The Chinese five-year agricultural plan also made space for ‘future foods’ for the first time in history.
Making alternative protein foods as accessible as possible and cost-effective will be vital to the acceptance of the items as a whole. A study in 2020 revealed that 95 percent of consumers in China are already aware of plant0based meat products, with 61 percent believing that eating them would be healthy. 41 percent said they assumed they have a lower carbon footprint than conventional meat.
Haofood’s move into thousands of convenience stores is intended to make plant-based chicken an everyday food.
Made for the meat-lovers
Haofood uses its proprietary peanut-derived Innotein protein as its main ingredient. The company states that this gives it an advantage in the texture and taste stakes, yielding more umami notes and a fibrosity that meat eaters enjoy. Numerous restaurant partnerships are already in place and now, the ultimate convenience of snacks in grab-and-go locations takes things a step further.
“This ties back to our mission of sustaining happiness from good food forever. We want to unite past, present and future through the creation of traditional dishes with our innovative, futuristic products that allow consumers to enjoy sustainable food in the present,” Prajogo said in a statement. “We will continue to seek ways to innovate, improve and bring people sustainable alternatives to meat while preserving cultural norms in cooking and making a positive impact on the Earth.”
Snacking on plant-based chicken
All over the world, convenience stores are making it easier for consumers to access plant-based meat. Earlier this year, Lightlife partnered with 7-Eleven to make its vegan chicken tenders available as a grab-and-go hot snack throughout Canada. More than 600 locations were cited to be getting the snacks, which were being stocked as part of the convenience giant’s commitment to offering more plant-based options.
Many of you will know that I am Filipina. The past few days have been quite a journey following the Philippine elections, culminating with a frightening win of the dictator’s son Bongbong Marcos Jr and Sara Duterte, daughter of the outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte.
There is speculation that their leadership style may be more despotic than their authoritarian parents (with proposals to “rewrite history” on previous dictatorship). I am worried that this is election result will genuinely risk lives in what could be a continued crackdown on activists and a prolonged massacre of the poor.
There are also significant fears around worries related to China’s influence in the South China Sea and beyond, especially on human rights matters.
This is an election the world should be paying close attention to, as it fortells the result of structural inequality through a lack of civics education and the influence of social media.
I have not yet seen an interpretation of the results for friends who may not be familiar with Filipino politics. I also think I may have a different view, given my family’s heritage as working class rural Filipinos and growing up in the Western world.
The Philippines was, and sadly still is, a place where you can be “redtagged” and assassinated for your political views.
The ousted President Ferdinand Marcos was known for a reign of terror through martial law, widespread torture, politically motivated violence and corruption.
A period of hope
After his rule, there was a period of hope with the Yellow Revolution where the country turned towards democracy and the idea of becoming a cosmopolitian and educated state.
This was the kind of pattern hoped for with this post-Duterte election, moving towards a country free from extrajudicial killings, punitive culture and violence against the poor.
Babies of the Al Jazeera documentary Deliverance, part of a series on the Philippines called The Slum. Image: Screenshot KO/APR
But by Tuesday morning, this was not to be. Outgoing Vice-President Leni Robredo, the opposition leader who our hopes were on to win, fell further and further behind in the results.
Philippines has one of the highest percentage of social media users in the world, the majority of political engagement and general learning happens with the internet.
These past few days, several whistleblowers called into local radio stations and posted on Reddit revelations of mass paid troll farms and social media strategies to deliberately create discord.
The Duterte administration cracked down on initiatIves like this community pantry … “Free Market; Free to take, free to give. Share love, give free … community free shop.” Image: Screenshot KO/APR
One of the most worrying allegations was the use of double agents, which I fear is starting to create a divide within Filipino activist communities.
However, even without troll farms, many Filipino voters, especially in disenfranchised rural areas, are single issue voters or may vote in exchange for food and essentials for their family — this is something I have witnessed personally.
Petri dish for mass disinformation This, combined with a country of varying levels of access to education and critical thinking, is a petri dish for mass disinformation. We may have seen seeds of this in the West, with the growth of disinformation and movements increasingly willing to turn to political violence.
The 1988 “NO” referendum campaign in Chile against Pinochet and neoliberalism was featured in the 2012 historical drama No.
I am watching the situation with apprehension, I am worried for my extended family. For those with family in the Philippines (or any other authoritarian country) who feels the same, it is high time to secure activist movements.
For those similarly disappointed by the result: Political participation is not just with the ballot box, it’s building awareness, learning as much as we can and thinking about how we can protect and empower vulnerable and disenfranchised people.
The popular campaign against the 1988 “NO” referendum of Chile marked a new era of people’s empowerment free from the dictator Pinochet and neoliberalism. This was documented in an inspirational 2012 film called No. And this is what many Filipinos were hoping for in this election, but alas…
Laban! … Fight on!
Keeara Ofren is a final year law student at the University of Auckland – Waipapa Taumata Rau and a former president of Amnesty On Campus. She works in communications for the Auckland Refugee Council. This article was first published on her Facebook page and is republished here with permission.
This was my presentation at a Chongyang Institute’s organized international webinar on 6 May 2022 on the topic of “Seeking Peace and Promoting Development”. The Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies is a think tank attached to the Renmin University of Beijing.
*****
In today’s world of regional conflicts, technological upgrading, epidemic stalemate and system reform, Peace is Priority Number One for an international sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development.
The present most infamous conflict is the Ukraine – Russia war, China could play an important role as moderator as proposed on several occasions by President Xi Jinping. It might belong to the United Nations peace-promoting role, to override western and NATO interests, by initiating President Xi’s mediating proposal for peace negotiations.
The call for Peace goes also and especially to the NATO countries which continue delivering billions of dollars-worth of sophisticated weaponry to Ukraine to help them fight Russia, but the world, including such international bodies like the UN, is quiet, tolerating this direct interference, or worse, they encourage it. This definitely does not make for Peace, but puts the world at risk of a WWIII scenario.
Second – Trade has, since ancient times, been a means of preserving Peace. The original Silk Road 2100 years ago is currently still a vivid example. Today, China’s Belt and Road Initiative – a modern times Silk Road – might again be an instrument to foster and sustain equitable development, while preserving peace. What is crucial in this process is the respect of individual countries’ sovereignty.
Third – Ajust monetary system, sovereign local currencies, backed by national economies. Dominance by fiat money must be a thing of the past. Justice in fair international monetary policies outside the current western dominated fiat system is a MUST.
If Peace and development are to be sustainable, western “sanctioning” of countries that do not follow western political and economic narratives, are no longer to be possible. Nor the stealing of foreign exchange reserves from countries which, by their sovereign right, choose their own political and economic internal and external policies.
This means abandoning the current privately-run monopoly-type SWIFT monetary transfer methods in exchange for an internationally honored scheme – where countries deal and exchange directly with each other, for example, through foreign exchange swaps.
We may indeed need a new “Bretton Woods Moment” promoting a JUST system of weighted equality among countries with sovereign currencies backed by nations’ respective economies.
A post-US-dollar system may be market-based, with sovereign local currencies tied to a number of measurable, tangible commodities such as gold and other precious metals, grain, hydrocarbons, as well as various internationally used goods. Factors of economic efficiency and scientific innovation may also become part of a currency backing formula.
This may indeed require a state or public-owned banking system. State-run banking systems are almost exponentially more efficient than private banking. It would keep money creation in the hands of governments, as opposed to private banks, the current western standard. Government control over money creation would also limit debt creation. It would substantially increase monetary efficiency. China is a vivid example.
According to Sergei Glazyev, Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic Commission, the world’s future monetary system will be “underpinned by a digital currency, backed by a basket of (new) foreign currencies and natural resources. It will liberate the Global South from both western debt and IMF-induced austerity.”
A debt-free economy is an Economy of Peace.
The transition from a western economic order toward a multipolar one is crucial for attaining and preserving World Peace. As mentioned before, it must be an economic order that does not allow “sanctions” and stealing of foreign exchange reserves. Interfering by economic coercion in a sovereign country’s internal affairs and decision making, is against international law, against basic human rights, and ought not to be possible in a new monetary system.
We may also need a new “United Nations Moment”. As it stands, over the past two to three decades, the UN has been highjacked by powerful western interests.
In a “new” UN, the noble role of preserving World Peace must be re-introduced. It may also require a restructured and more balanced Security Council.
A strong UN for an international body is crucial to remain neutral and balanced in its role to remain a fair arbiter.
As to Global Governance, there may be different interpretations of the meaning of Global Governance. If I have learned anything in my decades of international development work – mainly with the World Bank – it is that people in every country around the globe wish to preserve national autonomy, with cultural, judiciary and monetary sovereignty. Accent on sovereignty is key. They do definitely not want to be governed by an external force, a Global Government, or a western style One World Government.
These socioeconomic observations rule out a western Reset-type “Global Governance”. It is essential that country leaders, as well as international organizations, the UN system, the IMF, World Bank, World Trade Organization (WTO) – and not least, the World Health Organization (WHO) – listen to the people, and respect their views and wishes if we eventually want a World of Peace, a world of sustainable and equitable development.
My interpretation of “globalization” – Chinese style – is connecting people through trade, joint projects, exchange of ideas, of cultural events and education – as in learning from each other. It is “globalization”, with the Belt and Road approach, by connecting in Peace – striving for new ideas to socioeconomic development, creating dynamics, where nations’ sovereignty remains an essential element, thereby clearly promoting the building of a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind, in an effort to open up a bright and beautiful future for the world.
HUIZHONG WU for Associated Press on 10 May 2022 reports that a Taiwanese human rights activist, who served five years in jail in China, said that international pressure and the tireless advocacy by his wife worked to ensure his safe return to Taiwan. “I know that my life’s safety and security was defended by many people, thanks to everyone, I have never felt abandoned or alone,” Lee Ming-che said at a press conference Tuesday in his first public appearance since being released from prison.Lee Ming-che was arrested by Chinese authorities in 2017 and charged with subversion of state power. His arrest was China’s first criminal prosecution of a non-profit worker since Beijing passed a law tightening controls over foreign non-governmental organizations in 2016.
His arrest marked a turning point as China showed that it would not hesitate to prosecute Taiwanese individuals for political activism, regardless of the harm it would bring to cross-Strait relations.
Lee had given online lectures on Taiwan’s democratization and managed a fund for families of political prisoners in China that some friends had set up.
“I did what I could do, using my credit card to buy some books,” he said, which he would send to friends in China. He would also give donations to the families of political prisoners. “This is not to interfere with the country’s internal affairs. All of this was simply a way of humanitarian caring.”Lee is the son of parents who were both born in China and had come to Taiwan with the ruling Nationalist Party. He had always thought of himself as a Chinese person growing up. That changed in high school with a history teacher who taught the students to learn about local history.
While Lee was able to come home, another prisoner, Lee Meng-chu, remains trapped in China. Lee Meng-chu has been accused of being a spy by Chinese authorities and is now serving the two years as part of his sentence which deprived him of “political rights.” Meng-chu had been in Hong Kong in 2019, during the massive anti-government protests that rocked the city, according to the semi-official Central News Agency. He disappeared after crossing the border into Shenzhen.
It’s uncertain how many Taiwanese are being held in Chinese prisons, as many families have chosen to remain quiet in the hopes of getting their loved ones’ release. This stands in contrast with Lee, the human rights activist’s case. In the last five years, Lee’s wife, Ching-yu worked with local nonprofit organizations to raise awareness about her husband’s case. .. That continued effort, both said, paid off. “International support can truly have a concrete change on the treatment of a political prisoner in China,” said Lee Ching-yu.
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