In China, academic competition has become a kind of faith, providing values and a sense of purpose to its acolytes.
This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.
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The world needs an international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and able to remain stable in the long run, removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies.
— PBOC Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, October 9, 2009.
Only Xi can rescue Trump from his self-created tariff blunder, but his price will shock the West.
The Story So Far
President Trump’s tariffs will barely affect China’s GDP growth but, says Molson Hart, by April 10 America will face an economic catastrophe worse than the global financial crisis (GFC), as hospitals close and the bond market triggers hyperinflation.
As my subscribers know, China began preparing for this moment in 2009, when the PBOC1 started developing mBridge, the international trading platform on which countries trade in their own currencies quickly and securely. mBridge has been operating smoothly since 2022.
Next came CIPS, China’s alternative to SWIFT’s slow, expensive, insecure, dollar-denominated system. CIPS daily transaction volume surpassed SWIFT’s last week.
But by far its most ambitious project was an international reserve currency modeled on Keynes’ bancor2 system, which makes surplus countries invest their excess foreign reserves abroad and deficit countries reduce their foreign borrowings accordingly. Keynes proposed the bancor at Bretton Woods in 1945 when, after centuries as the world’s reserve currency, the pound sterling could no longer afford to serve both domestic and global needs. The United States rejected it, insisting that the dollar replace the pound. President Trump recently admitted that the United States is fast approaching that moment.The PBOC aimed to introduce the bancor in the late 2030s but will bring that forward , to save the US dollar from collapse. It will also support America as it adapts to the new regime. Then, freed of international obligations, the RMB, the USD and the Euro can focus on domestic priorities.
The rescue
PM Li Qiang, who has known him since their Shanghai days, will invite Elon Musk and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to convey the bancor offer to the White House and even allow Trump to claim credit for it. Implementation will require years of patience, trust and skill, but Trump has no alternative. War is definitely not one: the US was never a match for China militarily, as Beijing demonstrated in 1951. Nor is a trade war: China’s GDP will be unaffected by tariffs and grow 5.4%, by $1.7 trillion, this year while America’s is already contracting.
Xi the Merciful
Moral leaders whose own states always act correctly will unfailingly attain primacy. States wishing to exercise humane authority must be the first to respect the norms they advocate, because leaders of high ethical reputation and great administrative ability are attractive to other states and, since the domestic determines the international, winning hearts and minds is more important than winning territory. Being compassionate in great matters and overlooking small ones makes one fit to become lord of the covenants. Rulers win leadership by acting morally and, by presiding over the meetings of other states, earn international acknowledgement of their humane authority.
— Xunzi, 300 BC.
Beijing is hunting much bigger game than tariffs: the liberation of Palestine. China, Palestine’s oldest and most loyal friend, has endured America’s genocidal mania for generations and now has the tools to end their shared misery.
Every major US industry, from arms to hi-tech to automotive, relies entirely on Chinese rare earth metals and lacks the skills to manufacture them. Beijing restricts REM exports and forbids foreign buyers, like Occupied Korea, to on-sell them to the West. If the US wants them, it must end the genocide before the last of its REM stockpiles is exhausted: eight months at most. The clock is running down.
This year, we will witness the most momentous events since WWII. Global leadership will return to Asia, America will enters its post-imperial twilight, and Palestine will become free and independent, and the Zionists return to Ukraine whence they came.
Appropriately, Xi is in Moscow today…to celebrate Victory Day.
They’ve won.
ENDNOTES:
The post Xi the Merciful? first appeared on Dissident Voice.1 China and the Central Bank of Russia, whose head is the world’s best central banker, created these facilities. I omitted this to save time and space.2 The so-called Triffin Dilemma.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Godfree Roberts.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The governing regime in Kiev is desperately trying to maintain its US support, as a defeat of the US-led, NATO proxy war in Ukraine looms. It is citing the collapse of the government in South Vietnam in April 1975 as a warning, saying that something similar could happen in Ukraine. At the time, the US defeat in Vietnam was a huge blow to the image and standing of US imperialism in the world.
Such pronouncements by the Kiev regime reveal a recognition that ‘its’ Ukraine has become a satellite of the United States – much as South Vietnam was widely recognized to be half a century ago. Then as now, Washington and its allies are desperately seeking to maintain their economic and military dominance over the world and to stop rising movements of liberation by the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The post Ukraine Resembles The Fall Of Saigon In 1975 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
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The United States risks isolating itself by pursuing unilateral trade restrictions, Chinese President Xi Jinping warned on Friday during a visit of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to Beijing.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has launched an escalating tariff war with China, imposing a total of 145% in duties on Chinese imports this week. Beijing has retaliated by hiking tariffs on American goods to 125%.
“There are no winners in the tariff war and standing against the world ultimately results in self-isolation,” Xi said, as cited by Xinhua news agency.
Xi called on China and the European Union to “jointly resist unilateral bullying” in order to protect their legitimate rights and interests, and uphold international rules and order.
The EU, which has been targeted with a 20% tariff by the US, has warned of significant global economic repercussions and has vowed to take countermeasures. Earlier this week, Trump declared a 90-day pause on reciprocal duties for most US trading partners, including the EU, allowing a window for negotiation.
Brussels has adopted a policy of “de-risking” towards Chinese imports, balancing protective trade measures such as tariffs on electric vehicles with efforts to maintain constructive economic relations.
The Chinese president also stated that regardless of changes in the external environment, the country would remain steadfast, focused, and would efficiently manage its own affairs.
“For over seven decades, China’s growth has been fueled by self-reliance and hard work, never depending on favors from others and never backing down in the face of unreasonable suppression,” Xi explained.
Trump argues that the increased duties are needed to address trade imbalances and stop China from “ripping off the USA.” Earlier this week, he opined that the “proud” Chinese would have to “make a deal at some point.”
China has slammed Trump’s “abnormally high tariffs” on Chinese products as “unilateral bullying and coercion.” The move by the US president represents “a serious violation of international economic and trade rules, as well as of basic economic laws and common sense,” Beijing stressed.The trade dispute between the world’s two largest economies has disrupted global markets, sent oil prices to four-year lows and caused concerns over global supply chains.
The post Xi Warns US Will Isolate Itself first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Chinese government has rebuffed bold consumption stimulus policy. But boosting domestic household spending is precisely what the country needs to achieve healthy growth.
This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.
In today’s newsletter: Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum says the president-elect won’t transform into a dictator – but he could set in motion an unstoppable democratic decline
Good morning.
The global surge of authoritarian rule in recent years has been stark and alarming. Strongman leaders like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have systematically consolidated power, while a new wave of autocratic rulers have emerged from Asia to South America.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
On 12 June 2024, a group of important NGOs addressed the following letter to Josep Borrell, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs:
We, the undersigned civil society organisations, are writing to reiterate our request for the European Union to suspend its human rights dialogue with China, and to consider other, more impactful measures at the EU’s disposal to address the Chinese government’s assault on human rights at home and abroad.
While appreciative of the open and frank discussion and engagement with the EEAS in preparation of each round of human rights dialogue with China, we regret that the EU continues this exercise despite its amply proven ineffectiveness over 38 rounds. While the EU raises concerns during these dialogues, it knows that the Chinese government will not acknowledge abuses, will not undertake any effort to secure accountability, and will not be persuaded to undertake any policy or legislative action to comply with China’s international human rights obligations. The EU’s reluctance to establish any measurable benchmark of progress, or even to establish clearly defined objectives beyond having a dialogue, exacerbates the ineffectiveness of this exercise.
This year’s human rights dialogue would also entail EU officials sitting down with authorities in Beijing to “engage… through dialogue and cooperation” on human rights, days after the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.
Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013, the Chinese government has intensified its crackdown on dissent, harassing and imprisoning human rights defenders and activists including the Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai, the Uyghur economist and Sakharov Prize laureate Ilham Tohti [7 human rights awards, see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/37AE7DC4-16DB-51E9-4CF8-AB0828AEF491], the Hong-Kong barrister and human rights activist Chow Hang-tung and human rights lawyers Yu Wensheng and his wife Xu Yan, who were arrested a little over a year ago on their way to meet with the EU delegation [see: https://www.trueheroesfilms.org/thedigest/laureates/69fc7057-b583-40c3-b6fa-b8603531248e and https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2023/07/12/new-wave-of-repression-against-human-rights-lawyers-unleashed-in-china/]. The Chinese government has committed egregious violations against Uyghur and other Turkic communities in Xinjiang/The Uyghur Region, which a report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in August 2022 stated “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity.” Beijing has also intensified its repression in Tibet, while in Hong Kong the creation of a new national security architecture at Beijing’s behest has severely restricted the rights and freedoms long enjoyed by Hong Kong’s people.
Beijing’s foreign policy has also been increasingly detrimental to human rights, both in the region and beyond. The Chinese government continues to support highly abusive governments, to challenge international efforts to secure accountability for grave abuses, and to intensify efforts to undermine the international human rights system and rewrite its norms. The Chinese government has also engaged in increasingly brazen transnational repression – abuses committed outside its borders – including in EU countries.
The EU has already suspended human rights dialogues with highly repressive countries such as Russia, Syria, Belarus, and Myanmar, among others, in light of the nature, scale and pervasiveness of their authorities’ human rights abuses and violations of international law. The Chinese government has committed serious crimes amounting to crimes against humanity. It has long been evident that the human rights dialogue is not an appropriate nor an effective tool to address them. There is no reason to expect the 39th round will prove more beneficial to the rights of people in China than the previous 38. The EU and its member states should pursue different, more effective actions to press the Chinese government to end its crimes against humanity and other serious violations – and to hold accountable those responsible for failing to do so.
We have long been suggesting alternative action, latest in this February 2023 letter. We stand ready to discuss these and other options with you any time.
Signatories:
Amnesty International
Front Line Defenders
Human Rights Watch
International Service for Human Rights
World Uyghur Congressand see https://www.ucanews.com/news/jailing-of-chinese-metoo-journalist-upsets-rights-groups/105431
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
This week we would like to recommend to you a Chinese song from 1967 called Bravely March On, Arab People! (奋勇前进，阿拉伯人民) in support of the pan-Arab movement.
If you don’t have a lot of time, this is what you should know:
- For China, Iran’s attack on Israel was “an act of self-defense”
- The West’s new narrative against China: overcapacity
- China exceeds its 5% GDP growth target in first quarter
- Historic “peace trip” by former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou
For China, Iran’s attack was “an act of self-defense”
In the context of the genocide that Israel is perpetrating on the Palestinian population, and in retaliation of Israel’s attack on its embassy compound in Damascus (Syria), Iran carried out a missile and drone attack on Israeli territory for the first time in history, repeatedly puncturing the famous “iron dome”.
After the military response, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, called his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. During their discussion, Wang Yi again condemned Israel’s “unacceptable” attack on the Iranian embassy in Syria, saying it was a serious violation of international law. He also stated that “Iran can handle the situation well and prevent the region from further turmoil while safeguarding its sovereignty and dignity.” The Iranian foreign minister assured Foreign Minister Wang that his country was willing to be moderate and had no intention of escalating the situation further. He further stressed that “the Islamic Republic of Iran advocates an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and supports China’s positive efforts to promote a ceasefire.”
In contrast, Yuval Waks, deputy head of the Israeli mission to China, said Israel was not satisfied with China’s current response to Iran’s attack as, in his words, they had expected “a stronger condemnation and a clear recognition of Israel’s right to defend itself.”
A few days later, the US House Speaker labeled Iran, China, and Russia the new “axis of evil” while supporting the latest bill to send $60 billion to Ukraine.
For years, China has advocated a two-state solution, the creation of an independent Palestinian state, and full Palestinian membership in the UN. In fact, last week, it again supported a UN Security Council motion to that effect, but it was vetoed, once again, by the United States.While everyone is talking about Iran’s actions in recent weeks, a major shift in Iran’s energy trade has been taking place in recent years. Despite Western sanctions, Iran’s oil exports reached a 6-year high, boosting its economy by $35 billion per year.
Iran sold an average of 1.56 million barrels per day, of which the vast majority were sold to China. Approximately one-tenth of China’s oil imports come from Iran.
This makes it more difficult for the new sanctions that the United States and Europe may impose because of the conflict with Israel to really affect the Iranian economy. We could be witnessing a phenomenon similar to that of the Western sanctions against Russia since February 2022: by increasing trade with the economies of the Global South, driven by China, which does not engage with Western sanctions, the economy, which in theory should suffer, ends up strengthening and reducing its dependence on the West. It is too early to say but the indications provided by Iranian oil exports seem to point to this.
The West’s new narrative against China: overcapacity
During her visit to China at the beginning of April, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed her concern about an alleged overcapacity in the Asian giant’s new energy sector. In the last few weeks, this idea has been circulating in the Western media, accusing the Chinese government’s subsidies to energy sector companies as “unfair”. However, the decision to subsidize or not an industrial sector is a national sovereignty decision of the country and a common practice in international trade. The fact is that Europe heavily subsidizes its agricultural sector (and has even been accused of dumping practices) and, historically, the United States has had a protectionist policy to boost its domestic industry. The bottom line is that both the US and Europe are concerned about China’s sweeping advance in the production of electric cars, solar panels, technology, and robotics, products at the core of China’s current industrial development.
A good example is China’s largest automation company Innovance, which has a market capitalization of US$ 25 billion. Known as “little Huawei”, it was founded by former Huawei engineers and today is the main supplier of AC servo systems parts (those that produce motion in industrial machines) and the second largest national producer of industrial robots. Its 2023, revenues increased by 30% to US$ 4 billion; its R&D investment is significant, and it has two factories in Hungary and one in India.
According to figures from the International Federation of Robotics, in 2022 more than half of all industrial robot installations in the world were in China.
This boost in China’s new energy industries is an opportunity for countries in the Global South, Dongsheng member Marco Fernandes told CGTN in an interview. He emphasized that “…it is the first time that we have a major economy, such a strong economy in the Global South, so it is absolutely strategic” and that for developing countries it is “…a matter of trying to have balanced partnerships”.
In this way, China’s alleged overcapacity seems more of a threat to the traditional powers than to the world’s developing countries. Both Europe and the United States insist on decoupling or “de-risking” from China, but the data show that such a thing is far from being achieved. According to a Brookings paper last year, US manufacturers are far more dependent on China than standard calculations that examine the origin of intermediate goods, i.e., imports used to make US products, suggest.
The paper reveals that, in 2018, China was the supplier for more than 90% of US manufacturing sectors, particularly apparel, motor vehicles, and electrical equipment. In 1995, Japan was the main foreign source for about 40% of US manufacturing sectors, followed by Canada with about 30%. This high dependence on Chinese intermediate goods implies, for the authors, that “decoupling from China will be much, much more difficult and much slower than many people think, and may be impossible.”
In the same vein, it was Siemens CFO Ralf Thomas who said a few days ago that it will take “decades” for German manufacturers to reduce their dependence on China. “Global value chains have been built up over the last 50 years – how naive do you have to be to believe that this can change in six or 12 months?” he remarked. This is a small sample of the dependence that European countries also have in their trade with China. Following Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit, China announced that it will reduce controls on German agricultural products, including pork, apples, and some beef products. Similar measures were taken earlier this year on products from Spain, Belgium, and Austria, in a clear sign of Beijing’s intentions to improve its ties with Europe.
First quarter economy: China exceeds its 5% GDP growth target
China’s economy exceeded expectations and grew by 5.3% year-on-year in the first quarter, consistent with the annual growth target of “around 5%” set at the Two Sessions earlier this year.
Amid China’s productive reorganization, based on manufacturing, not real estate, as the cornerstone of growth, the investment in fixed assets reached 10 trillion yuan (1.4 trillion USD), up by 4.5%. Amid the restructuring of industry, investment in real estate continues to fall (-9.5%), while manufacturing and infrastructure made up the overall growth in investment, increasing by 9.9 and 6.5%, respectively.
China’s industrial value-added grew 6% in the first quarter, especially in the high-tech sector whose manufacturing growth accelerated. China’s central bank will set up a 500 billion yuan ($70 billion) re-lending program to support the country’s science and technology sectors for small and midsize companies.
On the international front, the use of the RMB in international transactions continued to grow. According to SWIFT, the share of the yuan in global payments rose to a record high in March (4.69%), remaining the world’s fourth most active currency. The US dollar continued to have the largest share in global payments, at around 47% and the euro fell below 22%.
When SWIFT began tracking the use of the yuan in 2010, the currency accounted for less than 0.1 percent of global settlements.
Moreover, the use of the yuan in China’s cross-border transactions for trade in goods was nearly 30% in the first quarter, up from 25% in 2023 and 18% in 2022.
Historic “peace trip” by former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou
Ma Ying-jeou, the former leader of the island of Taiwan from 2008 to 2016, made a peace trip to mainland China where he met with Xi Jinping. At the meeting, Xi affirmed that “there are no problems that cannot be discussed and no forces that can separate us” and that “external interference cannot contain the historical trend of national reunification”. For his part, Ma said that upholding the 1992 Consensus and opposing “Taiwan independence” are the common political basis for the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations.
Ma belongs to Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang party, which is more inclined to maintain a friendly relationship with the mainland. The Democratic Progressive Party, which has ruled since 2016, won the last regional elections. In a few days, the new leader William Lai Ching-te, who will succeed Tsai Ing-wen, will take office. Since Tsai came to power in 2016, talks with the central government have been frozen since the Taiwanese government stopped recognizing the 1992 Consensus that respects the One China principle.
It remains to be seen how these relations will develop with the new government. Ma, after his visit to the mainland, urged the elected leader to respond “pragmatically” to Xi Jinping’s call for peace, and to respect the One China principle.
China launches third round of anti-corruption inspections of the financial sector
China launched another series of disciplinary inspections of key government departments and state-owned financial institutions.
The third round of routine inspections, following the last one in 2021, will target 34 agencies, including central government ministries, the central bank, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, the largest state-owned banks and insurers, as well as policy lenders.
The anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping in 2013 has covered all sectors of governance. From ministries, finance, and state-owned enterprises, to health and sports. More than four million CPC regional cadres and 533 at the vice-ministerial level and above have been investigated since the start of the anti-corruption campaign.
Pork prices plummet in China
Chinese pork prices are in a prolonged slump due to oversupply. After peaking at 26 yuan (US$ 3.6) in October 2022, they have now hit a low of 14 yuan (US$ 1.93). This product accounts for 60% of the country’s meat consumption, so fluctuations in its prices have multiple implications.
- For a start, it puts deflationary pressure on the Consumer Price Index, which in March rose by 0.1% year-on-year, below the government’s 3% target.
- If China decides to reduce the number of pigs raised, it will most likely have an impact on the global grain market, as a decrease in feed demand will put downward pressure on international prices.
- In addition, the downward price trend puts producers at risk of bankruptcy and may put many small producers out of production, as has happened on other similar occasions.
That is why the Chinese government started to take action, announcing plans to reduce its target number of breeding sows by about 5% starting in March, from 41 million to 39 million. In addition, it will consider 92% of that target (about 35.9 million sows) as an acceptable level.
China’s coastal cities will be below sea level within a century
A quarter of China’s coastal land will sink below sea level within a century, according to a new study by Chinese and US researchers published in the journal Science. They found that about one-third of the population of the 82 cities analyzed live in regions that drop more than 3 mm per year, while 7% live in areas that drop more than 10 mm per year. The paper also found that 270 million Chinese currently live on subsiding land.
Changes in groundwater and the weight of construction would be among the reasons, and a possible solution could lie in long-term control of groundwater extraction.
Subsidence causes cracks in the ground, damages buildings, and increases the risk of flooding. In addition, land subsidence-related disasters in China have injured or killed hundreds of people and cost an annual direct economic loss of more than 7.5 billion yuan (US$1 billion) in recent decades.
The team mapped the subsidence of cities between 2015 and 2022 using a technique powered by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites to measure vertical land movement.
New university graduates choose smaller cities for work
Chinese university graduates are increasingly opting to leave the country’s major cities and seek employment in smaller cities and counties. According to a Mycos survey, in 2018, only 20% of respondents were working in counties and cities six months after graduation, but this figure increased to 25% by 2022.
It’s because graduates want to move closer to family and avoid the pressure that comes with working in big cities. Counties and cities also offer more opportunities to get public sector jobs.
Nearly 60% of respondents working in counties and cities had been in the same place for at least five years and their average monthly income had increased from 4,640 yuan ($641) in 2018 to 5,377 yuan in 2022. Their average job satisfaction rate increased from 67% to 76% during the same period.
Some regions push policies aimed at promoting the return of graduates to their hometowns. For example, Suichang County in Zhejiang Province offers those with master’s degrees a housing allowance of 300,000 yuan and an annual living allowance of 30,000 yuan for five years.
The post Overcapacity: The West’s New Narrative against China first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Whither China? was the name of a widely circulated pamphlet authored by the respected Anglo-Indian Marxist author, R. Palme Dutt. Writing in 1966, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the throes of the “Cultural Revolution,” the pamphlet sought to shed light on the PRC’s tortured road from liberation in 1949 to a vast upheaval disrupting all aspects of Chinese society as well as foreign relations. To most people — across the entire political spectrum — developments within this Asian giant were a challenge to understand. To be sure, there were zealots outside of the PRC who hung on every word uttered by The Great Helmsman, Chairman Mao, and stood by every release explaining Chinese events in the People’s Daily, Red Flag and Peking Review. A few Communist Parties and many middle-class intellectuals embraced the Cultural Revolution as a rite of purification. Yet for most, as with Palme Dutt, the paramount question remained: Where is the PRC going?
Today, forty-five years later, the question remains open.
I wrote the above thirteen years ago. I contend that the question remains open today. Much has changed, however. In 2011, China-bashing was widespread especially where jobs had disappeared in manufacturing, but largely tempered by a Western business sector anxious to exploit low wages and the Chinese domestic market.
But almost simultaneously with the 2011 posting, the Obama administration made official its “pivot to Asia,” directed explicitly at Peoples’ China. As the Brookings Institute ‘diplomatically’ put it, “Washington is still very much focused on sustaining a constructive U.S.-China relationship, but it has now brought disparate elements together in a strategically integrated fashion that explicitly affirms and promises to sustain American leadership throughout Asia for the foreseeable future.” More explicitly, they intend “to establish a strong and credible American presence across Asia to both encourage constructive Chinese behavior and to provide confidence to other countries in the region that they need not yield to potential Chinese regional hegemony.”To be sure, the officially declared Obama administration hostility to the PRC was neither a reaction to job loss nor to deindustrialization. The Administration showed no interest in recreating lost jobs or restoring the industrial cities in the Midwest. The real purpose is revealed in the simple phrase “Chinese regional hegemony.” Clearly, by 2011, ruling circles in the US had decided that the PRC was more than an economic cherry ready to be plucked. Instead, it had developed into an economic powerhouse, a true, even the true, competitor in global markets; indeed, it had become a robust threat to U.S. hegemony.
With the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the anti-PRC campaign continued, though conducted in an accelerated, cruder fashion, employing sanctions, threats, ultimatums, and even legal chicanery (the detention of one of Huawei’s executives, the daughter of the company’s founder).
The subsequent Biden administration pursued the same approach, adding another level of belligerence by stirring conflict in the South China Sea and reigniting the Taiwan issue. To anyone paying attention, successive administrations were intensifying aggression against the PRC, a process fueled by the eagerly compliant mainstream media.
It has become commonplace on the left to explain the growing hostility to the PRC by the U.S. and its NATO satellites as the instigation of a new Cold War, a revival of the anti-Communist crusades strengthening after World War II. In the past, I have suggested as much. But that would be grossly misleading.
The original Cold War was a struggle between capitalism and socialism. Whether Western critics will concede that the Soviet alternative was really socialism is irrelevant. It was a sharp and near-total alternative, and the West fought it as such. The Soviet Union did not organize its production to participate in global markets, it did not compete for global markets, nor did it threaten the profitability of capitalist enterprises through global competition. In short, the Soviet Union offered a potent option to Western capitalism, but not the threat of a rival for markets or profits. Moreover, Soviet foreign policy both condemned capitalism and explicitly sought to win other countries to socialist construction.
The same cannot be said for the Western antagonism to the PRC. The West courted Peoples’ China assiduously from the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution through the entire Deng era. Western powers saw the PRC as either an ally against the Soviet Union, a source of cheap labor, an investment windfall, or a virgin market. But with China’s success in weathering the capitalist crisis of 2007-2009, the U.S. and its allies began to look at the PRC as a dangerous rival within the global system of capitalism. Chinese technologies more than rivaled the West’s; its share of global trade had grown dramatically; and its accumulation of capital and its export of capital were alarming to Western powers bent on pressing their own export of capital.
In contrast to the actual Cold War, even the most ardent defender of the “Chinese road to socialism” cannot today cite many instances of PRC foreign policy strongly advocating, assisting, or even vigorously defending the fight for socialism anywhere outside of China. Indeed, the basic tenet of PRC policy — the noninterference in the affairs of others, regardless of their ideologies or policies — has more in common with Adam Smith than Vladimir Lenin.
What the Soviet Union took as its internationalist mission — support for those fighting capitalism — is not to be found in the CPC’s foreign policy. Nothing demonstrates the differences more than the Soviet’s past solidarity and aid toward Cuba’s socialist construction and the contrasting PRC’s commercial and cultural relations and meager aid.
Accordingly, the PRC’s commercial relations with less developed countries can raise substantial issues. Recently, Ann Garrison, a highly respected solidarity activist, often focusing on imperialism in Africa, wrote a provocative article for Black Agenda Report. In her review of Cobalt Red, How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives — an account of corporate mining and labor exploitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo– Garrison makes the following commentary guaranteed to raise the ire of devotees of the “Chinese road to socialism”:
[The author of Cobalt Red] explains battery technology and the global dominance of battery manufacture by South Korean, Japanese, and, most of all, Chinese industrial titans. Huge Chinese corporations so dominate Congolese cobalt mining, processing and battery manufacture that one has to ask why a communist government, however capitalist in fact, doesn’t at least somehow require more responsible sourcing of minerals processed and then advanced along the supply chain within its borders. I hope that Kara’s book has or will be translated into Chinese. (my emphasis)
Predictably, rejoinders came fast and furious. In both an interview and response
posted on Black Agenda Report, Garrison’s critics struggled to explain why PRC-based corporations were not contributing to the impoverishment and exploitation of Congolese workers. They cited Chinese investments in infrastructure and in modernization; they noted huge increases in productivity wrought by Chinese technology; they reminded Garrison of the corruption of the DRC government and local capitalists, and even blamed capitalism itself. How, one critic asked, could the PRC be singled out, when other (admittedly capitalist) countries were doing it as well? Yet none even made a feeble attempt to explain how the extraction of one of the most sought-after minerals in modern industry could leave the people of the mineral-rich DRC with one of — if not the lowest — median incomes in the entire world. This striking fact points to the enormous rate of exploitation engaged in cobalt, copper, and other resource extraction in this poverty-stricken African country (for a Marxist angle on this question, see Charles Andrews’s article, cited by Garrison, but seemingly misunderstood by her).
In their zeal to defend the PRC’s Belt and Road initiative, these same defenders of the penetration of Chinese capital in poor countries often cite the frequent Chinese concept of “win-win” — the idea that Chinese capital brings with it victory for both the capital supplier and those ‘benefitted’ by the capital. Theorists of the non-class “win-win” concept are never clear exactly who the beneficiaries are — other capitalists, corrupt government officials, or the working class. Nevertheless, within the intensely competitive global capitalist system, this “win-win” is not sustainable and is contrary to both experience and the laws of capitalist development. Theoretically, it owes more to the thinking of David Ricardo than Karl Marx.
The PRC’s vexing relationship to capitalism has produced contradictions at home as well as globally. The ongoing collapse of the largely private construction/real-estate industry is one very large example. Once a major factor in PRC growth, overproduction of housing is now a substantial drag on economic advance. Monthly sales of new homes by private developers peaked late in 2020 at over 1.5 trillion yuan and fell to a little more than .25 trillion yuan at the beginning of 2024.
With the private real estate sector on the verge of bankruptcy and a huge number of residential properties unsold or unfinished, the PRC leadership is caught in a twenty-first-century version of the infamous scissors crisis that brought the Soviet NEP — the experiment with capitalist development of the productive forces — to a halt. If the government allows the private developers to fail, it will have harsh repercussions throughout the private sector, with banks, and foreign investors. If the government bails out the developers, it will remove the market consequences of capitalist excess and put the burden of sustaining capitalist failure on the backs of the Chinese people.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the government, led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is considering placing “the state back in charge of the property market, part of a push to rein in the private sector.” The WSJ editors construe this as reviving “Socialist Ideas” — a welcome thought, if true.
The article claims that in CCP General Secretary Xi’s view, “too much credit moved into property speculation, adding risks to the financial system, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and diverting resources from what Xi considers to be the ‘real economy’ — sectors such as manufacturing and high-end technology.…”
Putting aside the question of how the private real estate sector was allowed to create an enormous bubble of unfinished and unsold homes, the move to return responsibility for housing to the public sector should be welcome, restoring price stability and planning, and eliminating speculation, overproduction, and economic disparities.
Unfortunately, there will be uncertain consequences and difficulties for banks, investors, and real estate buyers who purchased under the private regimen.
It is worth noting that no Western capitalist country or Japan has or would address a real estate bubble by absorbing real estate into the public sector.
Under Xi’s leadership, the direction of the PRC’s ‘reforms’ may have shifted somewhat away from an infatuation with markets, private ownership, and foreign capital. The former “enrich yourselves” tolerance for wealth accumulation has been tempered by conscious efforts at raising the living standards of the poorest. Xi has made a priority of “targeted poverty alleviation,” with impressive success.
Western intellectuals harshly criticize the PRC’s ‘democracy’ because it rejects the multi-party, periodic election model long-favored in the West. These same intellectuals fetishize a form of democracy, regardless of whether that particular form earns the trust of those supposedly represented. The mere fact that a procedure purports to deliver democratic or representative results does not guarantee that it actually makes good on its promise.
If China-critics were truly concerned with democratic or popular outcomes, they would turn to measures or surveys of public confidence, satisfaction, or trust in government to judge the respective systems. On this count, the PRC is always found at or near the top in public trust (for example, hereand here). Moreover, Chinese society shows high interpersonal or social trust, another measure of success in producing popular social cohesion by a government.
It’s telling that with the Western obsession with democracy, there is little interest in holding bourgeois democracy up to any relevant measure of its trust or popularity. When it is done, the U.S. fares very poorly, with a six-decade decline in public trust, according to Pew. As recently as February 28, the most recent Pew poll shows that even people who do respect “representative democracy” are critical of how it’s working. Their answer to their skepticism may be found “if more women, people from poor backgrounds and young adults held elective office”, say respondents. Those elites who so glibly talk of “our democracy,” in contrast to those including the CCP that they call “authoritarians,” might pause to listen to the people of their own country.
The PRC has shocked Western critics with the breakneck pace of its adoption of non-emission energy production. In 2020, the Chinese anticipated generating 1200 gigawatts of solar and wind power by 2030. That goal and more will likely be reached by the end of 2024. Overall, the PRC expects to account for more new clean-energy capacity this year than the average growth in electricity demand over the last decade and a half. This means, of course, that emissions have likely peaked and will be receding in the years ahead– an achievement well ahead of Western estimates and Western achievements, and a victory for the global environmental movement.
At the same time, the PRC’s successful competition in the solar-panel market makes it the target of global competitors, a brutal struggle that undermines the espoused “win-win” approach. Despite the benign tone of “win-win,” market competition is not bound by polite resignation, but aggression, conflict, and, as Lenin affirmed, ultimately war. That is the inescapable logic of capitalism. PRC engagement with the market cannot negate it.
Western leftists too often simplify the ‘Chinese Question’ by making it a parlor game revolving around whether China is or is not a socialist country, an error confusing a settled, accomplished state of affairs with a contested process.
As long as capitalism exists and holds seats of political power, the process of building socialism remains unstable and unfinished.
The 1936 Soviet constitution declared in Article One that the USSR was “a socialist state of workers and peasants,” a status that was under great duress over the subsequent following decades. The 1977 constitution stated even more boldly that the USSR was “a socialist state of the whole people…,” a state without classes and, by implication, class struggle. A decade and a half later, there was no USSR. Building socialism is a fragile process and one prone to reversals and defeats.
Thus, we should follow Palme Dutt’s sage advice and observe developments in the PRC with vigilance and a critical eye. If building socialism is a dynamic process, we should attend to its direction, rather than pronouncing its summary success or failure. The PRC is a complex creation with a complex — often contradictory — relationship with other countries as well as the socialist project. The cause of socialism is ill served by either ignoring or exaggerating both missteps and victories in the PRC’s revolutionary path.
The post Peoples’ China: What Lies Ahead? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In the age of disinformation and artificial information, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post (WaPo) manages to have some credibility. After its February 22 editorial, “Mr. Xi is tanking China’s economy,” Jeff Bezos would be wise to sell the newspaper. If those who lead the Editorial Board make childish mistakes and recite obvious falsehoods, can anyone believe in what they read?
Before scolding WAPO’s spurious description of Xi’s world, in which none of the charges are backed with proof, permit the presentation of one of the most serious errors in journalism history. Doubtful the WaPo staff will ever recover from this faux pas. The editorial states:
China recorded a respectable 5.2 percent economic growth rate last year, but the real rate is lower when adjusted for falling prices. Rather than being an economic juggernaut, China seems likely to be entering a period of deflation, the sorts of conditions that led to Japan’s “lost decade.”
Having the real rate of growth to go down with deflation is equivalent to having an auto slow down when the gas pedal is more heavily pressed. How many hands, eyeballs, and minds at WAPO did not know that “inflation occurs when nominal GDP is higher than real GDP and deflation happens when real GDP is higher than nominal GDP.”
Real GDP= Nominal GDP/R
where: GDP=Gross domestic product
R=GDP deflator (R<1 during deflation and >1 during inflation)Examine the opening paragraph:
For the past decade, Americans have worried increasingly about China, not least because Chinese President Xi Jinping has centralized power, silenced critics, stalled private-sector reforms and taken an increasingly combative posture toward the rest of the world
Saying that Xi Jinping silenced critics, without specifying who and how is meaningless. To gain office, all politicians try to overcome critics. A good politician silences critics. China is different; the government runs on consensus, and when a decision is made, including who will be president, there are no remaining critics.
Again, without specifying the nature of Xi’s “increasingly combative posture toward the rest of the world?” how can his nature be evaluated? Have the Africans, Latinos, Europeans, Eskimos, and most of Asia found Xi combative or does the WaPo editorial board think Washington is the world?
Instead, Mr. Xi’s China is less free, less prosperous and less competently governed than it would have been had he taken a different course — one not inspired by rivalry with the West or fear of his own people.
“Mr. Xi’s China is less free.”
The intentional insult of replacing President Xi with Mr. XI demeans WaPo.
Western media always considered China devoid of freedom. How can a country be less free when it has always been considered not free? Consider who is setting the criteria and doing the evaluation. If Chinese authorities set the criteria and evaluated freedom in the United States how would they consider freedom of thought in the U.S. after the rise of Trumpism and his cohorts?“Less prosperous.”
GDP is up 60 percent since Xi’s time in office; how could Xi have made China “less prosperous?”
China GDP (Trillions of US Dollars)
From Trading Economics
“and less competently governed than it would have been had he taken a different course.”
How does anyone know what will happen and what is the different course?” This is speculative speculation, a ridiculous assumption that does not pass the smell test.
Despite Mr. Xi lifting the world’s most draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, construction in China has slowed, manufacturing prices have declined and consumer spending has flattened. China’s stock market has lost $6 trillion in value in three years.
Reciting a decline in manufacturing prices and a flattening of consumer spending, as if they are always negatives, is not clever thinking. If a recession occurred, then they might be a result of an economic decline. No recession has occurred and their relation is due to consumer prices having dropped, maybe due to increased efficiency and productivity. Consumer transactions have increased and the total sales remained static, or did they? Beijing reports contradictory information and data does not indicate a flattening of consumer spending.
Robust consumption has been thriving and helping to underpin China’s economic recovery, while the country is energetically spurring consumer spending to strengthen one of the pillars needed to support high-quality growth. China’s total retail sales of consumer goods, a major indicator of the country’s consumption strength, climbed 7.2 percent year on year to reach 47.15 trillion yuan (about 6.63 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2023, an obvious sign of the Chinese people’s growing readiness to purchase.
China Consumer-spending in CNY hundred million
As for the stock market, it lost popularity in 2009, long before Xi Jinping gained the presidential office, exhibited a 100 percent increase in a year after he took the helm, and has been static since then. Nothing significant there.
The last of many spurious remarks
To reduce the falling birthrate, he prefers exhorting young women to stay home and have more babies as their patriotic duty.
Another insulting remark to a nation’s president. Falling birthrate is a problem in all advanced nations, and no country seems to have a solution. A mendacious and callous WaPo distorted Xi’s words. At a recent All-China Women’s Federation meeting, President Xi Jinping told the cadres:
…to “guide women to play their roles in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation” and “in establishing good family traditions.” They should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and child-bearing” among women, so they can “respond to the aging of the population.”
Big difference between WaPo’s interpretation and the actual spoken words.
The experts on Xi Jinping China follow up the bashing with tools for him to use, and advice on how Xi can extricate himself and his nation from the damage he caused. Imagined failures solicit imagination of how to cure a patient who is not sick. Noting that, since 1978, except for one year during the COVID-19 epidemic, China had no recessions, while the U.S. suffered a recession every ten years, I doubt the Chinese government needs lectures on how to run their economy. China has a major housing crisis, not much different in scope than the 2008 mortgage crisis in the United States. The latter crisis provoked a huge banking crisis and sent the U.S. into a major recession. China’s housing crisis is now several years old and has not provoked a banking or economic crisis.
Describing people in a totally negative manner and not reciting known positive characteristics is biased editorializing. Xi has guided China to become the leading world power outdistancing the U.S. in the more important GDP/PPP.
Gross Domestic Product at Purchasing Power parity ($Trillions)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) Xi probably was not personally involved and criticizing him for “the world’s most draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of 2022,” is a subjective appraisal. An objective appraisal mentions his administration’s holding the number of Covid cases to 503,302 and deaths to 5,272 compared to U.S. cases of 111,426,318 and deaths of 1,199,436. Use per capita figures of 90,273 cases/1 million population and 896 deaths/1 million population for China and 333,802 cases/1 million population and 3,582 deaths/1 million population for the United States, and a bright light shines on China’s president.
The WaPo editorial, “Mr. Xi is tanking China’s economy,” is informative. It informs us that WaPo cannot be trusted. It has an agenda and will distort, lie, do somersaults, and deceive its audience to pursue the agenda.
When will we be free from China bashing?
The post The Washington Post Bashes Xi Jinping first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Liu Hongjie (China), Skyline, 2021.Late last year, a colleague sent me a letter decrying some of my writings about China, notably the last newsletter of 2023. This newsletter is my response to him.
**
The situation in China is the cause of a great deal of consternation amongst the left. I am glad you have raised the issue of Chinese socialism with me directly.
We are living in very dangerous times, as you know. The United States’ accelerating tension with other powerful nations threatens the planet more now than perhaps any period since 1991. The war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are illustrative of the dangers before us. In the interim, I worry about the US trying to draw Iran into the conflict, with Israel threatening to escalate tensions with Hezbollah in Lebanon and then draw Tehran into making a step that would allow the US to bomb Iran. The New Cold War against China will take these conflicts to another level. Taiwan is already the lever. I hope that sober minds will prevail.
All socialist projects, as you well know, are formed in the process of the class struggle and through the development of the productive forces. Not the least China. You recall Bill Hinton’s book The Great Reversal: The Privatisation of China, 1978–1989, published in 1990. I was with Bill in Concord, Massachusetts a year or so before he died in 2004 and had several discussions with him about China. No one in the US knew China as well as Bill, his entire family (including his sister Joan and her husband Sid Engst, who modernised dairy farming in China), and, of course, their friends Isabel Crook, Edgar Snow, Helen Foster Snow, and, later, the translator Joan Pinkham, the daughter of Harry Dexter White.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was great trepidation about China. When I visited the country decades earlier, I was confounded by the poverty in rural areas. But at the same time, I was taken by the dignity of a people inspired by the great history of the struggles that created the Chinese Revolution of 1949 who knew that they were building a socialist project. Bill held fast to Maoism, clear about the contradictions of the socialist project, as he wrote in Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution.
Inequality had risen to high levels during the Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) and Hu Jintao (2003–2013) years. In Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013), I wrote about the Chinese Revolution with some of that pessimism, despite understanding the difficulties of building socialism in a poor country (the only place, after Russia, to try and do so since revolutions failed in the West). A few years after that, I read Ezra Vogel’s terrific assessment of Deng, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), which placed Deng’s decisions in 1978 in the context of the entire revolutionary process. That book gave me a better understanding of the Deng reforms. One of the key lessons I took away was that Deng had to confront the stagnation of the economy, allowing the market to advance the productive forces. Without that, it was clear that China – a poor, backward country – would slip into a socialism of despair. It had to pioneer a new approach. Of course, the Deng reforms turned toward market forces and opened the door to a very dangerous situation. Bill’s pessimism was a response to that reality.
Sheyang Farmers Painting Institute (Jiangsu, China), part of the ‘farmers painting’ project, 2017.By the late 1990s, discussions began – including in the journals of the Communist Party of China (CPC) – to tackle rising rates of inequality and poverty through mass action. At the fifth plenum of the 16th CPC congress in October 2005, the party announced a ‘great historic mission’ to ‘construc[t] a new socialist countryside’, using the new phrase the ‘three rurals’ to refer to agriculture, farmers, and rural areas. This mission sought to improve rural infrastructure through state investment, provide free and compulsory education, and develop cooperative medical services while retreating from the market reforms in the medical sector, the latter of which became a nationwide policy across China from 2009. It interested me that the campaign was run with a mass character and not bureaucratically, with thousands of CPC cadre involved in carrying out this mission. This was a forerunner of the poverty eradication campaign that would come a decade later.
As this mission unfolded, I was very interested in the fact that places with ‘red resources’ were highlighted for action (such as Hailufeng in Guangdong Province, which was the heart of China’s first rural Soviet). It is telling that scholars in the West did not focus on these new shifts, fixated as they were on the country’s Pacific coastline rather than studying the conditions in China’s rural interior. Among the few exceptions are sincere people such as Professor Elizabeth Perry and Professor Minzi Su (the author of China’s Rural Development Policy: Exploring the ‘New Socialist Countryside’, 2009), who are ignored by most commentators on China.
This push for a new socialist countryside enlivened the CPC and a tacit movement to counter pure free-market forces, which created the dynamic that led to Xi Jinping’s election as party leader in late 2012. Xi’s concern for the country’s rural areas comes from spending part of his youth in China’s underdeveloped northwest and from his time as the party secretary of the Ningde Prefecture in the late 1980s, which was then one of the poorest regions in Fujian Province. A widely acknowledged element of Xi’s leadership during this period is that he helped decrease poverty in that area and improve social indicators, making youth less prone to migrate to cities.
Did China’s growth need to come at the expense of nature? In 2005, while in Huzhou (Zhejiang Province), Xi laid out the ‘Two Mountains’ theory, which suggested that economic and ecological development must go hand in hand. This is evidenced by the fact that, from 2013 to 2020, particulate pollution in China decreased by 39.6%, increasing average life expectancy by two years. In 2023, Xi announced a new ecological strategy to build a ‘beautiful China’, which includes an environmental plan for rural areas.
I was struck by some of your claims, in particular that ‘forcible return to the countryside is now state policy’, which I think bears special reflection due to it being part of the broader ‘new socialist countryside’ policy. It is true that President Xi has been talking about the need for rural revitalisation since 2017, and it is also true that various provinces (for instance, Guangdong) have action plans for college graduates to go to the countryside and participate in making the rural as attractive as the urban. However, this is not done by force, but by innovative programmes.
Zhang Hailong (China), Horses and Herdsmen Series 3, 2022.At the frontlines of these programmes are youth, many of whom were among the three million cadres who went to villages as part of the policy to abolish extreme poverty (it is worth noting that 1,800 cadres died while carrying out this task). Xi is very sensitive, as Mao Zedong was, to the importance of party members experiencing the reality in rural China, given China’s vast rural landscape, and was himself sent to China’s rural northwest during the Cultural Revolution. Reflecting on this experience, Xi wrote in 2002: ‘At the age of 15, I came to Liangjiahe village perplexed and lost. At the age of 22, I left with a clear life goal and was filled with confidence’. There is something of this attitude in China’s policy. Is it bad for party members, many of whom might have jobs in the state apparatus, to spend time in the countryside? Not if you want them to better understand China’s reality.
I have been to China many times over the past ten years and have travelled extensively in both rural and urban areas. The dual circulation strategy that Xi has pursued (driven by this ‘new socialist countryside’ policy) is of interest, and I have been working with a range of scholars to build up a detailed, empirical understanding of the Chinese project from within and through their own categories. That is the basis of the work we have been doing, some of it published in Wenhua Zongheng and some of it in the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s study on the eradication of extreme poverty in China. Is it propaganda? I hope not. I hope that we are getting closer and closer to being able to offer a theoretical assessment of the Chinese Revolution as it proceeds forward. Is the revolution perfect? Not at all. But it requires understanding rather than clichés, which abound in the West when it comes to China.
Abdurkerim Nasirdin (China), Young Painter, 1995.Take, for instance, the allegations of the oppression of Chinese Muslims (25 million or 1.8% of the total population). I remember being in Central Asia in the 2000s when al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a serious impact on the region, including through the offices of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU formulated a policy to take over the entire Xinjiang region, which is why some Uygurs moved to the leadership of Juma Namangani.
The Turkistan Islamic Party, led by people close to al-Qaeda (such as Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, who was a member of al-Qaeda’s shura), was born out of those sorts of contacts. Bombings of public places became commonplace, including in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Abdul Shakoor al-Turkistani, who in 2010 took over leadership from Abdul Haq (the engineer of the 2008 bombings in Beijing during the Olympics), was responsible for the Kashgar attacks in 2008 and 2011 and the Hotan attack in 2011. In 2013, this group moved to Syria, where I met a few of them on the Turkish-Syrian border. They are now based in Idlib and are a key part of the al-Qaeda formation there. This is their characteristic feature: not mere Turkic nationalism, but Islamic fundamentalism of the al-Qaeda variety.
At the time, several approaches could have been taken to the insurgency. The one that the US and its allies in the region favoured was to use violence, including by attacking areas suspected of being run by these insurgents and arresting them en masse, with some of them ending up in US-run black sites. Many of the members of this group, including Abdul Haq and Abdul Shakoor, were killed by US drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Interestingly, China did not follow this approach. Some years ago, I interviewed former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who had turned away from violence and the ideology of al-Qaeda. Their group, the controversial Quilliam Foundation (based in London), was led by people such as Noman Benotman who followed the approach of the Egyptian ‘repentance’ and the Algerian ‘reconciliation’ projects. These programmes essentially tried to adopt both cognitive and behavioural approaches to deradicalisation (changing the ideology and stopping the violence, respectively). The former Libyan jihadis were eager to bring this approach to play both in Libya (which failed) and in the West (where many of them resettled), rather than the alternative of targeted violence and mass arrests. They were rebuffed (except in Germany, where the Hayat Programme was established in 2012). The problem with the violent approach that the West opted for instead was that it demonised all Muslims rather than merely trying to deradicalise those drawn into a toxic politics.
In the case of China, rather than waging a frontal war against the radical groups in Xinjiang and then the society in which they lived and demonising all Muslims, the government sought to conduct forms of deradicalisation. It is useful to recall the meeting between the Chinese Islamic Association and the CPC in Beijing in 2019 that built on the Five-Year Planning Outline for Persisting in the Sinification of Islam and sought to make Islam compatible with socialism. This is an interesting project, although it suffers from a lack of clarity. Making Islam Chinese is one part of the project; the other is to make the practice of Islam consonant with the socialist project. The latter is a sensible sociological approach for the modern world: to make religion – in a broader sense – compatible with modern values, and, in the case of China, with ‘core socialist values’ (such as combating gender discrimination).
Liu Xiaodong (China), Belief, 2012.The former is harder to understand, and I have not truly grasped it. When it comes to the idea that religion must be aligned with modern values, especially socialist values, I am fully on board. How should this happen? Does one, say, ban certain practices (such as headscarves in France), or should one begin a process of debate and discussion with the leaders of religious communities (who are often the most conservative)? What does one do when confronted by an insurgency that has its roots outside the country, such as in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and even Syria, rather than inside the country, such as the contradictions in Xinjiang? These are all pressing dilemmas, but the ludicrous statements about genocide and so on pushed by US State Department and its cronies – including by dodgy people who work for dodgier ‘think tanks’ near the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia – cannot be allowed to define our discussion within the left. We need a greater understanding of the matters at hand so as not to fall into the Biden-Netanyahu line of questioning, which boils down to the ‘do you condemn Hamas’ sort of debate.
Tang Xiaohe and Cheng Li (China), Mother on the Construction Site, 1984.In your email, you write that ‘there is no question that the living standards of ordinary Chinese people, especially city-dwellers, have improved dramatically over the last decades’. In fact, all the data – and my own travels – shows that this is not only the case ‘especially’ for city-dwellers but across the country and increasingly in the areas of the far west and far north. International Labour Organisation data, for instance, shows that China’s annual real wage growth was 4.7%, far and away above that of other countries in the Global South, and certainly higher than in India (1.3%) and the US (0.3%) In just eight years, from 2013 to 2021, the disposable per capita income of China’s 498 million rural residents increased by more than 72.6% while that of the 914 million residents of urban areas increased by 53.5%. Meanwhile, the gap of disposable income between rural and urban areas declined by 5% during this period, and the growth rate of disposable income of rural residents has outpaced that of urban residents for twelve consecutive years (2009–2021).
Between 2012 and 2020, targeted poverty alleviation lifted 98.99 million people in rural areas out of extreme poverty and enabled every single family suffering from extreme poverty to receive assistance. As part of this innovative process, the CPC combined the training and development of grassroots cadres with digital technology, thus enhancing modern governance capabilities at the local level and enabling party members and cadres to serve the people more accurately and efficiently.
For comparison, using the Gini index, which does not cover public services (ignoring items like subsidised rentals for rural homes), income inequality in India is 24% higher than in China.
Those who look at the data on inequality in China often focus on China’s billionaires. That was clear in your email, which noted that China ‘is awash with state-subsidised millionaires and even billionaires. Indeed, a mounting class of super-bourgeoise, many of whom “invest abroad”’. Certainly, the reform era produced the social conditions for some people to get rich. However, that number is in decline: in 2023, of the 2,640 billionaires in the world, about 562 were in China, down from 607 in the previous year, and the last few CPC congresses have made it a priority to reverse the engine of this billionaire-production process. Of the 2,296 delegates to the 20th National Congress, only 18 were private sector executives, most of whom are from small and medium-sized enterprises, down from 34 who participated in 18th National Congress in 2012.
As you might know, in 2021 Xi called for a policy of ‘common prosperity’ (a term first used by the CPC in 1953), which alarmed many of these billionaires. They have since sought to run for the hills (‘invest abroad’, as you say). However, China has very strong capital controls, allowing only $50,000 to be remitted overseas. A range of illegal operations have opened up in the past few years to assist the rich in exiting their cash, including through the more porous region of Hong Kong. But the state has been cracking down on this, as it has cracked down on corruption. In August 2023, the police arrested the leaders of an immigration firm in Shanghai that facilitated illegal foreign exchange transfers. The pressure on Jack Ma (fintech company Ant Group), Hui Ka Yan (property developer Evergrande), and Bao Fan (investment bank Renaissance Holdings) is indicative of the CPC’s current position regarding billionaires.
You write that while living standards have improved in China, ‘socialism is not on the agenda in that country’. If not for the socialist agenda pursued by the CPC, how has China been able to abolish extreme poverty and bring down inequality rates, especially in times of rising global inequality when the social democratic agenda in the capitalist Global North and in large parts of the Global South has failed to come anywhere close to these achievements? It helps that large banks in China are under the control of the state so that large-scale capital can be managed efficiently to solve social problems, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. The class struggle continues in China, of course, and that class struggle impacts the CPC (with its extraordinary membership of 98 million).
Wang Zihua (China), When the Wind Blows Through the Summer, 2022.
I have tried not only to provide some facts to guide our discussion but also to thread them into the theory of socialism that I believe is most attractive. According to that theory, socialism is not an event but a process, and this process – rooted in the class struggle – goes in zigs and zags, a back-and-forth tension that is often accentuated by the urgent need to increase the productive forces in poor countries. It is important to accompany such processes rather than taking an omniscient standpoint.
The post Why I Believe What I Believe About the Chinese Revolution first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Xi Jinping: “It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other… the planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed.”
Joe Biden: “We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision.”
In the latest salvo preparing the US for confrontation with China, Nicholas Burns flat out said, “I don’t feel optimistic about the future of US-China relations.” Burns should know. He is Washington’s ambassador to Beijing.
The US stance on bilateral relations with China, according to Burns, is one of “strategic competition in the coming decades… vying for global power as well as regional power.” Indeed, the US is preparing for war with China. High-ranking US Airforce General Mike Minihan foresees war as early as 2025.
This contrasts with the Chinese approach of cooperation for mutual benefit to solve the most pressing global problems. In short, each country’s leadership presents different paradigms of relations. The Chinese strategy is compatible with a socialist mode of collaboration and community. The US construct reflects a capitalist fundamentalism of competitive social relas.
Which paradigm may prevail is discussed below based on observations made in China on a recent US Peace Council delegation where we met with our counterpart, the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament.
View from Beijing
The Chinese view, based on what they call “Xi Jinping Thought,” is that the US-China association as the most important bilateral relationship in the world. As Chinese President Xi Jinping has explained: “How China and the US get along will determine the future of humanity.” This view is predicated on the acceptance of a high degree of integration between the two countries’ economies. They see this “entwining” as something to be promoted because both countries stand to benefit from each other’s development.
Overarching the bilateral relationship from the Chinese perspective is a stance of friendly cooperative relations. A “common prosperity,” they believe, can be built on three principles. First is mutual respect. A critical aspect of that pillar of mutual relations is not crossing the red lines of either of the two global powers. Second is peaceful coexistence. This entails a commitment to manage disagreements through communications and dialogue. And third is win-win cooperation. For example, increased trade with China boosted the annual purchasing power for US households.
That the US and China occupy such dominant positions in the world entails concomitant responsibilities. According to the Chinese, major countries have major responsibilities to humanity. They point out that global problems, such as climate change, cannot be solved without US-China cooperation. Indeed, the US and China together contribute to 40% of the planet’s current greenhouse gas emissions.
Beijing contrasts their posture with what they explicitly criticize as the Biden administration’s “zero-sum mentality.” In a zero-sum game, one player’s gain is equivalent to the other’s loss. This differs from the Chinese vision of “win-win” relations based on cooperation for mutual benefit. The Chinese take exception to the US definition of bilateral relations as one of antagonistic “strategic” competition.
Biden-Xi faceoff
The opposing paradigms were displayed at the APEC summit in San Francisco on November 15, where the two world leaders met face-to-face for the first time in two years. We do not know what was discussed in the closed-door meeting. But in a press conference afterwards, US President Joe Biden said of the person he had just spent four hours: “Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours.”
Even neo-con US Secretary of State Antony Blinken winced at the press conference. His grimace was captured in a video that went viral.
Later that day, Chinese President Xi calmly instructed, as if responding to Biden’s indiscretion, “It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other.” Peaceful coexistence for the Chinese necessitates a tolerance and acceptance of different social systems and modes of being. Xi further commented, “the planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed.”
Fortune acknowledged that Xi offered a vision different from what it characterized as Biden’s “winner-take-all” mentality. The business magazine noted that Biden has continued Trump’s tariffs on some Chinese products while tightening export controls and investments in high-tech areas such as advanced chips.
Thinking through the unthinkable
It is not an accident of geography that China is surrounded by a ring of some 400 US military bases. Biden has strengthened (1) the Quad military alliance with India, Australia, and Japan originally initiated in 2007, (2) the AUKUS security pact with the UK and Australia founded in 2021, and (3) the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing with UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada dating back to the beginning of the first Cold War, while forging (4) a new mini NATO alliance with Japan and South Korea last August.
Although the Chinese have no bases in North America, a Chinese “spy balloon” that strayed over “American skies” a year ago posed an “unprecedented challenge,” according to the Pentagon. A study by the semi-governmental RAND Corporation provides further insight into the official US posture. Commissioned by the US Army, the title of the study says it all: “War with China – thinking through the unthinkable.” The best minds that money can buy were paid by the US taxpayers to game Armageddon.
Starting from the official US national security doctrine of “full spectrum dominance,” the analysts at RAND played out various US war scenarios with China. The outcome, they predicted, would be disastrous to both sides. However, based on the morality expressed on a bumper sticker I saw in my neighborhood, “he who ends up with the most toys wins,” the US would come out ahead.
Yes, the US would prevail according to RAND. But the report also contained a caveat…if such a war is contained. That is, if other countries do not join the melee and if it does not go nuclear, the conflict might be contained.
The military strategists warn that the chances of containment, however, become progressively fleeting as a conflict progresses. Once initiated, such a conflict is increasingly subject to unintended consequences for the protagonists. Further, they note that there is a tremendous military advantage for one side or the other to strike first.
Contest for the future of our world
In his official National Security Strategy, Joe Biden described “the contest for the future of our world.” According to the US president, “our world is at an inflection point.” He continued, “my administration will seize this decisive decade to…outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors,” meaning foremost China.
Biden admonished: “We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision.” It’s either my way or the highway, for the imperial POTUS.
Biden then promised to impose “American leadership” – meaning domination, because no one voted him planetary potentate – “around the world.” US world leadership is already manifest in the most mass shootings, the highest national debt, and the largest incarcerated population. The US currently leads the world in the sale of military equipment, military expenditures, and foreign military bases.
Whistling in the dark, Biden concluded, “our economy is dynamic.” In fact, the US economy is dominated by the non-productive FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sectors, while China has become the “workshop of the world.” Statista estimates that China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by 2030.
In contrast, China’s belt and road initiative (BRI) is a global infrastructure development program which has invested in over 150 countries. No wonder Biden fears that the Chinese alternative in his own words “tilts the global playing field to its benefit.”
The alternative posed by China
Unlike the West, whose wealth is based on colonial relations, China elevated 800 million out of poverty without resorting to imperial wars. But is China, guided by Xi Jinping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” indeed socialist? A range of opinions exist within the self-identified socialist left depending on the litmus test applied.
For some, socialism does not exist in China or for that matter anywhere else, past or present. For them, socialism is an ideal that has yet to be realized. Others uphold China under Mao Zedong but not under the subsequent Deng Xiaoping revision. At the other end of the spectrum are proponents of China having already achieved socialism. In between, reflecting China’s mixed economy with state-owned and private enterprises, are various shades seeing China in transition between socialism and capitalism. For some, the transition is advancing; for others, it is regressing.
The Chinese leadership’s view is that the material conditions necessary for the full realization of socialism are still in the process of being developed.
This modest paper will not resolve the question of whether China is socialist, which ultimately will be one for history to decide. It is clear, however, that the Chinese paradigm of global cooperation is counterposed to the US’s zero-sum competition. If not precisely socialist, China at least offers a paradigm that does not preclude a socialist future. Importantly, in this contentious geopolitical climate, China and by extension the Global South pose a countervailing space from US imperial hegemony.
The Chinese appear cognizant of the Yankee’s “make war, not peace” attitude, but the 4000-year-young civilization seems self-assured that the rationality of “win-win” peaceful development will prevail. From what I saw on my visit, they confidently exude the patience of maturity and the solid vitality of youth.
The post Contrasting Strategies of the US and China first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Dissidents face an uncertain future in Taiwan and South Korea after fleeing
When Li Cheng En pushed his standup paddleboard off the Xiamen beach on China’s Fujian coastline, a mother and son stood nearby, watching him. It was dark, and he moved quickly, but felt sure he’d be caught. Li had spent the day scouting for a secluded beach from which he could launch his bold plan to flee China. But everywhere he went there were fences or security guards and cameras.
“At around 7.30pm, when I decided to go, I thought that there was no more choice for me,” he says. He waited for the security guard shift change. “I rushed into the water and thought that if they would catch me, they would catch me.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong are leading figures in the thwarted New Citizens’ Movement group of activists and lawyers
A Chinese court is to rule in the appeals of detained human rights lawyers Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong, as Ding’s wife called on China’s top judge to “rectify the miscarriage of justice” in their case.
Ding and Xu are leading figures in China’s thwarted New Citizens’ Movement, a loose network of activists and lawyers concerned with human rights and government corruption. In April, the men were sentenced to more than a decade in prison for subversion of state power, in a ruling that was criticised by the UN’s human rights chief. Ding received a 12-year sentence, while Xu’s was 14 years.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Fears South Korean court will impose harsh penalty on Kwon Pyong to appease Beijing
The father of a Chinese dissident detained in South Korea said his son will die if he is sent back to China, a country he escaped from on a jetski in a life-threatening journey in August.
A court in South Korea will decide on Thursday the fate of Kwon Pyong, who is charged with violating the immigration control act. Kwon, 35, pleaded guilty and appealed for leniency as prosecutors requested a sentence of two and a half years, which experts say is unusually harsh.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This week’s News on China. Sources:
• Xi Jinping in the US
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplo…
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic…
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Inte…
• BYD catches up with Tesla
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The…
https://es-us.finanzas.yahoo.com/noti…
• Xizang Autonomous Region improves living standards
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…
• Women’s boxing gains popularity in China
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1013914
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-03-26…
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in California this week in their first meeting in person in over a year. The two countries released a joint climate statement this week and committed to work together more closely to fight climate change.
World leaders are also gathering this week in Nairobi, Kenya, at the United Nation’s Third Session (INC-3) to craft an ambitious Global Plastics Treaty to end plastic pollution. This is a huge opportunity to show the world what the U.S. and China can do to address climate change, phase out fossil fuels, and end all forms of plastic pollution in every stage of the life cycle.
This week’s statement reaffirmed their commitment to address climate change, and to end plastic pollution and work together and with others to develop an internationally legally binding instrument. On both climate and plastics, it is critical that the U.S. and China work with the rest of the world.
The ongoing negotiations for the plastics treaty are a unique opportunity to show how the ambitious targets for net-zero emissions set by U.S. and China can be translated to an effective international agreement focusing on one of the most emissions-intensive industries.
Scientists, including myself, have demonstrated the connection between unsustainable production and consumption of plastics and the climate crisis. Plastics are a fully integrated link of the fossil fuel value chain—99% of plastics are derived from fossil fuels, primarily oil and gas fractions—as well as a core and growing business of many of the largest fossil fuel firms. This has in recent years led to a deeper fossil fuel lock-in for plastics. Plastics are associated with around 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), and this share is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades if projections for continued growth of plastic production materialize.
Of particular concern is the rapid growth of plastic production in countries and regions with energy systems and plastic feedstocks that use coal, leading to GHG emissions from plastics production growing at a higher rate than production itself. Plastic producers have very limited targets and programs for reducing their GHG emissions such as through renewable energy. And necessary long-term targets for eliminating the use of fossil fuel feedstocks are completely absent. So far international climate policy has largely ignored the need to phase out fossil fuels for both energy and plastic feedstocks.
It is clear that one of the most effective ways of mitigating climate change impacts as well as all other forms of pollution associated with plastics is to restrict future production. This has been identified by scientists as a central goal for the Global Plastics Treaty and is one of the key requirements for the treaty emphasized by the global Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty.
Civil society organizations and business leaders from around the world agree, and have rallied around a call for a treaty that prioritizes production reduction. And they have pointed out that the treaty is too focused on downstream measures which will be inadequate for meeting the challenge.
With China and the U.S. taking steps towards a more internationally harmonized agenda on climate change mitigation, we would expect these leading plastic producer countries to also show leadership in relation to plastics. The ongoing negotiations for the plastics treaty are a unique opportunity to show how the ambitious targets for net-zero emissions set by U.S. and China can be translated to an effective international agreement focusing on one of the most emissions-intensive industries.
It is imperative, for the climate as well as both terrestrial and marine ecosystems, that the plastics treaty addresses the full life cycle of plastics through measures and interventions in production, consumption, and end-of-life management.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Photo Credit: The CradleHamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.
First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.
Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.
Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.
It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.
Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.
Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin. Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.
There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.
Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.
That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.
Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.
Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.
Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.
Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.
Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to no high-tech surveillance access, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”
The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.
It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”
The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”
Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians
Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.
Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:
“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”
After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.
Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.
Which brings us to Iran.
Geopolitical plausible deniability
The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.
Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.
In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.
Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.
As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”
Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.
The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.
Elsewhere in the region, the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.
Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.
Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor
The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.
A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.
What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.
China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.
Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.
The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.
Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.
- First published at The Cradle.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
China’s paramount leader, like his Russian counterpart, is making a fine mess of his country’s economy and world standing
It must be tough, being a dictator, when your diktats are ignored, thwarted and scorned. Vladimir Putin is a sad case in point. He ordered the glorious reintegration of Ukraine into his imaginary Russian empire. What he got was an existential crisis that he couldn’t control.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, is another paramount leader with dictatorship issues. Xi presumes to exercise supreme control, channelling Mao Zedong like a card-carrying Communist party Zeus – yet repeatedly messes up. Xi’s signature tune could be the chorus to Moby’s Extreme Ways: “Then it fell apart … Like it always does.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
Introduction
Western media never stop warning us of China: it menaces Taiwan, threatens its neighbors and shipping lanes in the South China Sea, and sticks military bases on Cuba. China, we are told, spies on us by the most devious means, through TikTok, Huawei 5G, and weather balloons. And China, say our media, ensnares Africa with debt traps. Meanwhile, the US government and its media-echo decry China’s abuses of its own people. China, the US says, has committed “cultural” and literal genocide against Uyghur muslims in Xinjiang. As for the Covid-19 pandemic, the West with whiplash-inducing self-contradiction accuses China of mishandling the crisis by imposing both draconian lockdowns and lockdowns that were too lax, as well as premature reopenings and reopenings that were too-long delayed.
Meanwhile, the liberal and left-liberal West shakes its ideological finger at China, declaring it to practice an idiosyncratic communism-capitalism that sometimes features the worst of both worlds.
In the western imagination, China’s citizens are feared for their abject discipline and uncanny competence. Yet the West pities them too, thinking they are ruled by communist overlords in a dictatorship devoid of individual liberties.
In short, to the western world, China is an iconic picture of tyranny, malevolence, and exploitation. Still, China is not unique in its status as a US bogeyman. Whenever the West targets a country militarily or economically, the press always turns the country into a cartoon, invariably the same cartoon: authoritarian, autocratic, led by an evil/mad dictator; e.g., Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, etc.
Which is why we should be grateful for the picture of China drawn in this elegantly concise and easily read book, The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century, by Carlos Martinez (Praxis Press, 2023, 210 pp.). Of its 210 pages, nearly 60 are taken up with source citations, a 5-page index, reading recommendations, and photographs.
Despite its brevity, the book expertly refutes the West’s blizzard of charges against China. It also sketches China’s 20th century history, its economics and political system, and the ideology that accompanied the Chinese people’s astonishing advance. Martinez analyzes and answers two questions preoccupying many on the political left: Is China socialist? Is it imperialist? (Martinez argues Yes, and No, respectively.)
Life in China Today
First, some bullet points on life in China today, with facts gleaned from the book. (Citations are to the print edition.)
• Life expectancy in China is now 78.2 years and literacy is 97%. For comparison, in the US the figures are 76.4 and 79, respectively. (95)
• Infant mortality is 5.4/1000 in 2020, just under the US figure of 5.69/1000. (95)
• The majority of students in higher education are women, while before the 1949 revolution the vast majority of women received no education at all. (31)
• Since 2000 China has revived universal health insurance, a minimum 9-year free compulsory education, pensions, subsidized housing, and other income support. (67-68)
• 98% of poor villages have optical fiber communications and 4G technology. (99)
• Extreme or “absolute” poverty has been eliminated. (31) This meant lifting over 800 million people (now 10% of humanity) out of poverty in the last 40 years. 1 (89) However, to say that China has eliminated “absolute poverty” but not “poverty” is technically true but vastly understates the accomplishment. China’s poverty elimination program considers that each and every citizen must have adequate food and clothing, access to medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and at least nine years of free education. To do this, “Three million carefully selected cadres were dispatched to poor villages, forming 255,000 teams that reside there. Living in humble conditions for generally one to three years at a time, the teams worked alongside poor peasants, local officials, and volunteers, until each household was lifted out of poverty.” 2 (97)
• China’s response to public health emergencies was very recently tested. After Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China identified and suppressed the virus, sequenced and published the genome, and reopened after a few months. This rapid response was unprecedented, as noted by the World Health Organization and many other authoritative bodies. China literally saved millions of lives through its public health administrative virtuosity, while the West, on the other hand, sacrificed millions. (At the time, this reviewer wrote about China’s initial response to COVID-19, here.) (113)
• China’s per capita incarceration rate is less than 20% that of the US. (122)
• 93% of China’s population are satisfied with their central government, according to a study by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. (54)
To see how impressive this all is, consider that by global standards China is anything but a rich country. According to the World Bank, in 2022 China’s nominal GDP per capita was about one-sixth of that of the US, but its purchase-price-parity GDP per capita is now comparable to that of the US. 3 This is consistent with China’s status as a peripheral or semi-peripheral country in the global system, 4 sending most of the surplus value it produces to the global north. 5 But it also tells us that China has created a domestic market that provides a much higher national standard of living than that in many other peripheral and semi-peripheral countries.
History
Martinez’s summary of China’s recent history explains that the current quality of life and popular sovereignty in China are rooted in the first half of the 20th century.
In 1949, year of the revolution, China was among the poorest countries in the world. The US under President Truman then imposed a near total blockade on China. (94) This crushing, existential impediment to China’s development, eventually forced it into the 1979-1980 US-China agreements with the US under President Nixon. China then devised the economic strategy that it now calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
But China’s progress did not begin with the US-China deal and the economic changes of the late 1970s-80s known as “Reform and Opening Up.” From the revolution in 1949 until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, life expectancy in China rose 31 years, the fastest ever recorded in a major country. In the same period, literacy went from 20% to 93%. (17) China’s unprecedented triumph over poverty simply continued the practice that began before the 1949 revolution, in the Communist-liberated zones, beginning with the Jianxi-Fujian Soviet in 1931. (90) After the 1949 revolution, life expectancy rose from 36 to 67 in the three decades that followed, well-exceeding the global increase. (91-92) Even the World Bank praised China’s successful development over the four decades before 1983. (90)
Development Strategy
China’s economic changes of the later 20th century were not just a development strategy, but a strategy of coping with the existential threat presented by the West. China intended to integrate itself into the global production chain so thoroughly that it would make the cost of Western aggression against it too high. (36-37, 47)
China’s economic system now depends on its popular government’s control of the commanding heights of the economy, including banking and all the leading industries, avoiding the scourge of privatization that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the devastation of its people in the 1990s. In China, even land ownership has not been privatized in the western sense.
Notice that this development strategy abjured the development strategy of the Western bloc, which depends, in the first instance, on centuries of colonialism, imperialism, plunder, and in the second, on the continuing imposition on the Global South of dependent underdevelopment, unequal exchange, violence, coups, sanctions and other malign practices required to enforce the unequal international order.
Global Leadership in Tech, Science, Climate Mitigation
China’s success is not just in its internal development, but in its global leadership. When the US trumpets its own “global leadership,” it looks nothing like what most of us would like the phrase to mean. China, on the other hand, really does lead, not only in world poverty reduction but in technology, scientific research, and climate mitigation efforts.
Some more bullet points, with facts gleaned from the book.
• China leads the world in renewable energy, digital networking, quantum computing, space exploration and nanotechnology. (xv)
• China leads the world in scientific research publication and patent grants. (xv)
• In 2007 over 80% of China’s electricity came from coal. By 2022, this dropped to 56%, about the same as Australia, a country with a per capita GDP (nominal) about five times China’s. (139)
• In 2021, China accounted for 46% of the world’s new solar and wind power capacity. (140)
• International energy analyst Tim Buckley observed that China is the world leader in “wind and solar installation, in wind and solar manufacturing, in electric vehicle production, in batteries, in hydro, in nuclear, in ground heat pumps, in grid transmission and distribution, and in green hydrogen… they literally lead the world in every zero-emissions technology today.” (140)
• China is reforesting, planting forests the size of Ireland in a single year, and doubling forest coverage from 12% in 1980 to 23% in 2020, while the global trend is in the opposite direction. (144-145)
• China also is leading in green foreign direct investment through the Belt and Road Initiative, in Pakistan, Argentina, Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Central African Republic. (149-150)
Imperialism? Debt Traps? ‘Belt and Road’ Bad?
The book offers a detailed analysis of the charge that China is imperialist. For example, as theorized by Lenin, one central imperial criterion is the export of capital. Martinez writes that in the past, “China’s ‘export of capital’ was limited largely to foreign aid projects in Africa, most famously the Tazara Railway linking Tanzania and Zambia, which aside from enabling regional development, broke Zambia’s dependency on apartheid-ruled territories (Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe], South Africa, Mozambique).”
Nor could China be considered imperialist in the 1980s and 1990s: “[R]ather, it was the recipient of enormous volumes of foreign capital, from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US and Europe… China opened itself up to exploitation by the imperialist powers so as to develop technological capacity and insert itself into global value chains.” (36-37)
The charge of imperialism overlaps the charge that China ensnares African states in “debt traps.” This is ironic, given that the charge is made by Africa’s historical trapper-in-chief, the West. 6
Martinez dispenses with this claim too. He describes the economic relations between Africa and China and how little they resemble imperialist relations.
[T]he structure of the Chinese economy is such that it doesn’t impel the domination of foreign markets, territories, resources and labor in the same way as free market capitalism does. The major banks—which obviously wield a decisive influence over how capital is deployed—are majority-owned by the state, responsible primarily not to shareholders but to the Chinese people,” as are “the key industries,” which are “subjected to heavy regulation by a state that does not have private profit maximization as its primary objective. (38)
Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis notes, “the Chinese are non-interventionist in a way that Westerners have never managed to fathom… they went to Addis Ababa and said to the government, ‘we can see you have some problems with your infrastructure, we would like to build some new airports, upgrade your railway system, create a telephone system, and rebuild your roads.’” (42)
China is now Africa’s largest trading partner: $254 billion in 2021. Compare US-Africa trade, at $64 billion. In addition to trade, China “provides vast low-cost loans for infrastructure projects, with Chinese banks now accounting for around a fifth of all lending to Africa.” Due in part to Chinese finance and expertise, ‘Ethiopia in 2015 celebrated the opening of the first metro train system in sub-Saharan Africa, along with Africa’s first fully electrified cross-border railway line, the Ethiopian-Djibouti electric railway. The African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa was funded by the Chinese government as a gift to the AU.’” China is also building Zimbabwe’s parliament building gratis, and funding construction of Africa’s CDC, just opened in January 2023. (40)
China makes loans differently too. At the time of the book’s writing, the average interest rate on private sector loans was about 5%, but Chinese public and private lenders charged half that. Austerity is never a condition of a Chinese loan, unlike Western loans that are made under IMF and World Bank strictures. (41)
China’s policy on foreign investment and loans is not an accident. China follows explicit rules for African investment, as outlined by President Xi in 2018: “No interference in African countries’ internal affairs; no imposition of our will on African countries; no attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa; and no seeking of selfish political gains in investment and financing cooperation with Africa.” (43-44)
China initiated its famous “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI),” a global infrastructure development strategy, ten years ago. As of last year, 150 countries (the United Nations General Assembly has 193) have signed up with BRI. “Politically, the project fits into China’s longstanding approach of using economic integration to increase the cost (and thereby reduce the likelihood) of confrontation.” (47) “Nearly every country in the Global South has signed up” with BRI, “including 43 out of 46 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.” (48)
Martinez quips, “Surely not all the turkeys are voting for Christmas?” (48)
Xinjiang
Perhaps the most vicious tale the West tells about China concerns Xinjiang and its Uyghur population. The US government and its media echo, joined by other western governments, accuse China of physical, cultural and religious genocide of Uyghurs, imprisoning a million of them, and subjecting them to forced labor.
Martinez debunks the Xinjiang myth point by point. But for this review, lets skip the details of China’s policy and practices in Xinjiang (largely a social work approach to terrorism). Let’s also forget the singular and bizarre source of the Xinjiang tales, one Adrian Zenz, exposed by a number of articles from The Grayzone. (120-122) Even without all that, the fraud is revealed by circumstantial evidence alone, as these bullet points show.
• Between 2010 and 2018 the Uyghur population has increased by 25%, from 10.2 million to 12.7 million; in the same period the majority Han Chinese population increased by only 2%. (117)
• China’s one-child policy implemented in 1978 and ending in 2015 exempted China’s dozens of ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs. (117)
• Life expectancy in the region has increased from 30 years in 1949 to 75 years today. (117)
• No refugee crisis exists or has been reported along the border with Pakistan, Kazakhstan or elsewhere. Indeed, Time magazine reported in 2021 the US had not admitted a single Uyghur refugee in the previous 12 months. (117)
• The total number of deaths caused by Covid-19 in Xinjiang is three. (118)
• All the schools in Xinjiang teach in both Standard Chinese and one minority language, most often Uyghur. (118)
• Chinese banknotes have five languages: Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian, and Zhuang. (118-9)
• There are over 25,000 mosques in Xinjiang, three times the number there were in 1980 and one of the highest rates per capita in the world. (119)
• The Xinjiang Islamic Institute is headquartered in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi. Thousands of students attend Islamic schools and the religion is practiced freely. (119)
• “During the 50th session of the Human Rights Council in 2022, members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation overwhelmingly co-sponsored the statement supporting China’s position (by 37 to 1).” Elsewhere in the Global South results were similar: Africa (33 to 2); Asia (20 to 2). (119)
In short, the Xinjiang story perpetrated by the West exemplifies the “big lie,” as theorized by an astute Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf:
[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.
Speaking of Hitler, an iconic offense in modern thought and discourse is the factual denial of the Nazi Holocaust. We might register the same disgust for the factual denial of any historically established mass genocidal event (e.g., in Guatemala). Is there any reason not to treat the wilful fabrication of a non-existent genocide with the same revulsion?
The South China Sea
The West accuses China of trying to militarize the South China Sea, including through island-building.
Martinez cites China scholar Jude Woodward: “Woodward observed that China’s island-building was carried out largely in response to the actions taken by other states in the region: ‘In its actions on these disputed islands, China can with justice argue that it has done no more than others… It [is] rarely mentioned that Taiwan has long had an airstrip on Taiping, Malaysia on Swallow Reef, Vietnam on Spratly Island and the Phillipines on Thitu.’” (50)
Moreover, China’s presence in the South China Sea is for economic and military securtity. It is China’s major shipping route, “as central to Asia as the Mediterranean is to Europe,” writes Robert Kaplan. (50) A blockade by the US or other hostile powers would present an existential threat. (50) This is not an imaginary threat, given US naval provocations and exercises in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, and US military and diplomatic relations with China’s separately-governed province of Taiwan. Indeed, it is the US which has sought to militarize and control the region.
Conclusion: The US Menace
The book’s last chapter urges us to work to oppose the West’s new Cold War on China. This war is multifaceted, including the 2012 US “pivot to Asia,” the banning of TikTok and WeChat, the kidnapping of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the long-standing US encirclement of China and Russia with perhaps half of its 800 to 1100 overseas military bases, and US military aggression in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. (167)
US policy is explicit: “Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival…that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union… Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.” (US Defense Planning Guidance for 1994-1999) (169)
Again citing China expert Jude Woodward, author of The US vs China: Asia’s new Cold War? (Manchester University Press, 2017), Martinez observes that current US policy toward China shows “a chilling resemblance” to US-USSR relations at the height of the Cold War, when the US sought to isolate the USSR economically, politically, and militarily. (170) Quoting Woodward, “The USSR was variously surrounded by a tightening iron noose of US military alliances, forward bases, border interventions, cruise missiles and naval exercises. Economically it was shut out of international trade organizations, subjected to bans and boycotts and excluded from collaboration on scientific and technological developments. It was diplomatically isolated, excluded from the G7 group of major economies and awarded an international pariah status. It was designated as uniquely undemocratic. Any opponents of this ‘Cold War’ and accompanying nuclear arms race were stigmatized as disloyal apologists, closet ‘reds’ or spies and subjected to McCarthyite witch-hunts.” (170)
“Propaganda wars can also be war propaganda,” writes Martinez. (110) And so it is with western demonization of China.
For those of us overwhelmed and frightened by the West’s prolific fictions about China and who wish to share a more accurate picture of the country with friends, families and fellow activists, in the hope of stopping the war before it starts, we might give them this book.
END NOTES
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It was a photo op for the ages: a visibly well-disposed President Xi Jinping receiving centenarian “old friend of China” Henry Kissinger in Beijing.Mirroring meticulous Chinese attention to protocol, they met at Villa 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse – exactly where Kissinger first met in person with Zhou Enlai in 1971, preparing Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. The Mr. Kissinger Goes to Beijing saga was an “unofficial”, individual attempt to try to mend increasingly fractious Sino-American relations. He was not representing the current American administration.
There’s the rub. Everyone involved in geopolitics is aware of the legendary Kissinger formulation: To be the US’s enemy is dangerous, to be the US’s friend is fatal. History abounds in examples, from Japan and South Korea to Germany, France and Ukraine. As quite a few Chinese scholars privately argued, if reason is to be upheld, and “respecting the wisdom of this 100-years-old diplomat”, Xi and the Politburo should maintain the China-US relation as it is: “icy”.
After all, they reason, being the US’s enemy is dangerous but manageable for a Sovereign Civilizational State like China. So Beijing should keep “the honorable and less perilous status” of being a US enemy.
The World Through Washington’s Eyes
What’s really going on in the back rooms of the current American administration was not reflected by Kissinger’s high-profile peace initiative, but by an extremely combative Edward Luttwak. Luttwak, 80, may not be as visibly influential as Kissinger, but as a behind-the-scenes strategist he’s been advising the Pentagon across the spectrum for over five decades. His book on Byzantine Empire strategy, for instance, heavily drawing on top Italian and British sources, is a classic.
Luttwak, a master of deception, reveals precious nuggets in terms of contextualizing current Washington moves. That starts with his assertion that the US – represented by the Biden combo – is itching to do a deal with Russia.
That explains why CIA head William Burns, actually a capable diplomat, called his counterpart, SVR head Sergey Naryshkin (Russian Foreign Intelligence) to sort of straighten things up “because you have something else to worry about which is more unlimited”. What’s “unlimited”, depicted by Luttwak in a Spenglerian sweep, is Xi Jinping’s drive to “get ready for war”. And if there’s a war, Luttwak claims that “of course” China would lose. That dovetails with the supreme delusion of Straussian neocon psychos across the Beltway.
Luttwak seems not to have understood China’s drive for food self-sufficiency: he qualifies it as a threat. Same for Xi using a “very dangerous” concept, the “rejuvenation of the Chinese people”: that’s “Mussolini stuff”, says Luttwak. “There has to be a war to rejuvenate China”.
The “rejuvenation” concept – actually better translated as “revival” – has been resonating in China circles at least since the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911. It was not coined by Xi. Chinese scholars point out that if you see US troops arriving in Taiwan as “advisors”, you would probably make preparations to fight too.
But Luttwak is on a mission: “This is not America, Europe, Ukraine, Russia. This is about ‘the sole dictator’. There is no China. There is only Xi Jinping,” he insisted. And Luttwak confirms the EU’s Josep “Garden vs. Jungle” Borrell and European Commission dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen fully support his vision. Luttwak, in just a few words, actually gives away the whole game: “The Russian Federation, as it is, is not strong enough to contain China as much as we would wish”. Hence the turn around by the Biden combo to “freeze” the conflict in the Donbass and change the subject. After all, “if that [China] is the threat, you don’t want Russia to fall apart,” Luttwak reasons.
So much for Kissingerian “diplomacy.”
Let’s Declare a “Moral Victory” and Run Away
On Russia, the Kissinger vs. Luttwak confrontation reveals crucial cracks as the Empire faces an existential conflict it never did in the recent past. The gradual, massive U-turn is already in progress – or at least the semblance of a U turn. US mainstream media will be entirely behind the U turn. And the naïve masses will follow. Luttwak is already voicing their deepest agenda: the real war is on China, and China “will lose”
At least some non-neocon players around the Biden combo – like Burns – seem to have understood the Empire’s massive strategic blunder of publicly committing to a Forever War, hybrid and otherwise, against Russia on behalf of Kiev. This would mean, in principle, that Washington can’t just walk away like it did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yet Hegemons do enjoy the privilege to walk away: after all they exercise sovereignty, not their vassals. European vassals will be left to rot. Imagine those Baltic chihuahuas declaring war on Russia-China all by themselves.
The off-ramp confirmed by Luttwak implies Washington declaring some sort of “moral victory” in Ukraine – which is already controlled by BlackRock anyway – and then moving the guns towards China.
Yet even that won’t be a cakewalk, because China and the about-to-expand BRICS+ are already attacking the Empire at its foundation: dollar hegemony. Without it, the US itself will have to fund the war on China. Chinese scholars, off the record, and exercising their millennia-old analytical sweep, observe this may be the last blunder the Empire ever made in its short history.
As one of them summarized it, “the empire has blundered itself to an existential war and, therefore, the last war of the empire. When the end comes, the empire will lie as usual and declare victory, but everyone else will know the truth, especially the vassals.”
And that brings us to former national security adviser Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski’s 180-degree turn shortly before he died, aligning him today with Kissinger, not Luttwak. “The Grand Chessboard”, published in 1997, before the 9/11 era, argued that the US should rule over any peer competitor rising in Eurasia. Brzezinski did not live to see the living incarnation of his ultimate nightmare: a Russia-China strategic partnership. But already seven years ago – two years after Maidan in Kiev – at least he understood it was imperative to realign the global power architecture”
Destroying the “Rules-Based International Order”
The crucial difference today, compared to seven years ago, is that the US is incapable, per Brzezinski, to “take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence (…) can be contained without destroying the global order.” It’s the Russia-China strategic partnership that is taking the lead – followed by the Global Majority – to contain and ultimately destroy the hegemonic “rules-based international order”.
As the indispensable Michael Hudson has summarized it, the ultimate question at this incandescent juncture is whether economic gains and efficiency will determine world trade, patterns and investment, or whether the post-industrial US/NATO economies will choose to end up looking like the rapidly depopulating and de-industrializing post-Soviet Ukraine and Baltic states or England.”
So is the wet dream of a war on China going to change these geopolitical and geoeconomics imperatives? Give us a -Thucydides – break. The real war is already on – but certainly not one identified by Kissinger, Brzezinski and much less Luttwak and assorted US neocons.
Michael Hudson, once again, summarized it: when it comes to the economy, the US and EU “strategic error of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive, so total, that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.”
- First published at Sputnikglobe.com.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of President Xi Jinping’s launch of China’s flagship, One Belt One Road (OBOR), later referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Echoing the historic Silk Road, the ancient trade network of Eurasia that connected the East and West, BRI is the most ambitious and expensive infrastructure plan in world history. Writing about BRI’s future, the British Economist once worried that “All roads lead to Beijing.”
In September 2013, on a visit to Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, President Xi advocated the establishment of a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” A month later, addressing the Indonesian parliament, he proposed a “Maritime Silk Road of the 20th Century. The trans-continental corridor links China with Southeast Asia, South Asia, Russia and Europe by land. The new sea trade route connects Chinese coast regions with southeast and south Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East and Eastern Africa, all the way to Europe.
BRI was later extended to include Latin America and initiatives to Polar regions through the “Silk Road on Ice” in the Arctic, a Digital Silk Road and another to outer space via the Space Information Corridor. Lastly, special mention should be made of The Green Silk Road, the scope of which includes reducing climate emissions, reducing pollution and protecting biodiversity. This is part of China’s prioritizing sustainable development under the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In sum, the BRI seeks to promote economic globalization, multipolarity, poverty reduction, livelihood improvement, cultural diversification and environmental protection.
The BRI is China’s signature foreign policy effort, in Xi’s words, to help achieve a “community of common destiny” which encompasses a “commonality of shared interests” as it “complements other economies” on the way to providing “one home for man.” Tang Qifang, a scholar at the China Institute of International Studies, describes BRI as “The concept of a community of common destiny transcending all sorts of differences in human society and targets the greatest possible benefits for all.” This embodies, “The Chinese aspiration to share power and development with the world.” (When Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought about the China-proposed “human community with a shared future, he replied “That’s exactly what we need.”)
And, Xi has repeatedly stressed that the nation’s destiny is “interwoven with that of another dialogue rather than confrontation, partnerships instead of alliances should be the pursuit of all nations in a win-win project.” [1] In keeping with this sentiment, China will transfer its competitive productive capacity as its industries possess a competitive edge.
In a 2018 speech Xi said,
To respond to the call of the times, China is ready to jointly promote the Belt and Road Initiative with partners. We hope to create new drivers to power common development through this new platform of international cooperation; and we hope to turn it into a road of peace, prosperity, openness, green development and innovation. And a road brings together different civilizations.” [2]
On numerous occasions, Xi has stressed that “We Chinese love peace. No matter how strong it may become China will never seek hegemony or expansion. It will never inflict its past suffering on any nation.”
It’s not lost on the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America that when colonizers built infrastructure it facilitated outward-bound routes whereas the Chinese infrastructure serves internal connections within the continent. W. Gyude Moore, former Minister for Public Works in Liberia, didn’t mince words when he said, “China has built more infrastructure in Africa than the West did in centuries.” [3]
As of January 2023, 152 countries and 32 international organizations had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and this includes 75% of the world’s population and half of the world GDP. Some economic forecasts predict that by 2027, BRI’s worldwide projects will number 2,600 valued at $3.7 trillion.
The banishment of selfishness from foreign policy. What a concept. Brotherhood in action.
Further, data show that the cumulative value of trade in goods between China and countries along the BRI routes reached nearly $11 trillion between 2013 and 2021, with a two-way investment reaching more than $230 billion.
According to a 2022 World Bank forecast, if only the BRI transportation infrastructure projects are eventually carried out, by 2030, the BRI will generate $1.6 trillion in revenues for the globe or 1.3 percent of global GDP. And up to 90 percent of the revenues will go the partnering countries. [4]
Thousands of projects (3,000 in Africa, alone), initially focused on roads. ports, railways, pipelines, power stations. More recently, there are cross-border fiber optic cables, space networks, schools, hospitals, solar panels, health care and financial services. Projects range from the Sudanese Railways Authority receiving a first installment of 21 locomotives which will significantly improve rail capacity, and 620 Lifan taxi cars in Montevideo, Uruguay to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. At a cost of $95.5 billion, it involves a port, highways, airport, fiber optic cables, railways and power plants. Many of the latter are running on solar, hydro and wind power.
In June, 2023, Egypt and China announced a BRI investment deal worth more than $8 billion for the Suez Canal Zone which will allow Chinese companies access to African and European markets, while taking advantage of the canal’s strategic position. Another notable project, the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail in Indonesia at at cost between $6-8 billion encountered logistical problems after being scheduled to begin service in July, 2023. The Chinese would be the first to acknowledge that BRI is not a miracle worker, success is not invariably guaranteed and although it originated in China, BRI belongs to all the members.
Recent BRI projects in Latin America include the $1.52 billion Fourth Bridge over the Panama Canal and the $5 billion Bogota metro line 1 in Colombia. In early June, 2023(, in official visits to Beijing, Honduran President Xiomara Castro expressed interest in joining BRI and signed 17 trade agreements with China and Argentina agreed to projects involving infrastructure, energy, economy and trade. Other projects are underway in Chile, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. At the end of 2021, Chinese investments in Latin America exceeded $450 billion. It should be noted that the U.S. has expressed its pique over BRI projects, especially in Panama, and has warned Latin America about Chinese BRI deals that were “too good to be true.”
Clearly, Latin America will not be amenable if China exhibits neo-imperial behavior and begins contradicting Xi’s pledge of “providing harmony, security and prosperity to both China and its neighbors” and seeks to impose its influence. Seemingly recognizing this, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has taken pains to emphasize that BRI “should not be viewed “through the outdated Cold War mentality.” [5]
Addressing and expanding this concern, Peng Guangquin, a retired major general and advisor to the Chinese National Security Commission, writes that: “BRI does not limit the nature of a given country’s political system, is not underline by ideology, does not create tiny circles of friends, does not set up trade protectionism, does not set up economic blockade, does not exercise control of other countries’ economic lifelines or change other countries’ political systems. [6]
Finally, more than 700 million of the globe’s extremely poor people live along the BRI’s and addressing the wealth disparity of the international order imposed on the Global South is a BRI priority. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, is now free of extreme poverty after it was eradicated for 850 million people. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has said that the Belt and Road initiative had accomplished this for 40 million people. This number accords with a World Bank study from four years ago that concluded BRI could lift 32 million out of moderate poverty and 7.6 out of extreme poverty.
Will BRI flounder and fizzle out? Back in 2017, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres praised BRI’s “immense potential,” lauded it for having “sustainable development as the overarching objective” and pledged the “United Nations system stands ready to travel this road with you.” [7] In 2022, China’s engagement through financial investment and contractural cooperation in 147 countries was USD 67-8 billion on over 200 deals. This was about the same as in 2021 and for 2023, and more BRI engagement is expected because strict COVID restrictions were lifted.
We do know, from a report issued by Ernst & Young that Chinese trade with BRI countries in Q1 of this year was U.S. $31.66 billion, an increase of 9.2%. It should be mentioned that there is no budget line for BRI in the Chinese government’s budget, rather, it remains a platform for launching a multitude of projects from vision to reality. In the future, we should expect less bilateral arrangements and more emphasis on bringing other countries into a quasi-governance structure, something on the order of BRI steering committee. And also more collaboration with the UN acting as an umbrella-type body. [8]
In 2017, the BRI was written into the Chinese Communist Party’s Constitution as an indicator of its importance. Australian Professor Jane Colley, who has studied BRI from its inception, believes “They are absolutely still advancing it” and as far as outside pressure, she adds that, “Any idea of containing them or forcing countries to pick a side — it’s a very risky game to play.” [9] And after a comprehensive look at BRI, the mainstream publication Euromoney, concedes that,“The BRI is neither dead nor dying but is quietly mutating into something much larger and — whisper it — perhaps better.” [10]
Will the BRI prove to be a platform that offers an alternative to the capitalist world order? The most comprehensive and objective attempt at predicting what BRI will resemble in 2035 contains various scenarios. The most optimistic, the “international BRI,” assumes the world will have entered a new phase of globalization. This world will be less Chinese, although the renminbi RMB) will be widely accepted as a reserve currency.
This BRI will incorporate “Chinese values” but this stage will be neither Western nor Chinese nor will it lead to China as the new hegemonal state. There will be increased cooperation, the option China committed to at the 75th UN General Assembly. [11] In short, it will be a “thoroughly hybrid paradigm of global cooperation. [12] One factor, that might tend to mitigate that optimistic rendering is that the amount of finance available to for BRI projects might be constrained by the need to focus on domestic economic priorities.
U.S Opposition to BRI
In 2011, two years before President Xi unveiled BRI, Yan Xuetang penned an opinion piece in the New York Times, titled “How China Can Defeat America.”
Yan, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars and Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, offered his explanation for China’s eventual rise and the slow decline of the United States. By interrogating the particulars of national leadership in China’s past, Yan concluded that morality might well play a key role in competition between the two great powers.
Yan identifies himself as a political realist, a school which assumes international international politics is a zero-sum game. But unlike most scholars in this field, Yen argued that “morally informed authority”can play a key role in shaping international competition between the China and the United States. This “humane authority,” creates a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad” and in the international competition between the two great powers, this will win hearts and minds and “separate the winners from the losers.” [13] One gets the sense that Yan is implicitly implying that the U.S. will fail in this competition but he’s also challenging his own government to take advantage of this opportunity.
Eight years later, in his 2019 groundbreaking book “Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers,” Yan wrote that “moral actions help [a rising power] to establish credibility.” Yan never abjures the existence of power hierarchies and that anarchy prevails in relations among nations. However, morally informed leadership can determine the outcome of the competition — without resorting to military confrontation. This moral realism “with Chinese characteristics” can be described as a form of enlightened self-interest.
This “morally informed leadership… the side that wins the most international support will win the competition.” This should be a prime consideration in conducting foreign policy gains and “enables its leadership to become favorable to the majority of UN members.”
When the BRI was first announced by China in 2013, it did not immediately set off alarm bells in Washington. But later, a study done for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, an organization which sets the American empire’s imperial agenda, warned that “The BRI is here to stay and poses significant risks to U.S. economic and political interests and to longer term security implications.” [14]
After the BRI had been in existence for seven years, it was characterized as China’s “means of weaponizing globalization to create commercial and political order centered around dependence on China.” [15] Both of these succinct summations reveal that the U.S. view of the BRI cannot be divorced from how U.S. oligarchs and the military industrial complex perceive China more generally and here we return to the aforementioned realist school of international relations.
American political scientist Hans Morgenthau’s book Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, became the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy for at least four decades. It’s fair to say that Morgenthau was the father of the realist school and his book was adopted as the primary text in colleges and universities across the country. My undergraduate political science professor had been one of Morgenthau’s graduate students at the University of Chicago and my copy of Politics Among Nations was heavily underlined in preparation for class discussion and exams.
In brief, the political realist assumes that all people are by “nature” greedy, aggressive and fiercely competitive. Morgenthau counseled that “Politics is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.” [16] Further, “The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an unavoidable fact of experience.” As such, the realist concludes that states, the actors on the international stage, must focus on power. No universal morality exists and power politics is amoral.
At the time his book was published, the outcome of the Chinese Revolution was still a year away but in an essay written in the 1960s, Morgenthau predicted that “China may well in the long run carry the gravest implications for the rest of the world.” Given this likelihood, he advised that U.S. strategy should be to establish an island chain running from Japan down to the Philippines so that one power could not attain a hegemonic position in Asia. [17] It should noted that prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be extremely careful in determining the national interest. It was on that basis that he was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War. Whether Morgenthau would find common cause with those willing to go war over Taiwan remains an open question.
John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago political science professor and arguably the most influential realist today, asserts that “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually to dominate the system.” [18] In terms of geopolitics “The U.S. will have no choice but to adopt a realist policy, simply because it must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia.” Further, he explains that,
The U.S. does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated in the 20th century, it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the U.S. can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer capable of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence, the U.S. is likely to behave towards China much the way it behaved towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
A contemporary and highly influential iteration of the realist school is defense analyst Elsbridge Colby’s Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. [19] Colby, grandson of former CIA Director William Colby, was the primary architect of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy. Colby’s effort is the best example I know of that lays out, chapter and verse, how the U.S. foreign policy elite is preparing for possible limited war with China and if necessary, nuclear war. Reaction from other realist strategies is typified by Robert Kaplan’s book cover blurb in which he gushes that Colby “reaches a level of theoretical mastery akin to Hans Morgenthau’s “Politics Among Nations.”
To maintain U.S. global domination, Colby states the following about China:
We are facing a peer superpower — a generational challenger…China’s first step is a hegemonic position over Asia…then from that position they will be able to gain global predominance from which China will be able to essentially hold sway or influence over the entire world, including of course, Europe, but also the United States.
To prevent this outcome,
Requires that we ruthlessly focus, and that take controversial and aggressive steps ready ourselves now to avoid worse outcomes later. The problem is that we have not been doing nearly enough of these things. On our current course we are courting disaster.
And further, if all else fails, “If China is willing to use nuclear weapons and the United States is not, Beijing will dominate over whatever interests are at stake — whether Taiwan’s fate, that of another U.S. ally or free American access to Asia more generally.” And in a dire warning, Colby asserts that “If China succeeds we can forget about housing, food, savings, affording college for our kids and other domestic needs. The end of ordinary citizen’s property will be here. China would make American society worse off and more susceptible to intense disputes over a stagnant economic pie.”
Prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be careful in circumscribing the “national interest.” It was on that basis that Morgenthau was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War which he felt lay outside U.S. national interest.
Given the preceding, it’s my sense that U.S. realists view BRI as vast and growing phalanx of Trojan Horses out of which will emerge the means to challenge Washington’s unipolar position. A system that features peaceful development and the promise of “common prosperity” can’t be accommodated within the realist school. As Mearsheimer asserts, irrespective of ideology, “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually dominate the globe.”
The BRI is seen as part of a zero-sum game in which Washington’s unipolar world dominance will be eliminated along with a “rules-based international order. ” Speaking on the CBS program 60 Minutes (May 2, 2021), U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “Our purpose is…to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re doing to stand up and defend it.” In truth, this order is one which the United States imposed on the world to perpetuate its hegemony. This elusive set of rules, a copy of which ordinary Americans have yet to see, has been thoroughly dissected by Kim Petersen who notes: “It is a given that the rules-based order is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve it as a global hegemon.”
BRI notions of win-win outcomes and a common destiny for mankind simply can’t be accommodated in the mindset of the realist practitioners within the U.S. national security state. They only see it as a geopolitical tool, wielded by China, who CIA Director William Burns claims, is the “most important geopolitical threat facing” the United States and if not stopped will eventually challenge American global hegemony.
Given the preceding, it’s unwarranted to surmise that a decade of BRI’s positive contributions to national development and the promise of more to come, is even viewed as more of a threat to U.S. monopoly capital’s interests than China’s rapidly growing military preparedness. That is, BRI is a type of normative power that might allow for the creation of a new international order with multilateral institutions that replace the existing ones without engaging in military conflict with the United States, thus “killing two birds with one stone.” For the realist, intent on defending the U.S. empire:
It goes without saying that this counter-hegemonic geopolitical endeavor is much more threatening to the United States than the geo-strategic actorness of China than the territorial empire which is mainly limited to military actions in China’s maritime vicinity. [20]
This is because BRI’s projects in the Global South stand in sharp relief to their collective memory of the American empire’s history brutal exploitation at the expense of other, of military intervention, giving covert support to opposition groups, stealing natural resources, regime change, CIA coups, assassinations and, of course, the prolongation of structural violence. And even after achieving independence, sometimes after years of liberation struggles, the only development option available has been the capitalist one with its mandated austerity measures that further hastened widespread misery.
The U.S. and its European vassals cannot compete in terms of scale, financing or political will and therefore have nothing to offer but more of the same. Biden’s “Build Back Better” and the EU’s “Global Gateway” are rudderless and lack any domestic support. BRI has no serious competitors. Predatory capitalism is in deep trouble and the window of opportunity to act is closing. As such, the Pentagon may try to sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with all the risks of confrontation between two nuclear powers.
Earlier this year, Air Force General Mike “unrepentant lethality” Minihan predicted a war with China within the next two years. In a memo to those under his command, he stressed preparing “to fight and win inside the first island range, running through Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. And in speech last September for a 16,000 member aerospace convention, Gen. Minihan declared: “Lethality matters most. When you kill your enemy, every part of life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.” It’s not clear to what degree Minihan is an outlier but the Pentagon may try to indirectly sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with of all the risks of a war between two nuclear powers.
This requires fostering public fears and paranoia about China and that explains why the mass media machine’s demonization of China is picking up speed. It seems to be working: A March 20-26, 2023 Pew Research Poll, a large majority (84%) of adult Americans now hold a negative view of China and only 14% a positive view, the lowest share ever recorded. And 4 in 10 describe China as “an enemy of the United States,” up 13 points since last year and a majority say the U.S. and China cannot work together to solve international problems. 75% of young Americans (18-25) have an unfavorable opinion of the country and those with a college degree are more likely to hold an unfavorable view than those with some college or less. It’s my sense that within this fevered smearing of “evil” China is an implicit war-mongering message: Something must be done to stop China’s rise in the world. Whether exposure to relentless Sino-phobia will translate into public support for an actual war should never be assumed. And leaves a very narrow and perhaps only temporary opening for counter-narratives that might preserve BRI as an antidote to Western imperialism while increasing the chances for “a human community with a shared destiny.”
ENDNOTES
1. Xi’s World Vision: A Community of Common Destiny, A Shared Home for Humanity, January 15,2017.
2. Chinese President Xi Jinping, speech at the opening ceremony of the 2018 FOCAC Beijing Summit.
3. W. Gyde Moore, Africa-China Review, August, 2020. China has been involved in Africa since the 1950s. Africa welcomed China’s role as a new source of finance and Beijing generally played a constructive role. Deborah Brautigam provides the comprehensive, definitive and corrective account in, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; also, “Chinese Investors in Africa Have Had ‘Significant and Persistently Positive’ Long-Term Effects Despite Controversy,” Eurasia Review, February 1, 2021; And for a thorough debunking of the “Chinese Debt Trap Myth.”
4. “China’s BRI ‘circle of friends’ expanding,” Helsinki Times, 1/16/2023.
5. Z.Wang, “Understanding the Belt and Road Initiative from the Relational Perspective,” Chinese Journal of International Relations, Vol.3, No.1 (2021). As such the BRI will assist the gradual evolution of the existing system “into a more fair and more inclusive system.” Fu Ying, “Is China’s Choice to Submit to the U.S. or Challenge It?” Huffington Post, May 26, 2015.
6. As found in Nedege Rolland, China’s Vision For A New World Order, NBR Special Report, No. 83. January 2020, p. 40-41.
7. Antonio Guerres, “Remarks at the opening of the Belt and Road Forum,” United Nations, May 14, 2017.
9. Silk Road briefing 2023-05-15 on China’s overseas investments.
10. For more on the subject, see Huiyao Wang, “How China can multilaterialize the BRI,” East Asian Forum, 11 March 2023.
11. “What is going on with China’s Belt and Road Initiative?” 23 May 2023.
12. Ozturk, I (2019) “The belt and road initiative as a hybrid international goal,” Working Papers in East Asian Studies, November 2019.
12. Elliot Wilson, “Not dead yet: The future of China’s belt and road,” Euromoney, September 22, 2022.
13. Yan Xuetang, “How China Can Defeat America,” New York Times, January 12, 2011.
14. “China’s belt and road: implications for the United States,” CFR, Independent Task Force Report No. 79.
15. U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission. 2020 Report to the Congress of the U.S. – Economic and Security Review.
16. It’s no coincidence that the realist take on human nature is congruent with the assumptions underlying capitalism and provide an ideological rationale for its practitioners. For a fact-based refutation, see, Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture and the Brain (New York: Springer Publishing, 2012).
17. Hans Morgenthau, Essays of a Decade: 1960-70. (New York: Praeger, 1970).
18. John Mearsheimer, “Can China Rise Peacefully?” The National Interest, October 25, 2014.
19. Eldridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. For an extensive look at Colby’s family, wealthy connections and the genesis of this book, see, William A. Shoup, “Giving War a Chance” Monthly Review, May 1, 2022.
20. Theodore Tudoroiu, “The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s New International Order,” Munk School, February 14, 2023.
Each time it happens, the world insists: ‘never again’. But the political and moral blindspots that allow these atrocities will persist until the lessons of history are learned
It’s happening again. In Darfur, scene of a genocide that killed 300,000 people and displaced millions 20 years ago, armed militias are on the rampage once more. Now, as then, they are targeting ethnic African tribes, murdering, raping and stealing with impunity. “They” are nomadic, ethnic Arab raiders, the much-feared “devils on horseback” – except now they ride in trucks. They’re called the Janjaweed. And they’re back.
How is it possible such horrors can be repeated? The world condemned the 2003 slaughter. The UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigated. Sudan’s former president, Omar al-Bashir, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity along with his principal allies. The trial of one suspect, known as Ali Kushayb, opened last year. Yet Bashir and the guilty men have evaded justice so far.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with leading Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping, in Beijing on Monday in what was portrayed by both sides as an effort to ease increasingly dangerous tensions between the two nuclear-armed powers. Blinken met with Xi for roughly 35 minutes on Monday after speaking to Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, for several hours earlier in…
This week’s News on China.
• US calls China “aggressive”
• Suez Canal investments
• Multinational pharmaceuticals in China
• History of bicycles in ChinaThis post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
One time she drew flowers on a letter to her ailing mother from her Chinese prison cell. Another time it was pictures of penguins. The drawings were a good sign. Zhang Zhan, the journalist jailed for her COVID-19 reporting from Wuhan, is maybe doing better.
The 39-year-old Shanghai lawyer-turned social media reporter was one of a handful of journalists, bloggers and writers who slipped into Wuhan – the epicenter of the pandemic – in early 2020 as the Chinese censorship juggernaut crushed on-the-ground independent reporting, hastening the spread of the virus that the World Health Organization says has since killed more than 6.9 million people worldwide.
A YouTube screenshot shows Zhang Zhan reporting outside a railway station in Wuhan. The video was uploaded the day before her May 14, 2020 arrest for reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. Zhang’s defiant reporting and activism earned her a four-year prison sentence in December 2020. She has been on several hunger strikes since then and her family and supporters have been worried for her health.
“Her mother thinks that if Zhang is able to draw on the envelopes or letters, it seems to suggest that her mental state has changed,” human rights lawyer Li Dawei said.
Pictures of the letters were posted on Twitter last December by her brother.
They have since been deleted.
- A screenshot of Zhang’s drawings from a now-deleted tweet by her brother
Li told Deutsche Welle that Zhang’s mother, who underwent cancer surgery last year, is also allowed to call her daughter once a month. Little is known, however, of Zhang’s physical condition. At her trial, she was too weak to stand because of her hunger strike.
“She went on a hunger strike to protest against the lockdown and published many articles and video interviews about the life of Wuhan residents under the lockdown,” says Murong Xuecun, a writer who also went to Wuhan to chronicle the COVID outbreak.
Other would-be investigative reporters in the city around the same time were Chen Qiushi, Li Zehua and Fang Bin. After their Chinese social media accounts were blocked, they posted vivid accounts from overflowing hospital emergency rooms and nighttime cremations on YouTube and Twitter to show the extent of the government’s concealment of the truth. Foreign social media platforms are banned in China but accessible with Great Firewall circumvention technologies.
Li Zehua reported from Wuhan at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Li Zehua) Inevitably, these reporters were all swept up in China’s digital social control dragnet. Murong escaped to write a book, “Deadly Quiet City,” and now lives in Australia. He devotes a whole chapter to Zhang, whom he interviewed in Wuhan. She was forcibly quarantined in a Wuhan neighborhood before her arrest. “When her community banned residents from entering and exiting freely, she repeatedly pushed down the fence that closed the road, and was threatened, humiliated, and even beaten for this,” Murong told me.
“She was the only citizen journalist left in Wuhan after Fang Bin, Li Zehua and Chen Qiushi disappeared. The authorities punished her not only for her reporting of the truth, which was also what Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua had done, but also for her courageous resistance and her outspoken criticism of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and the Chinese government.”
It’s perhaps hard for those of us in liberal democracies to understand the courage of these truth-seekers in a Leninist dictatorship like that of President Xi Jinping. China has been among the world’s top jailers of journalists since CPJ began its annual prison census three decades ago.
“We rarely mentioned Xi Jinping in conversation, even in private gatherings, because of the potential for very serious consequences,” Murong explains. “We used a gesture – a thumbs up with the right hand – in place of his name. The situation is even worse now, with few people daring to give interviews to the Western media.”
What struck Murong about the residents of Wuhan was a characteristic of other autocratic countries – even though people suspect they are being manipulated, they believe some of what they are told thanks to pervasive propaganda.
“One of the most important things I learnt from interviewing and writing this book is, people who have lived under the CCP’s rule for a long time often have complex and contradictory views on the government and its policies… They often expressed their support for the CCP but also showed their doubts and fears to its policies.”
However, skeptics who ventured outside with a camera after lockdown did not last long.
Fang Bin was a resident of Wuhan. He uploaded his first video on January 25, 2020 and was detained several times before disappearing into the state security apparatus on February 9, after lamenting the death of whistle-blowing physician Li Wenliang.
Chen Qiushi arrived in Wuhan on January 24, 2020, the day after the city went into lockdown. He managed to keep reporting until February 6. Li Zehua posted his first YouTube video on February 12 then filmed his own arrest 14 days later. Zhang lasted 104 days.
These and other chroniclers who called themselves citizen journalists could not do deep investigative reporting in Wuhan. Truthful official sources were non-existent. Some reporters tried but failed to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the government laboratory which became the focus of speculation abroad of a lab leak rather than animal-to-human transfer as the source of the virus.
But they did tell the stories of Wuhan residents who watched loved ones die in hospital corridors or who were locked down in their own homes. This went against Beijing’s attempts to conceal the scope of the pandemic from the world as it pumped out stories about how its system of government was superior to that of the West in coping with the outbreak.
This approach of denial, obfuscation, and lies proved to be a disaster for the planet.
“This not only led to more infections and more deaths, but also enabled the virus to infect the world more easily and more quickly,” Murong notes. “We all should be aware that it was the CCP regime that turned a manageable incident into a huge disaster of the century. Without its concealment and censorship, there wouldn’t have been so many deaths.”
No one knows the true infection rates or death toll from COVID because authoritarian governments systematically covered up the extent of the pandemic to mask their own incompetence and unpreparedness – something I and co-author Joel Simon covered in our book, “The Infodemic: How censorship and lies made the world sicker and less free.”
We are still living with the results of this censorship. And Murong believes it could happen again. “If there is another disaster like this, the Chinese government will continue to block out the truth and drag the world into the abyss once again,” he said.
Meanwhile, Chen Qiushi is free, having emerged after 20 months of detention in October 2021. He has remained largely silent, living inside China. Li Zehua fled to the United States after his release. Fang Bin was unexpectedly released on May 2 this year. Murong moved to Australia, fearing arrest.Zhang, however, still has more than a year of her sentence to serve for the crime of reporting.
Robert Mahoney
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Robert Mahoney.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
One time she drew flowers on a letter to her ailing mother from her Chinese prison cell. Another time it was pictures of penguins. The drawings were a good sign. Zhang Zhan, the journalist jailed for her COVID-19 reporting from Wuhan, is maybe doing better.
The 39-year-old Shanghai lawyer-turned social media reporter was one of a handful of journalists, bloggers and writers who slipped into Wuhan – the epicenter of the pandemic – in early 2020 as the Chinese censorship juggernaut crushed on-the-ground independent reporting, hastening the spread of the virus that the World Health Organization says has since killed more than 6.9 million people worldwide.
A YouTube screenshot shows Zhang Zhan reporting outside a railway station in Wuhan. The video was uploaded the day before her May 14, 2020 arrest for reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic. Zhang’s defiant reporting and activism earned her a four-year prison sentence in December 2020. She has been on several hunger strikes since then and her family and supporters have been worried for her health.
“Her mother thinks that if Zhang is able to draw on the envelopes or letters, it seems to suggest that her mental state has changed,” human rights lawyer Li Dawei said.
Pictures of the letters were posted on Twitter last December by her brother.
They have since been deleted.
- A screenshot of Zhang’s drawings from a now-deleted tweet by her brother
Li told Deutsche Welle that Zhang’s mother, who underwent cancer surgery last year, is also allowed to call her daughter once a month. Little is known, however, of Zhang’s physical condition. At her trial, she was too weak to stand because of her hunger strike.
“She went on a hunger strike to protest against the lockdown and published many articles and video interviews about the life of Wuhan residents under the lockdown,” says Murong Xuecun, a writer who also went to Wuhan to chronicle the COVID outbreak.
Other would-be investigative reporters in the city around the same time were Chen Qiushi, Li Zehua and Fang Bin. After their Chinese social media accounts were blocked, they posted vivid accounts from overflowing hospital emergency rooms and nighttime cremations on YouTube and Twitter to show the extent of the government’s concealment of the truth. Foreign social media platforms are banned in China but accessible with Great Firewall circumvention technologies.
Li Zehua reported from Wuhan at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo: Li Zehua) Inevitably, these reporters were all swept up in China’s digital social control dragnet. Murong escaped to write a book, “Deadly Quiet City,” and now lives in Australia. He devotes a whole chapter to Zhang, whom he interviewed in Wuhan. She was forcibly quarantined in a Wuhan neighborhood before her arrest. “When her community banned residents from entering and exiting freely, she repeatedly pushed down the fence that closed the road, and was threatened, humiliated, and even beaten for this,” Murong told me.
“She was the only citizen journalist left in Wuhan after Fang Bin, Li Zehua and Chen Qiushi disappeared. The authorities punished her not only for her reporting of the truth, which was also what Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua had done, but also for her courageous resistance and her outspoken criticism of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and the Chinese government.”
It’s perhaps hard for those of us in liberal democracies to understand the courage of these truth-seekers in a Leninist dictatorship like that of President Xi Jinping. China has been among the world’s top jailers of journalists since CPJ began its annual prison census three decades ago.
“We rarely mentioned Xi Jinping in conversation, even in private gatherings, because of the potential for very serious consequences,” Murong explains. “We used a gesture – a thumbs up with the right hand – in place of his name. The situation is even worse now, with few people daring to give interviews to the Western media.”
What struck Murong about the residents of Wuhan was a characteristic of other autocratic countries – even though people suspect they are being manipulated, they believe some of what they are told thanks to pervasive propaganda.
“One of the most important things I learnt from interviewing and writing this book is, people who have lived under the CCP’s rule for a long time often have complex and contradictory views on the government and its policies… They often expressed their support for the CCP but also showed their doubts and fears to its policies.”
However, skeptics who ventured outside with a camera after lockdown did not last long.
Fang Bin was a resident of Wuhan. He uploaded his first video on January 25, 2020 and was detained several times before disappearing into the state security apparatus on February 9, after lamenting the death of whistle-blowing physician Li Wenliang.
Chen Qiushi arrived in Wuhan on January 24, 2020, the day after the city went into lockdown. He managed to keep reporting until February 6. Li Zehua posted his first YouTube video on February 12 then filmed his own arrest 14 days later. Zhang lasted 104 days.
These and other chroniclers who called themselves citizen journalists could not do deep investigative reporting in Wuhan. Truthful official sources were non-existent. Some reporters tried but failed to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the government laboratory which became the focus of speculation abroad of a lab leak rather than animal-to-human transfer as the source of the virus.
But they did tell the stories of Wuhan residents who watched loved ones die in hospital corridors or who were locked down in their own homes. This went against Beijing’s attempts to conceal the scope of the pandemic from the world as it pumped out stories about how its system of government was superior to that of the West in coping with the outbreak.
This approach of denial, obfuscation, and lies proved to be a disaster for the planet.
“This not only led to more infections and more deaths, but also enabled the virus to infect the world more easily and more quickly,” Murong notes. “We all should be aware that it was the CCP regime that turned a manageable incident into a huge disaster of the century. Without its concealment and censorship, there wouldn’t have been so many deaths.”
No one knows the true infection rates or death toll from COVID because authoritarian governments systematically covered up the extent of the pandemic to mask their own incompetence and unpreparedness – something I and co-author Joel Simon covered in our book, “The Infodemic: How censorship and lies made the world sicker and less free.”
We are still living with the results of this censorship. And Murong believes it could happen again. “If there is another disaster like this, the Chinese government will continue to block out the truth and drag the world into the abyss once again,” he said.
Meanwhile, Chen Qiushi is free, having emerged after 20 months of detention in October 2021. He has remained largely silent, living inside China. Li Zehua fled to the United States after his release. Fang Bin was unexpectedly released on May 2 this year. Murong moved to Australia, fearing arrest.Zhang, however, still has more than a year of her sentence to serve for the crime of reporting.
Robert Mahoney
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Robert Mahoney.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Experts point to crackdown on national security and legal system that encourages guilty pleas
Chinese courts prosecuted 8.3 million people in the five years to 2022, a 12% increase on the previous period. There was also a nearly 20% increase in the number of protests against court rulings.
The figures released by the supreme people’s procuratorate (SPP) in March give a glimpse of how China’s notoriously opaque justice system has operated in recent years, amid a tightening domestic security environment.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
French leader sees Beijing as possible ‘gamechanger’ and will also discuss European trade on three-day visit
Emmanuel Macron has arrived in China for a three-day state visit during which he hopes to dissuade Xi Jinping from supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while also developing European trade ties with Beijing.
Shortly after arriving in the Chinese capital, Macron said he wanted to push back against the idea that there was an “inescapable spiral of mounting tensions” between China and the west.
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
