radiofree.asia

Category: China

  • The Biden doctrine: Ukraine gaffe sums up mixed year of foreign policy

    On Russia and Putin, the president said the quiet part loud. Re-engagement has been welcomed but the exit from Afghanistan was a disaster. Analysts see much to do to rebuild US credibility

    Joe Biden marked his first anniversary in office with a gaffe over Ukraine that undid weeks of disciplined messaging and diplomatic preparation.

    The president’s suggestion that a “minor incursion” by Russia might split Nato over how to respond sent the White House into frantic damage limitation mode.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • After a Year of Biden, Why Do We Still Have Trump’s Foreign Policy?

    Getty Images

    President Biden and the Democrats were highly critical of President Trump’s foreign policy, so it was reasonable to expect that Biden would quickly remedy its worst impacts. As a senior member of the Obama administration, Biden surely needed no schooling on Obama’s diplomatic agreements with Cuba and Iran, both of which began to resolve long-standing foreign policy problems and provided models for the renewed emphasis on diplomacy that Biden was promising.

    Tragically for America and the world, Biden has failed to restore Obama’s progressive initiatives, and has instead doubled down on many of Trump’s most dangerous and destabilizing policies. It is especially ironic and sad that a president who ran so stridently on being different from Trump has been so reluctant to reverse his regressive policies. Now the Democrats’ failure to deliver on their promises with respect to both domestic and foreign policy is undermining their prospects in November’s midterm election.

    Here is our assessment of Biden’s handling of ten critical foreign policy issues:

    1. Prolonging the agony of the people of Afghanistan. It is perhaps symptomatic of Biden’s foreign policy problems that the signal achievement of his first year in office was an initiative launched by Trump, to withdraw the United States from its 20-year war in Afghanistan. But Biden’s implementation of this policy was tainted by the same failure to understand Afghanistan that doomed and dogged at least three prior administrations and the U.S.’s hostile military occupation for 20 years, leading to the speedy restoration of the Taliban government and the televised chaos of the U.S. withdrawal.

    Now, instead of helping the Afghan people recover from two decades of U.S.-inflicted destruction, Biden has seized $9.4 billion in Afghan foreign currency reserves, while the people of Afghanistan suffer through a desperate humanitarian crisis. It is hard to imagine how even Donald Trump could be more cruel or vindictive.

    1. Provoking a crisis with Russia over Ukraine. Biden’s first year in office is ending with a dangerous escalation of tensions at the Russia/Ukraine border, a situation that threatens to devolve into a military conflict between the world’s two most heavily armed nuclear states–the United States and Russia. The United States bears much responsibility for this crisis by supporting the violent overthrow of the elected government of Ukraine in 2014, backing NATO expansion right up to Russia’s border, and arming and training Ukrainian forces.

    Biden’s failure to acknowledge Russia’s legitimate security concerns has led to the present impasse, and Cold Warriors within his administration are threatening Russia instead of proposing concrete measures to de-escalate the situation.

    1. Escalating Cold War tensions and a dangerous arms race with China. President Trump launched a tariff war with China that economically damaged both countries, and reignited a dangerous Cold War and arms race with China and Russia to justify an ever-increasing U.S. military budget.

    After a decade of unprecedented U.S. military spending and aggressive military expansion under Bush II and Obama, the U.S. “pivot to Asia” militarily encircled China, forcing it to invest in more robust defense forces and advanced weapons. Trump, in turn, used China’s strengthened defenses as a pretext for further increases in U.S. military spending, launching a new arms race that has raised the existential risk of nuclear war to a new level.

    Biden has only exacerbated these dangerous international tensions. Alongside the risk of war, his aggressive policies toward China have led to an ominous rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans, and created obstacles to much-needed cooperation with China to address climate change, the pandemic and other global problems.

    1. Abandoning Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. After President Obama’s sanctions against Iran utterly failed to force it to halt its civilian nuclear program, he finally took a progressive, diplomatic approach, which led to the JCPOA nuclear agreement in 2015. Iran scrupulously met all its obligations under the treaty, but Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in 2018. Trump’s withdrawal was vigorously condemned by Democrats, including candidate Biden, and Senator Sanders promised to rejoin the JCPOA on his first day in office if he became president.

    Instead of immediately rejoining an agreement that worked for all parties, the Biden administration thought it could pressure Iran to negotiate a “better deal.” Exasperated Iranians instead elected a more conservative government and Iran moved forward on enhancing its nuclear program.

    A year later, and after eight rounds of shuttle diplomacy in Vienna, Biden has still not rejoined the agreement. Ending his first year in the White House with the threat of another Middle East war is enough to give Biden an “F” in diplomacy.

    1. Backing Big Pharma over a People’s Vaccine. Biden took office as the first Covid vaccines were being approved and rolled out across the United States and the world. Severe inequities in global vaccine distribution between rich and poor countries were immediately apparent and became known as “vaccine apartheid.”

    Instead of manufacturing and distributing vaccines on a non-profit basis to tackle the pandemic as the global public health crisis that it is, the United States and other Western countries chose to maintain the neoliberal regime of patents and corporate monopolies on vaccine manufacture and distribution. The failure to open up the manufacture and distribution of vaccines to poorer countries gave the Covid virus free rein to spread and mutate, leading to new global waves of infection and death from the Delta and Omicron variants

    Biden belatedly agreed to support a patent waiver for Covid vaccines under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, but with no real plan for a “People’s Vaccine,” Biden’s concession has made no impact on millions of preventable deaths.

    1. Ensuring catastrophic global warming at COP26 in Glasgow. After Trump stubbornly ignored the climate crisis for four years, environmentalists were encouraged when Biden used his first days in office to rejoin the Paris climate accord and cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline.

    But by the time Biden got to Glasgow, he had let the centerpiece of his own climate plan, the Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), be stripped out of the Build Back Better bill in Congress at the behest of fossil-fuel industry sock-puppet Joe Manchin, turning the U.S. pledge of a 50% cut from 2005 emissions by 2030 into an empty promise.

    Biden’s speech in Glasgow highlighted China and Russia’s failures, neglecting to mention that the United States has higher emissions per capita than either of them. Even as COP26 was taking place, the Biden administration infuriated activists by putting oil and gas leases up for auction for 730,000 acres of the American West and 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico. At the one-year mark, Biden has talked the talk, but when it comes to confronting Big Oil, he is not walking the walk, and the whole world is paying the price.

    1. Political prosecutions of Julian Assange, Daniel Hale and Guantanamo torture victims. Under President Biden, the United States remains a country where the systematic killing of civilians and other war crimes go unpunished, while whistleblowers who muster the courage to expose these horrific crimes to the public are prosecuted and jailed as political prisoners.

    In July 2021, former drone pilot Daniel Hale was sentenced to 45 months in prison for exposing the killing of civilians in America’s drone wars. WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange still languishes in Belmarsh Prison in England, after 11 years fighting extradition to the United States for exposing U.S. war crimes.

    Twenty years after it set up an illegal concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to imprison 779 mostly innocent people kidnapped around the world, 39 prisoners remain there in illegal, extrajudicial detention. Despite promises to close this sordid chapter of U.S. history, the prison is still functioning and Biden is allowing the Pentagon to actually build a new, closed courtroom at Guantanamo to more easily keep the workings of this gulag hidden from public scrutiny.

    1. Economic siege warfare against the people of Cuba, Venezuela and other countries. Trump unilaterally rolled back Obama’s reforms on Cuba and recognized unelected Juan Guaidó as the “president” of Venezuela, as the United States tightened the screws on its economy with “maximum pressure” sanctions.

    Biden has continued Trump’s failed economic siege warfare against countries that resist U.S. imperial dictates, inflicting endless pain on their people without seriously imperiling, let alone bringing down, their governments. Brutal U.S. sanctions and efforts at regime change have universally failed for decades, serving mainly to undermine the United States’s own democratic and human rights credentials.

    Juan Guaidó is now the least popular opposition figure in Venezuela, and genuine grassroots movements opposed to U.S. intervention are bringing popular democratic and socialist governments to power across Latin America, in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras – and maybe Brazil in 2022.

    1. Still supporting Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen and its repressive ruler. Under Trump, Democrats and a minority of Republicans in Congress gradually built a bipartisan majority that voted to withdraw from the Saudi-led coalition attacking Yemen and stop sending arms to Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoed their efforts, but the Democratic election victory in 2020 should have led to an end to the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen.

    Instead, Biden only issued an order to stop selling “offensive” weapons to Saudi Arabia, without clearly defining that term, and went on to okay a $650 million weapons sale. The United States still supports the Saudi war, even as the resulting humanitarian crisis kills thousands of Yemeni children. And despite Biden’s pledge to treat the Saudis’ cruel leader, MBS, as a pariah, Biden refused to even sanction MBS for his barbaric murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

    1. Still complicit in illegal Israeli occupation, settlements and war crimes. The United States is Israel’s largest arms supplier, and Israel is the world’s largest recipient of U.S. military aid (approximately $4 billion annually), despite its illegal occupation of Palestine, widely condemned war crimes in Gaza and illegal settlement building. U.S. military aid and arms sales to Israel clearly violate the U.S. Leahy Laws and Arms Export Control Act.

    Donald Trump was flagrant in his disdain for Palestinian rights, including tranferring the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to a property in Jerusalem that is only partly within Israel’s internationally recognized border, a move that infuriated Palestinians and drew international condemnation.

    But nothing has changed under Biden. The U.S. position on Israel and Palestine is as illegitimate and contradictory as ever, and the U.S. Embassy to Israel remains on illegally occupied land. In May, Biden supported the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, which killed 256 Palestinians, half of them civilians, including 66 children.

    Conclusion

    Each part of this foreign policy fiasco costs human lives and creates regional–even global–instability. In every case, progressive alternative policies are readily available. The only thing lacking is political will and independence from corrupt vested interests.

    The United States has squandered unprecedented wealth, global goodwill and a historic position of international leadership to pursue unattainable imperial ambitions, using military force and other forms of violence and coercion in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law.

    Candidate Biden promised to restore America’s position of global leadership, but has instead doubled down on the policies through which the United States lost that position in the first place, under a succession of Republican and Democratic administrations. Trump was only the latest iteration in America’s race to the bottom.

    Biden has wasted a vital year doubling down on Trump’s failed policies. In the coming year, we hope that the public will remind Biden of its deep-seated aversion to war and that he will respond—albeit reluctantly—by adopting more dovish and rational ways.

    The post After a Year of Biden, Why Do We Still Have Trump’s Foreign Policy? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • One Year in, Biden Has Done the “Pivot to Asia” with Guns

    What do the maneuvers of the Biden administration reveal about American intentions toward China?

    The post One Year in, Biden Has Done the “Pivot to Asia” with Guns first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • News on China | No. 83

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes featuring great economic growth and continuing the anti-corruption fight.

    The post News on China | No. 83 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What Kind of Threat is China?

    @wei006119 他親口承認即使中國走上民主道路，美國也要千方百計的搞垮他。 #美國狼子野 #不願有人比美國強大 ♬ 原聲 – Sunyui Wei

    The “brutalist philosophy” of the US was made public (曝光) by Robert Daly, a former US diplomat stationed in Beijing, in 2015. Currently, he is the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States. No diplomatic niceties here, Daly frankly states the policy of the US: China must never reach the level of the US.

    Paolo Urio, a professor emeritus at the University of Geneva, points out in his book, America and the China Threat: From the End of History to the End of Empire (Clarity Press, 2022), that the US has “started to understand that China’s development risked putting an end of the world that America made, the foundation of the dominant U.S. role in the world … certainly for the U.S. establishment, the major threat.” (p 5)

    The Barack Obama administration with its “pivot to Asia” sought to contain China. (p 22)

    Obama boasted in his 2016 State of the Union Address of US leadership:

    Surveys show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to office, and when it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead–they call us. (p 27)

    One might argue that the mere fact that Obama felt the need for such bluster indicated some anxiety.

    “American reactions to China’s rise is the fear of losing the U.S. capacity to lead the world, to lose the status of sole super-power that sets the rules of the international system…” (p 232) President Joe Biden recognizes that fear to which he said “That’s not going to happen on my watch because the United States is going to grow and expand.” (p 235)

    America and the China Threat examines the validity of the the China threat and whether the US will succeed in denying China’s ascendancy. The book is divided into three chapters with a concluding section. In chapter one, Urio debunks myths about the United States and China. In chapter 2, he examines the ideological differences between the US and China throughout history. Chapter 3 is titled “The Policy and Power Divide,” which again examines the differences over time between the US and China. The book concludes by pondering the question “If America Is Back, Then What Kind of America Is It?”

    Urio begins by dismantling the myth of a free market upon which US capitalism is rooted. The Swiss author cites Adam Smith who promoted “a market free from the realization of rent (in his time, the rent from land) that is not the result of work.” (p 44) The market that exists now, writes Urio, is one massively tilted in favor of a tiny wealthy minority. (p 45)

    Next, Urio exposes the myth of democracy. Within capitalist countries, the major problem, finds Urio, are the interferences of the economy and major political organizations. (p 48) And, of course, there is the influence of money. (p 49) Concerning the protest movement in Hong Kong, Urio writes that the West depicts it as “a desperate demand for democracy due to the interferences of the Chinese dictatorship. There is certainly some truth in this…” (p 53) What was this “some truth”? Urio did not elaborate. He did state that it was not about a democratic deficit but rather the inequality in Hong Kong.

    Urio makes clear later that China is not a dictatorship. (p 86-92) The government serves the needs of the Chinese people and is supported widely by the people. (p 91)

    Urio derides what passes for democracy in western media: a merger between political and economic elitists. (p 57) The US, he says, is a non-democracy: a plutocracy. (p 341) In contrast,
    author Wei Ling Chua wrote, “The strength of China’s political system is that they need not compromise with corporate interests like in the West…”1

    Sometimes Urio makes perplexing statements. For example, on page 254, Urio writes Switzerland is the “world’s most democratic country.” He didn’t elaborate on this disputable claim that would best have been omitted from the manuscript. He also writes, “Since the beginning of the 20th century the U.S. has not won a single great war on its own.” (p 61) Two riders hang on this claim. First there is nothing great about war. But obviously, Urio refers to a large war. In the 20th century, there were only two large wars: WWI (which many call the Great War) and WWII. There were so many combatants involved in these large wars that renders “on its own” nugatory. The US has won a few wars on its own (e.g., the invasion of Panama and Grenada), but such wars against comparatively tiny opponents reveals the US to be at best a bully. A bully is a morally deficient person. That the United States is a morally flawed entity is clear from the deeply racist history of European settler-colonists having spawned the country through wars and broken treaties against the Original peoples on Turtle Island. (p 207-209) This was followed by the forced transer of Africans to provide slave labor. (p 79-83) Urio did not mention, what is usually omitted from history, that Indigenous peoples were also enslaved in America.2

    American superiority and invincibility is another myth that is deflated in America and the China Threat. The US is a warring nation, having been at war for 229 out of 239 years (93%) of its existence from 1776 to 2015. (p 66) To that number can be added the continuation of warring from 2016 to 2022. The belief in military superiority is dangerous reveals Urio, especially when applied to China: “The consequence of over-estimating present power can be … devastating if a competitor is on an ascending trajectory as far as its power resources are concerned.” (p 74)

    China’s last war was its shameful, truncated invasion of Viet Nam in 1979.

    Another myth debunked about China is the claim that it has a state-capitalist economy. Urio explains that, among other reasons, China is a socialist-market economy: land is collective property, its anti-neoliberal orientation is people first, and banking is controlled by the state.( p 94-95)

    To anyone closely observing the agricultural and technological leaps by China, the myth of China being a copycat manufacturer is balderdash. Robert Temple wrote of the myriad inventions that sprang first from the Chinese mind in The Genius of China: 3000 Years of Science, Discovery and Invention (1998), based on the research of Dr. Joseph Needham. Chinese innovations today are a continuation of its historical creativity.

    However, China’s being at the technological, innovative forefront chagrins many westerners. A prime example is the vendetta against the 5G, and 6G on the way, communications leader Huawei. This has evoked enormous jealousy and consternation among US elitists. Among the many examples of Chinese excellence is its state-of-the-art high-speed train network, including maglevs; cutting-edge AI and robotics technology; quantum computing breakthroughs; it announced plans to construct the Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC), five times larger than the CERN Large Hydron Collider in Switzerland; China continues research into nuclear fusion and its “artificial sun” — Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) — project has sustained a nuclear fusion reaction for more than 17 minutes; in space, there is humanity’s first soft landing on the far side of the moon, China is the first nation to carry out an orbiting, landing, and rovering mission on Mars successfully on its first try. The US shut China out of participation in the International Space Station, so China put the Tiangong space station into orbit, to which China invites foreign participation.

    Won’t the growing Chinese middle class demand a western style political system? The expectation that Chinese would pine for the purportedly superior western political system likeliest reflects western smugness. One ought to give the highly educated Chinese more credit. The mere fact is that China has risen so far and so fast, conquered extreme poverty, and is preparing put a nuclear-powered research station on the moon while a sizeable segment of the West still struggles with tent cities, hunger, unemployment, stagnant wages, drug addiction, etc. Why would Chinese people opt for the western political system that has wrought so much misery?

    Oria also debunks the notion of China becoming imperialist. Chairman Xi has on many occasions denounced hegemony. As Oria notes, the West seems stuck in projecting itself onto other countries. (p 114)

    American ideology is predicated on its chosenness, its exceptionalism, its having a manifest destiny, being the indispensable nation, and being the leader of the free world. (p 120-131) Being the leader, it has the right to decree what is right or wrong and to intervene at its choosing. Writes Urio, “the U.S. tendency has remained, constantly and consistently, to intervene everywhere, whenever possible, by any means, to diffuse the good news of the new world order.” (p 131)

    The Monroe Doctrine has been expanded around the world. Thus, the US breaks promises and sends military assets to the Russian frontier, to the former Soviet republic, Ukraine — what Russia has indicated is a redline. The US feels no embarrassment to tell NATO-ally Germany to not buy Russian gas. “This is another example of how the U.S. plans to lead the world and tell its allies what their interests are.” (p 145)

    The key US-designated adversary, though, is China. (p 150)

    Urio contrasts the static ideology of the US with the Chinese view of the world as perpetually changing. Thus, China remains prepared to adjust accordingly to seek harmony. The vehicle for that harmonization since 1949 has been Marxist-Leninism adapted to Chinese circumstances. Confucianism, molded to the present circumstances, holds the ruler is duty-bound to be moral and look after the people. (p 171, 187, 203) To this end, the Chinese people, writes Urio, will stand by the CPC as long as they can live comfortably. (p 186)

    Urio identifies the US as in decline because the politicians have favored the capitalists over the well-being of the country and its people. (p 243) Spending for the military-industrial complex is rampant (p 244) and has diminished spending in other social areas. (p 247) It is a priority markedly different than in China.

    Militarism is obviously out of the question to any sane analysis against a formidable, nuclear-armed China. Propagandizing is left as a tactic of choice. The US has targeted, in particular, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. Available facts belie western propaganda, disinformation, and incitement concerning these regions. Moreover, given that the continental US is based on the genocide and dispossession of the Original peoples, that Hawai’i was dispossessed from the Hawaiian people, that Guam, Saipan became administered territories of the US through far flung wars, it seems, moderately speaking, outrageous to criticize another country.

    Under Xi, the goal is attaining the Chinese Dream. Part of paving the way for the Chinese Dream means getting the economy right. In terms of economic growth China is faring extremely well, but as is detailed in America and the China Threat, getting the balance right between rural and urban, among the regions, and the narrowing the gap between the wealthy and struggling people (China has a high GINI coefficient) is a work in progress. Urio finds, “The overall result is that China is improving the living conditions of all strata of its society, thus realizing a satisfactory level of social cohesion, stability, unity and harmony, in spite of the persistence of disparities.” (p 287)

    One challenge for China, and other nations, is obtaining a level playing field in global commerce to break the stranglehold of the US dollar. Urio describes how this is being realized by China and other countries. China has entered several economic associations, among them the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS, and effective since 1 January 2022, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a “free” trade agreement among the Asia-Pacific nations of Australia, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Some indications point to the supremacy of the US dollar eroding.

    Near the end of the book, the lynchpin of the Chinese policy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is fleshed out. The BRI is daring and brilliant. With a road belt across Eurasia and a maritime road connecting Africa, the BRI encircles the globe. It is an ever-expanding project encouraging economic development, sharing possibilities among several countries, and attracting the interest of other countries. Who’d like to be left out of such a massive project? The US is opposed to the BRI since it represents leadership by China. Part of the genius of the BRI is that it skirts much of the US military encirclement of China. Says Urio, “BRI is above all a geo-strategic project that, if fully realized, will allow China to reclaim its status as a world power, thereby putting an end to the unipolar ‘world America made.’” (p 337)

    Biden and preceding administrations have not understood that it is economic not military values that will attract other countries. (p 349) China seeks win-win relationships, respects national sovereignty, and does not interfere in the domestic affairs of other nations. (p 351)

    On January 18, 2022, Vice Foreign Minister Le Yucheng spoke to a forum hosted by Renmin University:

    Let the 1.4 billion Chinese people live a good life and satisfy the people’s yearning for a better life is the goal of the Communist Party of China. You must know that there are still 1 billion people in China who have never been on a plane, and more than 200 million Chinese families do not have toilets. The proportion of Chinese people who have obtained a college degree or above is only 4%, compared with 25% in the United States. This is what we should attach great importance to and strive to change. Compared with whether GDP is super beautiful, we value our ideology, governance ability, and contribution to the world to catch up and surpass, and strive to be more advanced, more in line with people’s expectations, and more in line with the trend of the times.

    Does that sound threatening? America and the China Threat lays out the background and foreground to the dynamism between the US and China. One can comprehend the apprehension of US empire observing the unabating ascendance of China, and the US’s unwillingness to accept the rise of China. For most observers it is a fait accompli. The US can squawk about China ascendancy or work with it. Volens nolens, China will continue ascending.

    1. Wei Ling Chua, author of Democracy: What the West Can Learn from China (review: location 1692.
    2. See Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016).
    The post What Kind of Threat is China? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Nicaragua: A Renewed Partnership With China Defangs US Regime Change Tactics

    In a bold and consequential decision with rippling geopolitical implications, Nicaragua recognized the “One-China Principle” and resumed diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for the first time since the beginning of the neoliberal period in 1990. This was announced December 9, 2021 shortly after a meeting of the China-CELAC Forum in which CELAC’s 32 Latin American member states agreed to adopt a China-CELAC Joint Action Plan for Cooperation. The strengthening of Chinese ties with Western Hemisphere partners in a forum without US presence comes as a red flag for US hegemony and control over its own “backyard,” which, since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, has been firmly fenced off from other “external” global actors seeking influence in the region. However, unlike the last two centuries of US imperialism, China offers an approach that respects the rule of law and national sovereignty.

    The post Nicaragua: A Renewed Partnership With China Defangs US Regime Change Tactics appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • ‘1000 Trees’: Shanghai Reveals Visionary New Eco-Lifestyle Mall That Mimics A Mountain

    3 Mins Read Tian An China Investments has completed construction on a new green mall in Shanghai. The building sits snugly amidst the city’s art district. Called ‘1000 Trees’, it is covered with greenery, cascading over various levels, to resemble a mountain. London-based architects firm Heatherwick Studio was granted the new mall design commission. Previously completed projects include […]

    The post ‘1000 Trees’: Shanghai Reveals Visionary New Eco-Lifestyle Mall That Mimics A Mountain appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • China’s threat to ‘punish’ Olympic athletes for free speech ‘very concerning’, Australia says

    Sports minister Richard Colbeck says Australia opposes advisory on political comments from Beijing Winter Olympics committee

    Potential restrictions on athletes’ speech at the Beijing Winter Olympics are “very concerning”, Australia’s sports minister, Richard Colbeck, has said after China warned of “punishment” for political comments at next month’s Games.

    Colbeck said the Australian government opposed China’s advisory, and maintained athletes had the right to free speech on the Olympic stage.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • ACTION ALERT: NYT’s China Covid Coverage Needs to Acknowledge Reality

     

    NYT: The Army of Millions Who Enforce China’s Zero-Covid Policy, at All Costs

    A New York Times article (1/12/22) assailed China for following a zero Covid policy, “no matter the human costs”–without ever mentioning the human costs of not containing the coronavirus.

    The New York Times report (1/12/22) on the response to an outbreak of Covid-19 in the Chinese city of Xi’an featured over-the-top hand-wringing about “authoritarianism” and a complete erasure of the dangers of the coronavirus. Had this article been about Covid-19 response in Europe or the United States, one could swear it was from InfoWars or some other far-right, Covid-denying fringe outlet.

    China’s “zero Covid” policy is indeed a major outlier in the world’s approach to the pandemic. The country, the most populous in the world, took pride in this fact when it announced that it had less than 200 reported positive cases for January 8, a slight increase from days before (Reuters, 1/9/22). This hasn’t come without its hardships; noncitizens of China should be advised not to plan a vacation to a country with closed borders (CNN, 11/15/21; Time, 12/1/21). And outbreaks are met with lockdowns that can upend daily life for millions, as the city of Xi’an is learning (Xinhua, 1/10/22).

    ‘Iron-fist, authoritarian policies’

    The Times article by Li Yuan started off with some undeniable hardships, reflecting chaotic coordination of services. But it leaped from this to calling the Chinese Covid response a set of “iron-fist, authoritarian policies [that] emboldened its officials, seemingly giving them license to act with conviction and righteousness.” Chinese officials are striving to “ensure zero Covid infections”—not because it is the right thing to do, but because “it is the will of their top leader, Xi Jinping.”

    With language like “conviction and righteousness” and “the will of their top leader,” you can hear the Times attempting to parody the propagandistic style of CCP outlets for its own anti-China purposes. But by applying tems like “iron fist” and “authoritarian” to successful public health measures, the Times unironically echoed the framing of  right-wing partisans (Breitbart, 8/3/21, Federalist, 9/9/21; Fox News, 9/29/21; Newsmax, 9/13/21; Telegraph, 11/22/21; Miami Herald, 12/20/21) when they attack less effective Western containment policies.

    New York TImes depiction of a security guard in Xi'an

    The New York Times compared officials who enforced public health measures in Xi’an to Holocaust engineer Adolf Eichmann; like him, they are “willing to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.”

    It gets worse. When reporting on how low-level officials in the city comply with lockdown measures, Yuan quoted Chinese social media commentary to invoke philosopher Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” a concept Arendt applied (as Yuan noted) to high-ranking Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. Again, this is the same trope the far right (CNN, 7/7/21; Reuters, 12/15/21; NBC, 1/12/22) uses when they insist that vaccine cards and mandates are just a step away from the cattle cars, which is not just absurd but an offensive trivialization of Nazi terror.

    This invocation of Arendt sets up the rest of the piece: While there are some who don’t like the Xi’an lockdown, those that are going along with it aren’t an opposing viewpoint, but rather the brainwashed drones of a devious plot against humanity. “Chinese intellectuals,” Yuan wrote, are baffled that workers and civilians who enforce zero Covid policies are “driven by professional ambition or obedience…to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.” Such prose could have been lifted from Josh Mandel, the Republican senate candidate in Ohio who, in response to the idea of vaccine mandates, “compared [President Joe] Biden to the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police force” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 9/10/21).

    Them, not us 

    New York Times depiction of Xi'an ambulance

    The New York Times complained that lockdown rules in Xi’an hospitals “

    The Times spoke of social media censorship in China in relation to lockdowns. Such an issue isn’t nothing, but again, this is also true of the major US social media networks, like Facebook and Twitter (Bloomberg, 6/7/21).

    The Times wrote of “the hospitals that denied patients access to medical care and deprived their loved ones of the chance to say goodbye.” It noted that because of the lockdown, a man was denied care and died of a heart attack, and a pregnant woman who was turned away had a miscarriage.

    The part about dying alone suggests that in a normal country, it is standard procedure to allow visitors in to see patients who are dying from contagious diseases. This is of course not the case, as the Times (3/29/20) acknowledges in its non-China reporting.

    As for the denial of care, keep in mind that these were two tragedies in a city of 13 million. People being unable to access emergency rooms because they are overflowing with Covid patients is an enormous problem in the United States—sometimes with fatal results—but the Times story gives no inkling that access to care could be a problem outside an “authoritarian” state.

    And Xi’an’s health system under lockdown does have some semblance of accountability, as the AP (1/6/22) reported:  “Hospital officials in the northern Chinese city of Xi’an have been punished after a pregnant woman miscarried after being refused entry, reportedly for not having current Covid-19 test results.” The CCP-run Global Times (1/5/22) called the incident a “heartbreaking misfortune” and reported that “local authorities stressed that all hospitals must not use the excuse of epidemic prevention and control to avoid treating patients.”

    There are other forms of accountability in Xi’an public health. The South China Morning Post (1/5/22) said that the city “suspended its top official in charge of big data after the system powering the local health code app, a critical tool in China’s zero-Covid strategy, crashed for a second time.”

    The Times article does acknowledge that

    a few low-level Xi’an officials were punished…. The general manager of a hospital was suspended. Last Friday, the city announced that no medical facility could reject patients on the basis of Covid tests.

    “But that was about it,” Yuan sighs. It’s not clear what kind of retribution she was hoping for—prison sentences?

    ‘To surmount these trying times’

    NYT depiction of food delivery in Xi'an.

    The New York Times, depicting food delivery during the Xi’an lockdown, said that “” in the city.

    China’s state-run news wire, Xinhua (1/4/22), doesn’t dispute that the lockdown in Xi’an comes with “strict” containment measures, but at the same time defends them as a necessary public health measure. It quoted one French expatriate who “believes that it is necessary for Xi’an to adopt strict control measures”: “Not being free now is for real freedom later. The epidemic should be brought under control as soon as possible through strict measures.” As the paper put it, Chinese “authorities have taken strict measures to curb the spread of the virus,” noting that the response’s priority is “to surmount these trying times.”

    This outlook is one that many people have expressed the world over, including in the United States. While few have experienced the kind of intense lockdowns associated with China’s zero-Covid policy, a great many people from all corners of the globe have come to the conclusion that canceling events and travel, mandating remote work, restricting in-person services and requiring masks are things that must be done to tackle this pandemic.

    Just compare this Times report to Xinhua’s coverage (1/13/22) of the US government’s response to the omicron surge. It is written in cold, straight journalism that pulls heavily from US officials, academics and at least one US newspaper. And while it paints a picture of a country struggling to deal with the pandemic, it does report some positive news: “The White House also promised to make lab capacity available for 5 million free polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests.”

    Xinhua could have easily mocked America’s overstrained hospitals and the breakdown of public services  (New York Times, 1/7/22, 1/14/22; AP, 1/8/22; NPR, 1/13/22) as proof that Covid has exposed the United States as a failed state and an empire in decline. Instead, Chinese state media’s reporting on the pandemic in the US is, at least in this instance, fairer than the Times coverage of Xi’an. That’s quite a feat.

    FAIR (1/29/21, 9/17/21) has criticized New York Times coverage of China’s Covid policy in the past, for its harsh, one-sided attacks on a strategy that has literally saved millions of lives. (If the same proportion of China’s population had died from the pandemic that has so far died in the United States, its death toll would be 3.6 million. Its actual toll: less than 5,000.) But its latest coverage of Xi’an, with the casual flinging about of Nazi analogies, reaches a level of partisan hyperbole that puts the paper of record on a par with Fox News and Breitbart.

    ACTION:

    Please tell the New York Times to report on the successes as well as the problems of China’s Covid strategy, without resorting to the far-right’s anti–public health tropes.

    CONTACT:

    Letters: letters@nytimes.com
    Readers Center: Feedback
    Twitter: @NYTimes

    Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.

    The post ACTION ALERT: NYT’s China Covid Coverage Needs to Acknowledge Reality appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Omicron Supply-Chain Disruptions Are Hitting Low-Income Communities the Hardest

    A shopper passes by depleted refrigerated shelves at a Target store on January 12, 2022, in Springfield, Virginia.

    Over the past few weeks, as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus has swept the U.S., supply chain woes have worsened.

    Three things seem to be happening: the first is that so many workers are now out sick that delivery systems to grocery stores and retailers are starting to break down; in other words, the produce has been harvested, but in many instances it’s stuck in warehouses, or on ships, or in food silos because of a shortage of people to speedily deliver goods around this huge country. That, combined with a slew of tough winter storms across the U.S. in recent weeks has, retailers report, snarled truck traffic and caused delivery backups. Related to this, primary products are making it to processing facilities, but those facilities have so many workers out sick that they can’t keep up with demand to make processed foods, such as soups and cereals. The result? Empty shelves in grocery stores. Food chains are reporting they are out of as much as 15 percent of their stock at the moment, significantly higher than is usually the case.

    That doesn’t mean Americans are about to go hungry as grocery stores empty out — the food distribution system in the U.S. is more resilient than that, and has an awful lot of redundancies built in — but it does mean food choice options are declining at the moment, and food prices are likely to continue their upward march at an even faster pace. This will, of course, be a burden carried disproportionately by the poor: a large-scale study by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2016 found that low-income families in the U.S. spend between 28 and 42 percent of their pre-tax income on food; by contrast, wealthier families spent considerably less than 10 percent of their income on food.

    The second thing is that so many retail workers are sick that stores simply don’t have the staffing resources to fully stock their shelves while also catering to their usual numbers of customers. Many, including big-name stores like Walmart, Apple and Macy’s, have responded by reducing their hours and/or cutting back on services. Some grocery stores are reporting that up to 8 percent of their workers are now out sick on any given day as the nationwide Omicron surge nears its peak.

    The third contributing factor to the empty shelves being reported around the country is a more fundamental global supply-chain breakdown as the world enters the third year of the pandemic. Countries that had hoped to be far beyond lockdowns by 2022 are back to attempting to control the spread of the virus through the crude instrument of shuttering large parts of their economies and ordering people to work at home where possible. China — whose Sinopharm vaccine, including its booster shot, has been peculiarly outplayed by the Omicron variant — is locking down entire cities still, affecting tens of millions of people. As a result, key parts of the international supply chain, which is disproportionately dependent on Chinese factories, are particularly fragile at the moment. Asia analysts predict that the supply chain could come under unprecedented pressure over coming months if Omicron starts spreading in Asia at the speed that it has already spread through the U.S. and Europe, and if China continues to enforce its “zero-COVID” policy, which relies on locking down whole cities and mandating universal testing if even a single case of the virus is picked up by health authorities. Lock down enough cities simultaneously and it’s inevitable that factories will also have to temporarily cease operations.

    “The same capitalist system that moved production out of the U.S. to China to make more profits thereby required long global supply chains to feed production in China and bring the products back to U.S. markets,” Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts at Amherst, tells Truthout. “But long supply chains are more vulnerable to disruption than short ones.”

    Because the U.S. and its corporate behemoths have so much bargaining power within the global economy, at least in the short term, that protects the country and its more affluent consumers from the worst impacts of this global squeeze. Prices will go up, but for those who can afford them, most goods continue to be available. In poorer countries, by contrast, real shortages of vital goods, and a lack of money to pay for them, are even more of an everyday reality in 2022 than they were in the recent past.

    Global estimates are that in 2020 alone, as a result of the pandemic, as many as 75 million people fell into extreme poverty; and 80 million more became under-nourished because they no longer had access to sufficient supplies of food. The World Bank estimates that in 2020 alone, 97 million people globally saw their income fall below $2 per day. Since then, as the pandemic has dragged on, almost certainly that catastrophic situation has only become worse. If Omicron leads to even more disruptions, poorer countries will find their consumer power curtailed even further.

    The exacerbated supply chain woes unleashed by Omicron don’t, of course, play out equally in all locations and across all income groups. The wealthier the countries and individuals, the more options they have available to them — to simply pay more to buy goods that are, at least temporarily, scarce; or, for individuals, to shop around to look for particular goods if one store doesn’t have them. By contrast, poorer countries and individuals get frozen out of tight markets.

    In the U.S., the poorer one is, the more one tends to rely only on a small handful of stores. In 2017, the USDA estimated that more than 19 million Americans had only limited access to supermarkets and grocery stores. A disproportionate number of those living in the U.S.’s “food deserts” are people of color. When goods are absent or prices spike in food deserts, poorer consumers — whose incomes aren’t increasing at the same capacity as are prices — often have no choice but to do without.

    According to Wolff, fixing these supply chains in a way that protects the poor would involve building up inventories that could be tapped if and when the delivery of goods starts to break down. But companies are reluctant to do that, he says, because it takes a bite out of their short-term profits. Instead, they wait for catastrophes to hit and then, if and when they do — witness the pandemic — the market response leads to increased prices.

    “Supply chain disruptions threaten corporate profits,” Wolff says. “Their executives respond by allocating reduced quantities of outputs among those who demand those outputs. In doing so, they tend to raise prices and ship goods to higher-income outlets where consumers are most able to pay those higher prices. They correspondingly ship less to those outlets ‘serving’ lower-income folks less able or willing to pay higher prices.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • WADA Issues Warning To 2022 Olympic Athletes About Drug-Contaminated Chinese Meat

    3 Mins Read The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has doubled-down on recommending caution for 2022 Olympic athletes when consuming meat in China. It comes after confirmation of contaminated supplies and the German WADA counterpart issuing a mandate to avoid Chinese meat altogether.  Contaminated meat has been found to contain clenbuterol, a performance-enhancing steroid. Levels have been described as […]

    The post WADA Issues Warning To 2022 Olympic Athletes About Drug-Contaminated Chinese Meat appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • The US Empire Is More Dangerous Than Ever Before: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Most Americans now understand that it was wrong to spend centuries enslaving millions of people. Not many Americans yet understand how equally wrong it is that their government has spent the 21st century killing millions and displacing tens of millions in its post-9/11 wars.

    ❖

    The US is more dangerous now as it loses global primacy than it has been at any other point in its history. There really are just two options currently on the table: either the US empire relinquishes unipolar domination voluntarily and leads a peaceful transition into a multipolar world, or it takes increasingly drastic and dangerous action to maintain planetary control. The latter choice is both horrifying and likely.

    ❖

    People in western imperialist nations pretending to care about Muslims in China will never stop being hilarious.

    ❖

    Remember kids: false flags are crazy conspiracy theories that only ridiculous crackpots believe in, except when they’re reported as fact by news outlets who’ve lied to you about every war.

    ❖

    ❖

    Sure is an interesting coincidence how all the (still completely unproven) narratives about Russian 2016 election interference and Trump collusion served perfectly to manufacture consent for all the bat shit insane US/NATO escalations we’re seeing in Ukraine today.

    ❖

    Everyone who’d support going to war with Russia or China over Ukraine or Taiwan should be regarded with the same revulsion and social rejection as child molesters.

    ❖

    Capitalism is so innately absurd that its proponents always respond to questions about systemic problems by babbling about what people can do as individuals. People are homeless? Get a job. Jobs don’t pay enough? Get a better job. It’s like addressing the problem of a skyscraper being on fire by saying “Don’t go to the floors that are on fire.”

    It’s like if there was a locked room full of ten prisoners and you only gave them enough food to keep seven alive, and you responded to their complaints by saying “Better make sure you grab the food first when I throw it in your cell, then.”

    It’s a belief system you can only hold in place with psychological compartmentalization. Tell that one suffering guy to get a better job and save his money, and then simply do not think about the millions of people who are working low-paying jobs and unable to save any money.

    Any competition-based system will necessarily have losers as well as winners in those competitions. Saying “Compete better than those you’re competing against” does nothing for the part of the population who must necessarily lose. A collaboration-based system is what’s needed.

    ❖

    You don’t even need compassion for the poor and disadvantaged to oppose capitalism. You just need some basic self-preservation and an understanding that in a system where human behavior is driven by profit, war and ecocide must necessarily continue as long as they are profitable.

    ❖

    ❖

    Seems like every day the media have an urgent new report explaining why the free flow of ideas on the internet is dangerous and needs to be curtailed. Today it’s one thing, tomorrow it’ll be something else. It’s not about this or that person or issue, it’s about controlling information on the internet.

    ❖

    It was pretty clever how they redefined fascism as “being kind of racist” while actual fascism was rebranded as “just normal party politics”.

    ❖

    Saying propaganda doesn’t work is the same as saying advertising doesn’t work, and advertising is nearly a trillion-dollar industry. Also, advertising would be much more effective than it already is if corporate ads were allowed to disguise themselves as news reports in The New York Times.

    ❖

    Having strong political opinions on social media is no substitute for doing the work to heal your early childhood trauma.

    ❖

    If you’re the same person you were a decade ago, you just wasted ten years of your life.

    ____________________________

    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. 

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • China goes after dissidents abroad

    On 18 January 2022 a new report by Safeguard Defenders, inspired Al-Jazeera (Erin Hale) to write about how the Chinese authorities are trying to coerce critics thousands of miles from home into returning.

    Wang Jingyou was living in Turkey last year when he found that the 7,000 kilometres (4350 miles) between him and his homeland was no obstacle to an offended Chinese state. Wang had left China after voicing his support on TikTok for Hong Kong’s democracy protests, but after he questioned the outcome of an Indian-Chinese border clash on social media in February 2021, mainland authorities sprung into action.

    Within half an hour of the post, police in his hometown of Chongqing had visited his parents. Then they detained them. They said Wang, who is in his early twenties, had “slandered and belittled heroes” while also “picking quarrels”, two charges that in China are often used to silence government critics.

    “I’m not in China, I’m in Europe,” Wang told Al Jazeera. “I just said something. I didn’t do anything and they put my (name) on a wanted (list) in the government website, in the official media, also in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs too.”

    Wang soon found himself on a months-long journey of harassment that saw him detained while flying through Dubai in April 2021 and threatened with deportation to China – which he narrowly avoided when his story became international news. Wang and his fiancée travelled through several countries before they eventually claimed asylum in the Netherlands, but not before China had cancelled their passports.

    “We are in the Netherlands, but they also have many, many ways to find us,” Wang said, alleging that even with a Dutch phone number he continues to receive threatening text messages and phone calls.

    Chinese paramilitary police in summer unoforms march outside a new museum to the Chinese Commuist Party

    Wang’s story may sound dramatic, but it is far from extraordinary in Xi Jinping’s China, according to human rights watchdog Safeguard Defenders, which released a new report on Tuesday on the country’s widespread practice of “involuntary returns”. Such pressure has been used on more than 10,000 alleged Chinese “fugitives” who since 2014 have been coerced into returning from abroad to face detention or prosecution for alleged corruption and other crimes, the report said citing official data.

    Methods to “encourage” return can vary from harassment and coercion of friends and family online, to approaching a citizen overseas through Chinese or domestic security agents, and more “irregular” methods like state-sponsored kidnapping, Safeguard Defenders said. In some cases, authorities may freeze family assets or even threaten to remove children from families.

    Kidnappings typically occur in countries with a strong relationship with China, like Thailand or Myanmar, but Safeguard Defenders said as many as 10 people may have been kidnapped from among Australia’s large Chinese diaspora in recent years.

    The list also includes the 2015 disappearance of five staff members associated with a Hong Kong book store specialising in books banned in China. One bookseller, Gui Minhai, disappeared in Thailand while the others went missing on trips to China, only to later emerge in Chinese detention

    China has also made use of Interpol “red notices“, which flag a citizen to police and immigration departments around the world so they can be deported back home, where they face a 99 percent conviction rate if prosecuted, the watchdog said.

    “Involuntary returns” have become increasingly common since China first launched an ambitious anti-corruption campaign in 2012, followed by Operation Foxhunt in 2014 to repatriate Communist Party officials facing corruption charges who have fled abroad, and the broader Operation Sky Net in 2015 to target money laundering.

    While nominally law-enforcement based, Operation Foxhunt has been described as a “campaign to enforce political loyalty, avoid in-Party factionalism and to more generally instil Party discipline”, Safeguard Defenders said in the report.

    Both campaigns have corresponded to a 700 percent jump in Chinese people seeking asylum abroad between 2012 and 2020 as China’s already limited civil and political rights have been curtailed even further under President Xi, the rights group said.

    That number does not include the 88,000 Hong Kong people who applied to resettle in the UK in 2021 under a new immigration scheme, after the imposition of a national security law for the Chinese territory that Amnesty says has “decimated” freedoms and rights that Beijing had promised to respect until at least 2047.

    More than 175,000 people have been officially recognised as refugees, but that has not kept Chinese authorities from orchestrating “involuntary returns” whether they are government defectors, Falun Gong practitioners, human rights defenders, political dissidents, or even ordinary citizens like Wang who have fallen afoul of increasingly strict authorities.

    Wang says he was just doing what millions of other people do everyday — sharing his views on social media.

    “We didn’t do anything against China,” he said. “I wrote something. I never thought they would (begin to) watch me.”

    https://safeguarddefenders.com/en/blog/involuntary-returns-report-exposes-long-arm-policing-overseas

    https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/18/china-critics-overseas-feel-the-long-reach-of-beijing-report

    This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.

  • Chinese activist told he could not visit dying wife is re-arrested

    Yang Maodong held ‘on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power’ two days after death of his wife

    A Chinese human rights activist and writer who was detained following repeated pleas to be allowed to visit his terminally ill wife has been formally arrested days after she died for allegedly “inciting subversion of state power”.

    Yang Maodong, who goes by the pen-name Guo Feixiong, was formally arrested on Monday last week by the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau, two days after the death of his wife, Zhang Qing.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • China’s Surging Alternative Protein Sector Gets Government Support Ahead Of Next Food Tech Boom

    3 Mins Read After reviewing public records, The Good Food Institute (GFI) APAC, a non-profit that works to expedite the alternative protein industry across the region, has determined that China’s alternative protein sector is being increasingly better funded to support scale-up and product development. Previous recipients of similar financial allocations in China include solar panel developers and electric […]

    The post China’s Surging Alternative Protein Sector Gets Government Support Ahead Of Next Food Tech Boom appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Excellent Xinjiang Health Statistics vs US Alliance Lies

    The US and its allies are countering the re-emergence of China with a Sinophobic confection of new alliances (the AUKUS and the Quad), military threats, jingoism and false propaganda about a falsely claimed Uyghur Genocide in Xinjiang. The UK Uyghur Tribunal admits that there have been no mass killings in Xinjiang but absurdly asserts that application of globally-praised Chinese family planning in Xinjiang is “genocide.” However excellent health, infant mortality, maternal mortality, life expectancy, population growth, per capita GDP, education, literacy and birth rate outcomes in Xinjiang and China contradict Sinophobic US, UK, and Australian claims of a Uyghur Genocide.

    Below are some key relevant data on China and Xinjiang (42% Han Chinese, 58% ethnic minorities), and by way of comparison data for the US, UK, Australia, and Apartheid Israel (serial war criminal occupier countries), Indigenous Australians (socio-economically disadvantaged survivors of a 2-century Australian Genocide of Aboriginals), Occupied Palestine and Occupied Afghanistan (war criminally occupied countries), and India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (major impoverished but democratic neighbours of China).

    (1). Annual population growth: 0.2% (Australia) 0.3% (China), 0.4% (the US), 0.6% (UK), 1.0% (Bangladesh), 1.0% (India), 1.8% (Apartheid Israel), 1.8% (Xinjiang), 2.0% (Pakistan), 2.1% (Indigenous Australians), 2.3% (Occupied Afghanistan), and 2.5% (Occupied Palestine).

    (2). Life expectancy in years: 83.9 (Australia), 83.5 (Apartheid Israel), 81.8 (UK), 79.1 (US), 77.5 (China), 74.7 (Xinjiang), 74.6 (Occupied Palestine), 73.6 (Indigenous Australians), 73.6 (Bangladesh), 70.4 (India), 67.8 (Pakistan), and 66.0 (Occupied Afghanistan).

    (3). Under-1 infant deaths per 1,000 births: 3 (Australia), 2.5 (Apartheid Israel), 3.5 (UK), 5.5 (US), 6 (Indigenous Australians), 6.8 (Xinjiang), 9 (China), 16.5 (Occupied Palestine), 24.5 (Bangladesh), 29.5 (India), 48.5 (Occupied Afghanistan), and 58.5 (Pakistan).

    (4). Under-5 infant deaths per 1,000 births: 3 (Apartheid Israel), 3.5 (Australia), 4 (UK), 7 (US), 7 (Indigenous Australians), 10.9 (Xinjiang), 11 (China), 19 (Occupied Palestine), 29 Bangladesh, 36 (India), 62.5 (Occupied Afghanistan), and 71.5 (Pakistan).

    (5). Maternal deaths per 100,000 births: 3 (Apartheid Israel), 6 (Australia), 7 (UK), 17.9 (Xinjiang), 19 (US), 20 (Indigenous Australians), 27 (Occupied Palestine), 29 (China), 140 (Pakistan), 145 (India), 173 (Bangladesh) and 638 (Occupied Afghanistan).

    (6). GDP per capita: $65,134 (US), $54,763 (Australia; perhaps about 2 times lower  for the socio-economically disadvantaged Indigenous Australians), $46,376 (Apartheid Israel), $41,855 (UK), $10,001 (China), $8,575 (Xinjiang),  $3,424 (Occupied Palestine), $2,116 (India), $1,846 (Bangladesh), $1,187 (Pakistan), and $470 (Afghanistan).

    (7). Adult literacy:  99.0%  (US), 99.0% (Australia), 99.0%  (UK), 97.1% (Apartheid Israel), 96.7% (Occupied Palestine), 96.4% (China), 96.3% (Xinjiang), 72.2% (India), 61.5% (Bangladesh), 56.4% (Pakistan), and 38.2% (Occupied Afghanistan).

    (8). Annual births per 1000 of population: 12.4  (US), 12.0 (Australia), 12.0  (UK), 12.1 (China; as per (1) higher for Uyghurs), 17.9 (Apartheid Israel), 18.6 (Bangladesh), 18.7 (India), 21.6 (Pakistan), 28.3 (Occupied Palestine), and 37.5 (Occupied Afghanistan).

    These data show that Xinjiang is performing as well as or better than China in most of these parameters but has a much higher birth rate and population growth rate. Conversely, the shocking data on Indigenous Australians, Occupied  Palestine,  and Occupied Afghanistan show that the genocidal Occupiers (Australia, Apartheid Israel and the US Alliance, respectively)  are grossly violating  Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilians in Time of War (the Fourth Geneva Convention) that unequivocally state that the Occupiers are inescapably obliged to provide their conquered Subjects with life-sustaining food and medical requisites “to the fullest extent of the means available to them”.

    A holocaust involves the deaths of a huge number of people. However genocide is precisely defined by Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide thus: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”.

    In Xinjiang there have been no mass killings or expulsions, and birth control policies are much less restrictive for Uyghurs than for Han Chinese. Deaths from violence and imposed deprivation total 2.2 million (the WW1 onwards Palestinian Genocide) and 6.7 million (the 2001 onwards Afghan Genocide; it is worsening under deadly US and US Alliance sanctions, and through the US crippling impoverished Afghanistan by freezing $9.5 billion in Afghan reserves).

    Here is a shocking testament to massive lying by Western mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes – if you Google the terms “Uyghur Genocide”, “Palestinian Genocide” and “Afghan Genocide” you obtain the following results (deaths in brackets): 221,000 (“Uyghur Genocide”; 0 deaths), 11,200 (“Palestinian Genocide”; 2.2 million deaths) and 6,960 (“Afghan Genocide”; 6.7 million deaths). Similarly, searches of the mendacious ABC (the Australian taxpayer-funded equivalent of the mendacious UK BBC) for these terms yield the following results: 95 (for “Uyghur Genocide”), 0 (“Palestinian Genocide”) and 0 (“Afghan Genocide”).

    The Sinophobic claims made by US and US Alliance politicians and propagandists of “genocide” in Xinjiang are patently false. China  can and indeed must be legitimately criticized for the one party state, air pollution, the death penalty, censorship, the surveillance state, harsh treatment of Uyghurs, Hong Kong pro-democracy activists, and dissidents in general, and the harshness of its de-radicalization measures and associated human rights abuses in Xinjiang. However set against those harsh treatments are avoidance of the entrenched deadly jihadi extremism found in Muslim countries from West Africa to South East Asia.  It should be noted that the China-threatening US has an appalling record of covertly supporting non-state terrorism (including jihadi non-state terrorism) from Latin America to South East Asia.

    For a detailed and documented analysis see Gideon Polya, “Excellent Xinjiang Health, Growth & Education Outcomes Contradict Sinophobic US Lies,” Countercurrents. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Please disseminate this to everyone you can.

    The post Excellent Xinjiang Health Statistics vs US Alliance Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Starfield Scoops $100 Million In China’s Biggest Ever Vegan Protein Funding Round

    3 Mins Read Starfield Food Science & Technology has made history with a $100 million Series B investment round. Beijing’s Primavera Capital Group led the round. Other investors included Alibaba’s CSO Ming Zeng and existing backers Joy capita; and Lightspeed China partners, amongst others. Starfield has revealed that funding will be used to significantly increase production capacity. R&D […]

    The post Starfield Scoops $100 Million In China’s Biggest Ever Vegan Protein Funding Round appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Why Washington’s Focus on “Credibility” is a Recipe for War

    The most pressing threat to global security right now isn’t so-called “provocations” by either Russia or China. It is the United States’ misplaced obsession with its own “credibility”.

    This rallying cry by Washington officials – echoed by the media and allies in London and elsewhere – is code for allowing the US to act like a global gangster while claiming to be the world’s policeman. US “credibility” was apparently thrown into question last summer – and only when President Joe Biden held firm to a pledge to pull US troops out of Afghanistan.

    Prominent critics, including in the Pentagon, objected that any troop withdrawal would both suggest the US was backing off from a commitment to maintain the so-called “international order” and further embolden the West’s “enemies” – from the Taliban and Islamic State (IS) group to Russia and China.

    In a postmortem in September, General Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, echoed a view common in Washington: “I think that our credibility with allies and partners around the world, and with adversaries, is being intensely reviewed by them to see which way this is going to go – and I think that damage is one word that could be used.”

    At the same time, a former defence official in the George W Bush administration judged US credibility after the Afghanistan withdrawal at “rock bottom“.

    The only way this understanding of US “credibility” makes sense is if one disregards the disastrous previous two decades of Washington’s role in Afghanistan. Those were the years in which the US army propped up a bunch of wildly unpopular kleptocrats in Kabul who ransacked the public coffers as the US launched an arms’ length drone war that ended up killing large numbers of Afghan civilians.

    To bolster its apparently diminished “credibility” after the troop withdrawal, the US has imposed crushing sanctions on Afghanistan, deepening its current famine. There have also been reports of CIA efforts to run covert operations against the Taliban by aiding its opponents.

    Cold War relic

    Washington’s “credibility” was also seemingly in peril when US and Russian officials met in Geneva this week for negotiations in the midst of a diplomatic, and potential military, standoff over Ukraine.

    The background are demands from Moscow that Washington stops encircling Russia with military bases and that Nato end its relentless advancement towards Russia’s borders. Nato should be a relic of a Cold War-era that officially ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991. Moscow dissolved its own version of Nato, the Warsaw Pact, more than three decades ago.

    Russia had been given verbal assurances in 1990 by George HW Bush’s administration that Nato would not expand militarily beyond the borders of what was then West Germany. Seven years later, President Bill Clinton signed the Nato-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, which committed Russia and Nato not to treat each other “as adversaries”, while Nato reiterated that there would be no “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” in former Eastern bloc states.

    Every subsequent US administration has flagrantly broken both of these pledges, with Nato troops now stationed across eastern Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, Moscow feels as menaced by Nato’s aggressive posturing, which serves to revive its Cold War fears, as Washington would if Russia placed military bases in Cuba and Mexico.

    No one should forget that the US was prepared to bring the world to the brink of armageddon in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union in 1962 to prevent Moscow from stationing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

    Historic alliance

    Despite the current clamour about the need for the US to maintain its “credibility”, Washington was in fact only being asked at the Geneva talks to start honouring, 30 years late, commitments it made long ago and has repeatedly violated.

    The latest flashpoint is Ukraine, Russia’s neighbour, which has been roiling since a coup in 2014 overthrew the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, an ally of Moscow. The deeply divided country is split between those who want to prioritise their historic ties with Russia and those who want to be embraced by the European Union.

    Moscow – and a proportion of Ukrainians – believe Washington and Europe are exploiting the push for an economic pact to engineer Ukraine’s subordination to Nato security policies, directed against Russia. Such fears are not misplaced. Each of what were formerly Soviet states that became an EU member has also been recruited to Nato. In fact, since 2009 it has been an official requirement, through the Treaty of Lisbon, that EU member states align their security policies with Nato.

    Now US “credibility” apparently depends on its determination to bring Nato to Russia’s front door, via Ukraine.

    US perfidy

    Reporting on a working dinner with Russian diplomats last Sunday, before the Geneva meeting, Wendy Sherman, the US deputy secretary of state, recast that perfidy as the US stressing its commitment to “the freedom of sovereign nations to choose their own alliances”.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is being widely made out to be the aggressor after he posted tens of thousands of troops at the border with Ukraine.

    One can argue whether those soldiers are massed for an invasion of Ukraine, as is being widely assumed in the western media, or as a show of force against a US-led Nato that believes it can do whatever it pleases in Russia’s backyard. Either way, a miscalculation by either side could prove disastrous.

    According to the New York Times, General Milley has warned the Russians that an invasion force would face a prolonged insurgency backed by US weaponry. There are reports that Stinger anti-aircraft missiles have already been delivered to Ukraine.

    Similarly, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, has threatened“confrontation and massive consequences for Russia if it renews its aggression on Ukraine”.

    Drumbeat of war

    This reckless way of projecting “credibility” – and thereby making confrontations and war more, not less, likely – is currently on show in relation to another nuclear-armed power, China. For many months, the Biden administration has been playing what looks like a game of chicken with Beijing over China’s continuing assertion of a right to use force against Taiwan, a self-governing island off the coast of China that Beijing claims as its territory.

    Few countries formally recognise Taiwan as a state, and nothing in relations between Taipei and China is settled. That includes heated disagreements over the division of airspace, with Taiwan – backed by the US – claiming that a whole chunk of southeast mainland China falls within its “defence zone”. That means the scaremongering headlines about record numbers of Chinese warplanes flying over Taiwan need to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

    The same disputes apply to China and Taiwan’s respective claims to territorial waters, with a similar potential for provocation. The pair’s conflicting views of what constitutes their security and sovereignty are a ready hair-trigger for war – and in circumstances where one party possesses a large nuclear arsenal.

    Nonetheless, the Biden administration has stomped into this long-simmering feud by feeding the media with alarmist headlines and security analysts with talking points about a possible US war with China over Taiwan. Top Pentagon officials have also stoked concerns of an imminent invasion of Taiwan by China.

    Diplomatically, President Biden snubbed his nose at Beijing by inviting Taiwan to attend his so-called “democracy summit” last month. The event further inflamed Chinese indignation by showing Taiwan and China in separate colours on a regional map.

    The CIA has announced the establishment of a new espionage centre with an exclusive focus on China. According to CIA director William Burns, it is necessary because the US is faced with “an increasingly adversarial Chinese government”. That “adversary”, however, poses no direct threat to US security – unless Washington chooses provocatively to bring Taiwan under its security umbrella.

    Washington’s drumbeat has been so constant that a recent poll showed more than half of Americans supported sending US troops to defend Taiwan.

    Nuclear hard line

    The picture is the same with Iran. US “credibility” is being cited as the reason why Washington needs to take a hard line against Tehran – goaded, as ever, by Israel – on its presumed ambitions to build a nuclear bomb.

    Israel, of course, has had its own large arsenal of nuclear weapons for decades – entirely unmonitored and in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Both the US and Israel fear Iran wants to level the nuclear playing field in the Middle East. Israel is determined to make sure that only it has the power to make nuclear-backed threats, either against others in the region or as leverage in Washington to get its way.

    President Barack Obama’s administration signed an agreement with Iran in 2015 placing strict limits on Tehran’s development of nuclear technology. In return, Washington lifted some of the most punishing sanctions on the country. Three years later, however, President Donald Trump reneged on the deal.

    Now Iran suffers the worst of both worlds. The US has again intensified the sanctions regime while demanding that Tehran renew the deal on worse terms – and with no promise, according to US Secretary of State Blinken, that the next US administration won’t tear up the agreement anyway.

    US “credibility” does not depend, it seems, on Washington being required to keep its word.

    In the background, as ever, is the threat of joint military reprisals from Israel and the US. In October, Biden reportedly asked his national security adviser to review Pentagon plans for a military strike if this one-sided “diplomatic process” failed. A month later, Israel approved $1.5bn for precisely such an eventuality.

    Drunk on power

    Washington’s emphasis on its “credibility” is actually a story the US elite tells itself and western publics to obscure the truth. What is really prized is America’s ability to enforce its economic interests and military superiority unchallenged across the globe.

    After the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the US overthrow of the elected government of Iran to reinstall its dictator-monarch, there is barely a corner of the planet where the US has not meddled. In Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria and its so-called “backyard”, Latin America, US “credibility” has required interventions and war as an alternative to diplomacy.

    In October 2019, as Trump suggested that US troops would be pulled out of Syria – where they had no authorisation from the United Nations to be in the first place – Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and former head of the CIA, observed that the decision had “weakened the US” and “undercut our credibility in the world”.

    He added: “There isn’t an ally that we’ve around the world that doesn’t now distrust us and worry about whether or not we will stand by our word.”

    But this kind of credibility is built not on principle, on respecting others’ national sovereignty, or on peace-building, but on the gangsterism of a superpower drunk on its own power and its ability to intimidate and crush rivals.

    Washington’s “word” is only selectively kept, as its treatment of Russia and Iran highlight. And enforcement of its “credibility” – from breaking commitments to threatening war – has had a predictable effect: they have driven Washington’s “enemies” into an opposition camp out of necessity.

    The US has created a more menacing adversary, as Russia and China, two nuclear powers, have found a common purpose in asserting a countervailing pressure on Washington. Since the late summer, the two have held a series of war games and joint military exercises, each of them a first.

    The world is entering what looks like a new, even more complex cold war, in which any misunderstanding, mishap or false move could rapidly escalate into nuclear confrontation. If it happens, the pursuit of US “credibility” will have played a central part in the catastrophe.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Why Washington’s Focus on “Credibility” is a Recipe for War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 5 Vegan Traditional Chinese New Year Desserts Recipes To Celebrate With

    4 Mins Read Chinese New Year is the most important celebration of the year. Also called the Spring festival, it denotes a time of positivity and fresh beginnings. Celebrated across Mainland China but also globally, food plays a significant role in the festivities. And these vegan versions of favourite dishes will make it a plant-based celebration to remember. […]

    The post 5 Vegan Traditional Chinese New Year Desserts Recipes To Celebrate With appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • News on China | No. 82

    In this episode: China encourages peace in Africa, does business around the world, regulates care of “left-behind” children, and works toward the common prosperity goal through the construction of affordable housing.

    The post News on China | No. 82 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Short History of the US-Pakistan Relationship

    On January 10, 2022, National Security Advisor (NSA) Moeed Yusuf said, “It [Pakistan] is still not [free from US influence] and I doubt that there is any country which is free from it.” He added that the country does not have any financial independence, being dependent on loans from International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other foreign organizations. “When we cannot [fulfill] the demands, we seek foreign loans. When you procure loans, your economic sovereignty is compromised.” These comments are not entirely stunning; they encapsulate the ambivalent essence of the US-Pakistan relationship. While the Pakistani elite greatly enjoys its self-imposed subservience to the American empire, it never just sits back and rest on its laurels. It continuously tries to exploit what little room for maneuver it has within the bond of servility to further more selfish, regional interests – ones which either demand too much from the patron or don’t neatly align with the US’ hegemonic ambitions.

    Anticommunism

    Unlike the many postcolonial nations of the time which exuded a great degree of interest in the development of an independent project, Pakistan was totally craven; its creators displayed a surprising lack of enthusiasm in the paraphernalia of sovereignty. They were only interested in somehow securing money, regardless of the consequences which the people would have to face later. Every option was on the table. In The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Tariq Ali notes that “the new rulers of Pakistan developed an early communal awareness that to survive they had to rent their country.” Washington was approached as a possible buyer but it rejected the offer to buy Pakistan “as it was busy securing Western Europe and Japan, as well as keeping an eye on China, where the Eighth Route Army was beginning to threaten a Communist victory.” However, this did not stop Pakistan from trying to sell itself.

    Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, continued to consistently market his country as an important ally against Soviet expansionism. Ali remarks that he hysterically “insisted that Soviet agents were present in Kalat and Gilgit in search of a base in Baluchistan.” These same sentiments were shared in a more sophisticated manner by then foreign minister Zafarullah Khan. “[H]e pleaded with the United States to shore up Pakistan, whose people were genetically anticommunist, since this was the best way to protect India against the Soviet Union, which would send its armies through the Khyber Pass.” Pakistan’s persistence in peddling threats about USSR paid off in May 1954 when it signed the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement, through which the US provided resources and training to the Pakistani army, with the general aim of turning the new nation into a pliant Third World state. In September 1954, Pakistan was officially anointed as a crusader against the godless Communists, joining the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization together with Thailand and the Philippines.

    Exactly one year later, in September 1955, Pakistan joined another pro-Western organization known as the Baghdad Pact, which included King Faisal’s Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Britain. As Pakistan chummed up with its anti-Soviet friends, the inflows of money into the ruling class’ pockets increased. From 1953 to 1961, Pakistan received around $2 billion in assistance from the US. These wads of cash, however, did not signify a thoroughgoing bilateral camaraderie, one in which the imperialist benefactor would come to the help of its junior partner at all cost. Apart from acting as another chess piece in the anticommunist game, Pakistan served no other significant function for USA. Therefore, the latter felt no need for fulfilling all the demands of the former. In fact, what happened during the initial years of 1960s was the opposite. In United States and Pakistan in the 21st Century: Geostrategy and Geopolitics in South Asia, Syed Tahseen Raza writes:

    The Sino-Indian Border struggle in 1962 paved the way for closer US-India ties because neutral India, desperate to have weapons in the immediate aftermath of Chinese aggression, made a frantic plea for US help. The US was pleased because this was an opportunity to wean India off the influence of the Soviet Union by offering help in a time of crisis. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s inching closer with China was not liked by the United States. When American finally decided to give arms aid to India in November 1962, Pakistan was not consulted before as was promised to them and this deeply offended the leaders of Pakistan. The [John F.] Kennedy administration, on the whole, tried to balance the American relationship with South Asia on equal footing and therefore did not view Pakistan as more important than India.

    Feeling threatened by USA’s growing closeness with India, Pakistan extracted from the former, on November 5, 1962, a pledge “that it will come to Pakistan’s assistance in the event of aggression from India.” This pledge, nonetheless, did not help Pakistan during the Second Kashmir War (1965) when it undertook dangerous military adventures (Operation Gibraltar and Operation Grand Slam) against India. When the war started, the US cut aid to both Pakistan and India. A similar situation developed six years later. When New Delhi decisively intervened in East Pakistan’s civil war in late 1971, Washington was unwilling to directly support the Pakistani army’s Operation Searchlight against Bengali insurgents (though it did send part of its Seventh Fleet in the Bay of Bengal). The country’s eastern wing seceded to form the state of Bangladesh, dismembering Pakistan in a humiliating way. Spurred by this defeat, Pakistan’s governing caste realized that the continued existence of the nation was dependent on nuclear parity with India.

    The development of nuclear weapons was smoothed by conjunctural reasons. In neighboring Afghanistan, the communists, who had backed the 1973 military coup by Prince Daoud after which a republic was proclaimed, withdrew their support from him. In April 1978, the Shah of Iran convinced Daoud to turn against the communist factions in his army and administration. In response to increasingly harsh state repression, left-wing officers in the military stormed the Presidential Palace in Kabul. The government was turned over to Noor Mohammed Taraki, a communist professor who became the President of the Revolutionary Council of Afghanistan. These developments – which were extensively supported by the USSR – came to be known as the Saur (April) Revolution. The US was terrified. It crafted a subversive plan that made General Zia’s dictatorship in Pakistan a principal node for sending jihadists to Afghanistan. Singularly focused on destabilizing Afghanistan’s communist regime, and, by extension, Soviet Union, USA cared less about Pakistan developing its nuclear programme in the 1980s.

    War on Terror

    America’s benign attitude toward Pakistan changed with the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ultimate end of the Cold war. “[S]ans the American aim of defeating communism as their top priority,” comments Raza, “Pakistan was not given any extra consideration.” The “US Intelligence Report,” which had been indicting Pakistan for its nuclear quest, came to be invoked more frequently. When India conducted its Nuclear Test in March 1998, the Bill Clinton administration tried to prevent Pakistan from following suit, offering the resumption of the sale of F-16 aircraft (which had been frozen by George H.W. Bush when he did not certify Pakistan’s non-possession of nuclear devices) and economic and military aid. But Pakistan demanded more. Raza remarks: “Pakistan wanted tough punitive action against India. When the G-8 meeting on 17-18 May 1998 didn’t take very harsh measures against India in accordance with Pakistan’s expectations, bowing to public pressure, Pakistan decided to go for the Nuclear Test, which it ultimately carried out on 28 May, 1998.”

    In response to Pakistan’s nuclear test, the US imposed sanctions, which included restriction of the provision of credits, military sales, economic assistance, and loans. These were, nevertheless, limited in scope and were not sustained. US-Pakistan relations exited this period of downturn in an explosive manner after 2001, thanks to the murky dynamics cultivated by imperialism in Afghanistan. After the USSR left in 1988, Pakistan maintained a strong footprint in Afghanistan to gain “strategic depth” against India, continuing to nurture the Islamist extremism that was earlier used to mobilize jihadist fighters from all over the world against USSR. These actions had severe repercussions. When hardhats of jihadism attacked New York in 2001 to express their disgruntlement with America’s bases in Saudi Arabia, the destruction of Iraq and support for Israel, Pakistan was caught in a dilemma. Networks of battle-hardened fighters that it had built along with the USA were now on the attack radar of its imperialist sponsor.

    With limited options, Pakistan decided to join the US War on Terror, declaring support for the Hamid Karzai government in Kabul. “By providing the USA with help in the invasion of Afghanistan,” Justin Podur clarifies, “Pakistan was able to save its clients and its own personnel from destruction, as much of the Taliban and al-Qaeda crossed the border to Pakistan or went to ground and Afghanistan was taken over by US-friendly warlords.” This tactical move had its own disruptive consequences for Pakistan’s social osmosis. General Pervez Musharraf came to be accused of treason for supporting the USA against fellow Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This political effect complicated military operations. As the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) made the Pakistan army take action against insurgents operating in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, casualties increased, eroding the state’s legitimacy in the region. When Pakistan cooperated with the insurgents on the sly, it faced US threats.

    Conflicts

    The convoluted workings of the War on Terror have had a destructive impact on Pakistan’s economy. It has lost $150 billion – 41% or two-fifths of the country’s total economy size, more than the $13 billion that it received from the US between 1999 and 2013. Since the US invasion of Afghanistan, more than 80,000 Pakistani civilians, security forces personnel and women and children have been killed in gun, bomb and suicide attacks. On average, every year Pakistan suffered losses of $7.7 billion – more than the country’s total expenditures on education, health and other social safety schemes. With the growing advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan, current Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in September 2021, saying: “Since 2001, I have repeatedly warned that the Afghan war was unwinnable. Given their history, Afghans would never accept a protracted foreign military presence, and no outsider, including Pakistan, could change this reality. Unfortunately, successive Pakistani governments after 9/11 sought to please the United States instead of pointing out the error of a military-dominated approach.”

    Scarred by the War on Terror, Pakistan has been frustrated to see USA establish an alliance with India as part of an anti-China containment strategy. The US and Indian elites have found a common interest in countering China; India is embroiled in disputes on its land borders with China and the US and its allies are contesting China’s claim to maritime territories across shipping routes in the Indo-Pacific region. It is against this background that Pakistan has returned to China’s “all-weather friendship,” initiated in the 1960s by General Ayub Khan who felt betrayed by Washington’s overtures to India in the aftermath of the Sino-Indian border conflict. China has become Pakistan’s closest strategic ally, supplying it with modern defense equipment. Pakistan supports China’s stance on Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan, and China backs Pakistan on its Kashmir issue with India. Over the past five years, this cooperation has been further cemented by China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its local cognate China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), entailing over $60 billion worth of Chinese investments in infrastructure consisting mostly of loans.

    Despite the economic heft of China, Pakistan still needs Washington’s support, both to get disbursements of its $6 billion bailout package from the IMF and to be removed from the terror-financing and money-laundering watchdog Financial Action Task Force’s “grey list,” a designation that encumbers Islamabad’s global financial operations. War on Terror cooperation had converted Pakistan into a major non-NATO ally of the US in 2004, granting it various military and financial privileges. The designation had also eased Pakistan’s access to IMF facilities. With the deterioration of Pakistan’s relationship with USA, accessing funds has become difficult. In October-November 2021, IMF withheld the release of a $1 billion tranche under an Extended Fund Facility (EFF) to Pakistan until the government agreed to close commercial bank accounts held by the armed forces and other state entities and remitted $17 billion worth of public funds into a single treasury account. It is believed that USA, the single largest financial contributor to the IMF, had a hand in the reform demands.

    In a June 2021 interview on HBO’s documentary news series Axios, Khan had said, “Pakistan will “absolutely not” allow the CIA to use bases on its soil for cross-border counterterrorism missions after American forces withdraw from Afghanistan.” To change this policy decision, USA started using IMF monetary policy as a bargaining chip to force cash-strapped Islamabad to agree to Joe Biden administration’s counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. These events highlight the conflictual nature of the contemporary US-Pakistan relationship. And it seems that both the parties have failed to arrive at a proper resolution till now. Yusuf’s criticism is significant in this regard as he was the one chosen for mending ties with the US. He has spent a decade or more in the think tank and security policy circle in the US capital as associate vice president for Asia at the Institute of Peace, a US government-backed institution. The Pakistani government had recently elevated him from the position of Special Assistant to the Prime Minister to NSA to signal seriousness in creating a new rapport with the US. It seems that Pakistan will have to wait longer for such a reset in relationships.

    The post A Short History of the US-Pakistan Relationship first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Battle at Lake Changjin: China’s Anti-war Film

    For decades, Hollywood has produced a plethora of films extolling American military prowess in warfare. Aside from Oliver Stone films and a few others, e.g., Casualties of War, usually these Hollywood films depict the United States as a force for good defeating fascists and other evildoers. Never-ending US militarism has provided a cornucopia of potential war scripts for Hollywood. Currently designated bête noires have already featured in Hollywood war films. In 1984, Hollywood made Red Dawn about an invasion of the US by the Soviet Union. In 2012, Red Dawn was updated to the other source of US demonization, China. However, capitalism and the lust for profits caused a switcheroo. The Chinese market is very lucrative for Hollywood. Consequently, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) bogeyman was substituted in as invading the American homeland.

    The Soviet Union and Russia have produced a number of war films, albeit to little fanfare in the West. In the western world, Hollywood has been ruling the movie roost. Recently, however, Chinese film production has grown by major leaps and bounds, and blockbusters have been among the film fare. China is now the world’s largest cinema market, and it is expected to continue to grow.

    The major Chinese film of 2021 was a war epic, The Battle at Lake Changjin. It was produced at a cost of $200 million and grossed $905 million worldwide. It was commissioned by the Communist Party of China for its 100th anniversary in 2021.

    The year previously, 2020, China honored the 70th anniversary of its People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) that made the sacrifice to fight the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea. This war is encapsulated in The Battle at Lake Changjin.

    A basic outline of what preceded China’s entry into the war on the Korean peninsula is that the DPRK and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south were engaged in a civil war, a war precipitated by the US splitting the country in two. The DPRK had advanced throughout the ROK except for a small southern pocket when the US decided to interpose itself into the war on the side of the ROK. The US would also manage to bring the United Nations on board, bringing other countries to its side. This massively tipped the scales, and the war pushed north over the 38th parallel. China had warned the US on numerous occasions to stay away from the Yalu River that delineates the Korean border with China. (For detailed and footnoted substantiation read A.B. Abrams’ Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power. Review.)

    Near the beginning of the movie, viewers see US planes strafing the environs of the Yalu River. China was very reluctant to enter the war, having not so long ago emerged from its own civil war. At the time China was a poor country looking to get back on its feet. But as pointed out in the film, that generation had to fight to spare a future generation from having to fight the war.

    Thus, the 9th Army of the PVA is sent across the Yalu River during the frigid winter of 1950. The PVA was ill equipped, and they were going up against the best equipped and most formidable army of that epoch. At Changjin Lake temperatures plunged to -30°C. The film depicts ferocious fighting, numerous casualties, gore, and deaths on both sides. The remnants of the fleeing UN army made it to the port in Hungnam and escaped on vessels. The UN-US military would retreat back over the 38th parallel.

    China had won that battle, but jingoism is muted.

    Despite warnings from the Chinese side, the US breached the Yalu River, and China responded. Nowadays, a scenario plays out in Europe where Russia has warned the US against further eastward expansion.

    The US ought to have drawn some lessons from the debacle of losing to “Mao Zedong’s peasant army.” But history reveals the US was forced to withdraw from Afghanistan by peasants with AK-47s; to flee from peasant fighters in Viet Nam; told to leave from war-ravaged Iraq; and it is still mired in the abject embarrassment it helped cause in Syria, reduced to being a thief of oil and wheat.

    The Battle at Lake Changjin also commits Hollywood-style theatrical excesses. However, there is no glorification of warring in the film. The sensitive viewer can only conclude that war as a means to settle differences or to impose oneself on another is barbaric and immoral. But when one side resorts to violence, the other is forced to fight back or to submit. As Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata put it: a choice of dying on one’s feet or living on one’s knees.

    The film’s obvious message is that violence must be rejected by the peoples of all countries. But not only that: violence in all its forms must be rejected by humanity. The violence of oppression, brutality, inequality, poverty, racism, intolerance, etc all carry the seeds of greater violence that leads to all-out war.

    The post The Battle at Lake Changjin: China’s Anti-war Film first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Dairy-Free Brand Marvelous Foods Secures $1.2 Million For Expansion In China and Beyond

    3 Mins Read Beijing plant-based dairy company Marvelous Foods has scooped $1.2 million in new funding. Lever VC and New Climate Ventures, amongst others, participated in the round. The investment will be used to expand the current product portfolio and increase sales channels.  Marvelous Foods is focussed on providing dairy alternatives to Chinese consumers who want to shop […]

    The post Dairy-Free Brand Marvelous Foods Secures $1.2 Million For Expansion In China and Beyond appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • China Tests 12.5 Million In Zhengzhou For Covid In Six Hours

    On Friday, Chinese health authorities began testing every single resident of Zhengzhou, the capital of China’s central Henan Province, after a handful of COVID-19 cases were detected in the massive city of 12.5 million. Just six hours later, they were finished, achieving a rate of 2.1 million people tested per hour, or 583 residents per second, according to the Global Times. For comparison, that is equal to New York City and Chicago combined. On Sunday, health officials set about trying to do it again with the even larger city of Tianjin, home to 14 million people.

    The post China Tests 12.5 Million In Zhengzhou For Covid In Six Hours appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Anonymous Set To Launch Operation Tibet Action Against Winter Olympic Targets?

    Anonymous Set To Launch Operation Tibet Action Against Winter Olympic Targets?

    Image: courtesy of @AnonymousTibet @teamriddler

    With the ethical horror-show of the 2022 Winter Games due to launch in China on February 4th we were extremely pleased to receive news on social media that hacktivists ‘Operation Tibet’ have issued a statement pledging to take action. If their previous activism is any guide we can expect to see a number of Chinese online platforms and websites being targeted, no doubt linked to this appalling event.

    We’ll be posting updates on this as and when available. Meanwhile we’d like to once again express our genuine appreciation and respect to Anonymous for showing such amazing support for Tibet.

    This post was originally published on TIBET, ACTIVISM AND INFORMATION.

  • Increased repression and violence a sign of weakness, says Human Rights Watch

    Watchdog’s latest report argues autocrats around the world are getting desperate as opponents form coalitions to challenge them

    Increasingly repressive and violent acts against civilian protests by autocratic leaders and military regimes around the world are signs of their desperation and weakening grip on power, Human Rights Watch says in its annual assessment of human rights across the globe.

    In its world report 2022, the human rights organisation said autocratic leaders faced a significant backlash in 2021, with millions of people risking their lives to take to the streets to challenge regimes’ authority and demand democracy.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Military aircraft accidents blight start to the year

    Combat aircraft operations in the Asia Pacific is off to a rocky start in 2022 with a spate of high profile aircraft accidents for South Korea and Taiwan in the first two weeks of the year. On 4 January, A Republic of Korea Air Force (RoKAF) Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter made […]

    The post Military aircraft accidents blight start to the year appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • Kazakhstan:  NATO’s New Frontier?

    Kazakhstan reminds of Armenia (September 2015), also energy price increases, Georgia (April 2009), opposition attempting to force pro-Russian President Mikheil Saakashvili, from power; and even to some extent of Ukraine (2014) – Maiden riots supposedly because then President Viktor Yanukovych, lured into negotiations with Europe for an association agreement with the European Union, behind which was – who else – NATO. The majority of Ukrainians had no idea about these ongoing negotiations and their background. So, the riots were planned by long hand and had nothing to do with the short-cut EU negotiations. Talks were eventually interrupted when Yanukovych received assurances from Russia for a “better deal”.

    That’s when hell broke out on 21 February 2014 and the Maidan massacre took place. Its violent destruction was disproportionate to the cause. Western hired mercenaries were behind the merciless killing. The Maidan massacre murdered some 130 people, including some 18 policemen. That’s when it became clear – another Color Revolution was being instigated by the west – and always, but always with NATO in the back.  NATO’s goal was setting up one or several bases in Ukraine, the closer to Moscow, the better.

    Just for the record, the 1991 agreement between Europe and the new Russia, stipulated that there would be no new NATO bases further to the east (of Berlin), was never respected by the west. That’s why President Putin is drawing red lines, and rightly so.

    Perhaps, one of the first such Color Revolutions in recent history was Serbia, when in early 2000 Serbian youth chanted “Slobo, Save Serbia! Slobo Save Serbia!”. Later that year, a “reform-minded” foreign-funded and trained group of young people infiltrated the Serbian pro-Milosevic youth and brought Milosevic, the president loved by most Serbs, to fall in October 2000. He was arrested immediately shipped to the ICC prison in The Hague, where he awaited trial for highest treason and crimes against humanity, which he did not commit.

    His lawyers accumulated enough proof for Milosevic to demonstrate that the west was behind this Color Revolution and, indeed, the total dismantling of former Yugoslavia. If these documents would become known to the Court, the ICC, one of the most important interferences and destruction of a country in recent history would shed an irrevocable light on the crimes of the west, at that time led by President Clinton et al. So, Milosevic had to be “neutralized’. On March 11, 2006, he was found dead in his prison cell, a so-called suicide. This, despite the fact that since June 2001, he was on constant suicide watch.

    Well, these are the stories of Armenia, Georgia and Serbia, but back to Kazakhstan, which resembles in many details these preceding so-called Color Revolutions. NATO having been unsuccessful under Russia’s strict red line – to advance further toward Moscow in Ukraine, or before in Belarus — is trying now on the southern front, with Kazakhstan.

    This is clearly an attempted coup, no longer just protests about a gas price hike. It was engineered by the west – see this interview on the Kazakhstan crisis of Dr. Marcus Papadopoulos with Kevork Almassian (video 46 min. 6 January 2022):

    No chance of success with this new coup attempt – just more propaganda for the west. President Putin will never allow these former Soviet republics to slide into the power base of the west, of NATO, especially now, since it is well known that over 90% of the population of all these former Soviet Republics want to stay firmly in Russia’s orbit.

    The repeated protest patterns in Serbia, Armenia, Georgia, Belarus, and now in Kazakhstan are clearly indicative of western / NATO pressure to destabilize Russia and, ideally, so they keep dreaming since WWII – bring Russia into the “western influence base” – call it slavehood. In several of these cases the base reason for riots were massive energy price hikes, were just a pretext to heavy violent interference by western mercenaries under the guidance of NATO.

    Never to forget NATO is always the power base behind these moves, because the end game is one or several NATO bases in the countries they are trying to putsch. Yet, it doesn’t seem to be very smart, as the west ought to know that none of these former Soviet Republics will betray Russia – almost all the people, including all the higher-level politicians, want to remain firmly in Russia’s zone of influence. Kiev was an exception. Kiev since WWII has been a Nazi stronghold, something that doesn’t apply to the rest of Ukraine.

    In Kazakhstan, after what appears as local rather peaceful riots, violent elements were introduced from “outside”, in the form of well-trained almost para-military protesters, out to kill. It is what has become known as an attempted “Color Revolution”.

    In Kazakhstan the death toll far exceeds 30, including 18 policemen, at least two of whom were decapitated. Hundreds have been injured. While according to Kazakh President Tokayev, constitutional order was largely restored last Friday, 7 January, unrest continues and nearly 4000 people were arrested. The extreme violence took over government buildings and burnt them down; the airport was occupied. The level of violence was way disproportionate for a gas price hike. Clearly other motives are at stake.

    The vast majority of the 19 million Kazakhs have not taken to the streets, because of the gas price increase, which was not as dramatic as the western main stream media has you believe. The majority lives in rural areas and avoids violence.

    These latest Kazakh upheavals could also be called a below-the-belt NATO approach to destabilize Russia, since NATO seems to have failed in Ukraine. In other words, undermining Russia’s position on Ukraine.

    During the weekend, China’s President Xi Jinping called Kazakh President Tokayev, hinting at US interference, assuring Tokayev that China is backing Russia. He is also pledging direct support to Kazakhstan. See this Xi Jinping Calls Kazakh Pres Tokayev, Hints at US Interference, Backs Russia, Pledges Support

    Russian President Vladimir Putin held talks with member states of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on Friday. Peacekeepers from Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan were deployed to Kazakhstan earlier last week. President Tokayev was saying they would stay “for a limited period of time” to support the local security forces. Indeed, this morning, January 11, President Tokayev has declared the CSTO mission completed and is discussing with the troops their repatriation.

    Russia’s Ministry of Defense later clarified that the CSTO forces have also been tasked with the protection of important facilities and key infrastructure and were not supposed to participate in “operational and combat” activities.

    The EU, a typical undecided hypocritical agent, also offered the bloc’s assistance to help resolve the crisis with several countries calling on both the protesters and government forces to refrain from violence.

    Yeah, right: calling on both parties to refrain from violence, when, in fact, the violent element was introduced clearly by NATO members, most of whom are Europeans. Once again, the trustworthiness of Europe is down in the pits. All it will do is appease some ignorant western, mostly European citizen with a massive flood of pro-western propaganda.

    The question in the room is why Russian and Kazakh governments’ special services did not foresee this type of “Color Revolution” coming, especially after Russia’s drawing a red line on Ukraine? And after the west had lost her coup attempt in Belarus? Is it possible that the Ukraine distraction – hyped up by the western media with constant threats of a nuclear WWIII scenario – diverted President Putin’s attention from other vulnerable attack areas, such as Kazakhstan? And possibly Belarus? The latter is currently quiet. But to an outside eye, it looks like a temporary calm. And Ukraine is far from over.

    As long as Russia is running after the problem, rather than taking an offensive surprise lead, Putin may remain in a defensive bind. Reacting, rather than being pro-active. That’s always a disadvantage and may deserve strategic rethinking.

    Just imagine what a pro-active surprise move might be. For example, Russia setting up a military base in Mexico. And why not? Russia would certainly have the stature and standing in terms of friendly relations with Mexico to do so. It would be a game changer. It would put a different spin on world geopolitics. Why not give it a try by starting talks with AMLO, Mr. Lopez Obrador, Mexico’s President.

    The west’s / NATO’s intent has been since the 1990s to separate Kazakhstan from the orbit of the former Soviet Union and today’s Russia. So far unsuccessfully, for the reasons pointed out before. Kazakhstan exports 30% to and imports 60% from Russia and China. Today more than ever Kazakhstan is part of the Eurasian alliance. It is a de facto integrated nation and one in close partnership.

    The Russians and Kazakhs have learned from Ukraine. It didn’t take President Kassym-Jomart Kemelevich Tokayev long to request assistance from Russia; and it didn’t take long for President Putin to respond, through the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO – Eurasian security organization; members: Russia (de facto leader), Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan).

    In addition to the CSTO troops, Russia also sent air force troops to counter the militants. Chances are that this will not become a new Kiev, where Assistant Foreign Minister Victoria Nuland, so eloquently said “f*ck Europe!” since the US had already spent 10 million dollars over the past years to prepare this coup.….

    What we see in Kazakhstan are very well trained and armed militants – not peaceful protesters, as would have been the case when protests started over gas price increases – it is clear that peaceful protesters do not take over government buildings and airports, they do not shoot police officers to kill – this is clearly foreign intervention.

    It is amazing – and sad – to watch how Europe plays along, letting NATO troops eventually ravaging the European territory – when Russia interferes. Only brainless European leaders (sic) will allow NATO playing war games that could turn anytime “hot” – hot again on the territories of Europe.

    That’s what the European Union has become. She is led by an unelected lady, Madame Ursula von der Leyden, formerly Germany’s Defense Minister, but more importantly and much less visibly, she is a Member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum. We know who calls the shots over the European Union – and most of the viciously dictatorial leaders (sic) of the EU member countries, stripped of their sovereignty – are scholars from Klaus Schwab’s special courses for “Young Global Leaders”. This also applied for the most covid-tyrannical heads of states around the world.

    They shall not prevail.

    Back to Kazakhstan. The same people who scare (mostly) the western people to death for a virus that has never been isolated and identified, are also behind destroying Russia and China.

    If they were to succeed in Kazakhstan, they would have managed to weaken Russia considerably, and the next step would most likely be NATO’s ignoring Moscow’s red line on Ukraine with the aim of arming Ukraine and making it eventually a NATO country.

    This is, however, still unlikely because Putin then would not hesitate invading Ukraine through the Dunbass area, defending Russia’s interests.   NATO and the US know that they have no chance against Russia’s newest defense systems.  Would they let it happen, letting Europe be obliterated for the third time in a bit more than 100 years?

    The fight for Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus is a pivotal strategic chess game.  Undoubtedly Russia will win it, but at what cost for Europe, for Eurasia?  The more severe the covid restrictions the west will impose – and the east will obey – the higher the price for maintaining or regaining sovereign European and Eurasian countries.

    The post Kazakhstan:  NATO’s New Frontier? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • China’s Excellent, Very Good Year

    2021 was the best year. Ever.
    The robust growth of the domestic market also further stabilises the economy.

    Amidst global gloom, 2021 was the best year in modern Chinese history. Here’s what they accomplished:

    • Eliminated extreme poverty.
    • Reached 98% home ownership.
    • Kept Covid death rate at 0.6% of America’s.
    • Grew the economy $2 trillion PPP, the fastest growth ever.
    • Became the richest country on earth.
    • Became the world’s biggest overseas investor.
    • Became the world’s largest movie market.
    • Produced one new billionaire and 300 millionaires every workday.
    • Completed new train lines in seven countries, including Laos’ first.
    • Ran 15,000 cargo trains to and from Europe, up 30% YoY.
    • Joined RCEP trade pact, with 30% of global GDP and of the world’s population.
    • Sold $140 billion retail online in 24 hours (Amazon’s record is $5 billion).
    • Launched the first central bank digital currency.
    • Dominated scientific research and issued the most patents of any country.
    • Built three exascale computers that won the Gordon Bell prize for high performance computing.
    • Built a programmable quantum computer 10,000x faster than Google’s Sycamore.
    • Operated the first integrated, 3,000-mile, commercial, quantum communications network.
    • Brought  online two gas-cooled Pebble Bed nuclear power plants.
    • Fired up two thorium-fueled reactors, eliminating uranium from power generation.
    • Released a Covid treatment that reduces hospitalizations and deaths 78%.
    • Made 55% of global energy savings.
    • Generated 1 terawatt of renewable energy.
    • Installed one-million 5G base stations, giving Tibet better 5G service than New York.
    • Communicated between satellites via lasers, 1,000x faster than radio waves.
    • Operated the world’s most powerful solid rocket engine, with 500 tonnes thrust.
    • Flew three hypersonic missiles around the planet.
    • Released a fractional orbital bombardment missile from another missile at 17,000 mph.
    • Simultaneously commissioned three warships, becoming the world’s biggest navy.

    Expect China to maintain this pace through 2022 by launching, among other things, the first, greenfield, automated, 21st century city for six million knowledge workers. With 70% woods and lakes, the loudest sound will be birdsongs.

  • First published on Greanville Post.
    • The post China’s Excellent, Very Good Year first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Whither the Weasel?

    The real threat from ground based surface-to-air missiles means that there is still a need to keep the Vietnam ‘Wild Weasel’ capability current. The US Navy’s (USN) announcement that the Northrop Grumman AGM-88E Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile – Extended Range (AARGM-ER) had received Milestone C programme approval on 23 August 2021 focused attention on the […]

    The post Whither the Weasel? appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.