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Category: Xi Jinping

  • Historic Meeting between Xi and Putin

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

    • Historic meeting between Xi and Putin
    • Hong Kong announces industrial policy for the first time
    • Baidu unveiled its version of ChatGPT

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Historic Meeting between Xi and Putin

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

    • Historic meeting between Xi and Putin
    • Hong Kong announces industrial policy for the first time
    • Baidu unveiled its version of ChatGPT

    The post Historic Meeting between Xi and Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Drums Of War With China Are Beating Much Louder Now

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Comments from both Washington and Beijing have suddenly become much more pointed and aggressive in recent days, with talk about hot war now being discussed as not just a real possibility but in many cases as a probability. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant recent developments.

    Beijing comments on US encirclement

    The Chinese government has finally broken from its usual restrained commentary on the way the empire has been aggressively encircling the PRC with war machinery in ways that Washington would never permit itself to be encircled and waging economic warfare that it itself would never tolerate.

    “Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” President Xi Jinping said in a speech last week.

    China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang followed up on Xi’s comments the next day with a warning of “conflict and confrontation” should US aggressions and encirclement continue.

    “If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there surely will be conflict and confrontation,” he said, adding, “Who will bear the catastrophic consequences? Such competition is a reckless gamble with the stakes being the fundamental interests of the two peoples and even the future of humanity.”

    One of the most hilarious empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its number one rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively. The US is very plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is very clearly reacting defensively to those aggressions.

    These comments come not long after PRC Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning issued a stern warning to the US to “stop walking on the edge, stop using the salami tactics, stop pushing the envelope, and stop sowing confusion and trying to mislead the world on Taiwan,” calling the Taiwan issue “the first red line that must not be crossed” in US-China relations. As we’ve discussed previously, these increasingly frequent “red line” warnings are very similar to the ones that were being issued with greater and greater urgency by Moscow before US brinkmanship provoked the invasion of Ukraine.

    Committing to war with China over Taiwan

    The official head of the US intelligence cartel made some comments before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday which appear to have put the final nail in the coffin of the question of Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” on whether the US would go to war with China in defense of Taiwan.

    Asked by Congressman Chris Stewart about President Biden’s increasingly explicit assertions that the US would go to war with China over Taiwan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines asserted that, despite the White House’s repeated walk-backs of those claims, it is clear to China that this is in fact Washington’s actual policy on the Taiwan question.

    “In this particular case, I think it is clear to the Chinese what our position is based on the president’s comments,” Haines said.

    US officials are talking about war with China like it’s a foregone conclusion

    There’s been a marked spike in rhetoric from US officials about war with China being something that’s inevitably going to happen, or even something that is already underway.

    At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Senator John Cornyn expressed concern that difficulties in replenishing weapons stocks from the proxy war in Ukraine indicate that the US may not yet be “ready” to fight a “shooting war in Asia.”

    “I think the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the weakness of our industrial base when it comes to replenishing the weapons that we are supplying to the Ukrainians,” said Cornyn. “In World War Two we became the Arsenal of Democracy and saved Britain and Europe, but if we got involved in a shooting war in Asia, we would not be ready.”

    “I know what war looks like — we’re at war,” Congressman Tony Gonzales said at a House Homeland Security hearing on Thursday.

    “I mean, this is a war, maybe a Cold War. But this is a war with China,” Gonzales added, citing things like Chinese aircraft intercepting US aircraft on China’s border and China “invading Taiwan via their cyberspace” as evidence that the US is “at war” with the PRC.

    A direct war between nuclear powers

    The US war machine is making it more and more explicit that its position on Taiwan is very different from its position on Ukraine, in that it will directly commit American troops to fighting a hot war with China over Taiwan. This is especially concerning because US military encirclement and provocations with Taiwan are making that war more and more likely, in the same way western provocations made the war in Ukraine more likely.

    “Sending more weapons to Taiwan isn’t ‘deterrence,’ it’s a provocation,” tweeted Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp, who’s been documenting US provocations in Taiwan more thoroughly than anyone else I know of. “It’s clear now that increasing US military support for Taiwan will make a Chinese attack more likely. Anyone who is telling you otherwise is wrong or is purposely deceiving you.”

    Indeed, University College Cork professor Geoffrey Roberts has argued that Putin chose to wage a “preventative war” on Ukraine with the calculation that the way the west was turning it into a major military power meant it needed to be confronted early before it became a major threat. The exact same thing could easily be happening with Taiwan.

    “China is the big one,” DeCamp also tweeted recently. “Both sides are talking as if war is inevitable. Not a proxy war, a direct war between two nuclear powers. It can’t happen. The US needs to change course and stop its military buildup in the Asia Pacific, or we’re doomed.”

    Couldn’t have put it better myself. This must be opposed, and opposed forcefully. Now more than ever, humanity appears to be on track toward the unfolding of a chain of events that leads to the worst thing that could possibly happen.

    Some sanity from the mainstream media

    To close with some good news, the imperial media are apparently not fully aligned with the war-with-China agenda (at least not yet). All the insane hawkishness mentioned above appears to have scared some sense into some influential voices in the mainstream media, with surprisingly anti-war arguments emerging in the last few days.

    In an article titled “Who Benefits From Confrontation With China?“, none other than the New York Times editorial board taps the brakes with a wildly US-biased but still-welcome argument that “America’s increasingly confrontational posture toward China is a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy that warrants greater scrutiny and debate.”

    “Americans’ interests are best served by emphasizing competition with China while minimizing confrontation. Glib invocations of the Cold War are misguided,” NYT argues.

    In a Washington Post article titled “Democrats and Republicans agree on China. That’s a problem.“, Max Boot (yes, that Max Boot!) argues that the bipartisan foreign policy consensus on escalations against Beijing are a sign that something dangerously ill-advised is in the works.

    “The problem today isn’t that Americans are insufficiently concerned about the rise of China. The problem is that they are prey to hysteria and alarmism that could lead the United States into a needless nuclear war,” Boot writes.

    CNN’s Fareed Zakaria echoes Boot’s criticism of the Washington foreign policy orthodoxy, saying that “Washington has embraced a wide-ranging consensus on China that has turned into a classic example of groupthink.”

    A new Financial Times piece titled “China is right about US containment” acknowledges that Xi Jinping’s aforementioned comments about encirclement and suppression are “not technically wrong,” and says that betting on China’s submission in the new cold war “is not a strategy.”

    In a Daily Beast article titled “What the U.S. National Security Community Is Getting Wrong About China,” David Rothkopf argues that “We have passed the crossroads and we are already, unfortunately, dangerously, well on our way down the wrong path” with US-China relations.

    It remains to be seen if these sentiments will be sustained in the mainstream media. Even if they are, they may just be the liberal media counterpart to the way some right wingers in the mainstream media like Tucker Carlson are permitted to object to US foreign policy toward Russia as long as they continue to support brinkmanship with China (all the outlets I just mentioned have been enthusiastic supporters of US proxy warfare in Ukraine, after all). This may be yet another instance of the way the empire gets the mainstream herd arguing over how imperial agendas of global domination should be enacted, rather than if they should.

    Time will tell whether any sanity erupts from the muck of the empire regarding the possibility of igniting the most horrific war imaginable. As always with such things, I remain cautiously pessimistic.

    ______________

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • The US and China Edge Closer to War as Tensions Rise Over Taiwan

    Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines is calling China the “most consequential threat” to U.S. national security. Meanwhile, the Chinese parliament has unanimously voted to give Xi Jinping a third five-year term as president. On Monday, Xi directly accused the United States of suppressing China’s development, stating, “Western countries — led by the U.S. — have implemented all-round…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Blinken Cancels Trip to Beijing After US Shoots Down Suspected Spy Balloon

    China has accused the United States of overreacting after President Joe Biden ordered a suspected spy balloon shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Sunday. China maintains the balloon, first spotted over U.S. airspace last week, was a civilian aircraft blown off course. The U.S. and China have been conducting surveillance on each other for years using spy satellites, hacking and other means.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • China’s Highly Effective Global Dominance Is Intensifying the Death Economy



    After publishing the first two editions of the Confessions of an Economic Hit Man trilogy, I was invited to speak at global summits. I met with heads of state and their top advisors from many countries. Two particularly significant venues were conferences in the summer of 2017 in Russia and Kazakhstan, where I joined an array of speakers that included major corporate CEOs, government and NGO heads such as UN Secretary-General António Guterres, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and (before he invaded Ukraine) Russian President Vladimir Putin. I was asked to speak on the need to end an unsustainable economic system that’s consuming and polluting itself into extinction — a Death Economy — and replace it with a regenerative one that was beginning to evolve — a Life Economy.

    When I left for that trip, I felt encouraged. But something else happened.

    In talking with leaders who had been involved in the development of China’s New Silk Road (officially, the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI), I learned that an innovative, potent, and dangerous strategy was being implemented by China’s economic hit men (EHMs). It began to seem impossible to stop a country that in a few decades had pulled itself from the ashes of Mao’s Cultural Revolution to become a dominant world power and a major contributor to the Death Economy.

    During my time as an economic hit man in the 1970s, I learned that two of the most important tools of the US EHM strategy are:

    1. Divide and conquer, and
    2. Neoliberal economics.

    US EHMs maintain that the world is divided into the good guys (America and its allies) and the bad guys (the Soviet Union/Russia, China, and other Communist nations), and we try to convince people around the world that if they don’t accept neoliberal economics they’ll be doomed to remain “undeveloped” and impoverished forever.

    Neoliberal policies include austerity programs that cut taxes for the rich and wages and social services for everyone else, reduce government regulations, and privatize public-sector businesses and sell them to foreign (US) investors — all of which support “free” markets that favor transnational corporations. Neoliberal advocates promote the perception that money will “trickle down” from the corporations and elites to the rest of the population. However, in truth, these policies almost always cause greater inequality.

    Although the US EHM strategy has been successful in the short term at helping corporations control resources and markets in many countries, its failures have become increasingly obvious. America’s wars in the Middle East (while neglecting much of the rest of the world), the tendency of one Washington administration to break agreements made by previous ones, the inability of Republicans and Democrats to compromise, the wanton destruction of environments, and the exploitation of resources create doubts and often cause resentment.

    China has been quick to take advantage.

    Xi Jinping became president of China in 2013 and immediately began campaigning in Africa and Latin America. He and his EHMs emphasized that by rejecting neoliberalism and developing its own model, China had accomplished the seemingly impossible. It had experienced an average annual economic growth rate of nearly 10 percent for three decades and elevated more than 700 million people out of extreme poverty. No other country had ever done anything even remotely approaching this. China presented itself as a model for rapid economic success at home and it made major modifications to the EHM strategy abroad.

    In addition to rejecting neoliberalism, China promoted the perception that it was ending the divide-and-conquer tactic. The New Silk Road was cast as a vehicle for uniting the world in a trading network that, it claimed, would end global poverty. Latin American and African countries were told that, through Chinese-built ports, highways, and railroads, they would be connected to countries on every continent. This was a significant departure from the bilateralism of colonial powers and the US EHM strategy.

    Whatever one thinks of China, whatever its real intent, and despite recent setbacks, it’s impossible not to recognize that China’s domestic successes and its modifications to the EHM strategy impress much of the world.

    However, there’s a downside. The New Silk Road may be uniting countries that were once divided, but it’s doing so under China’s autocratic government — one that suppresses self-evaluation and criticism. Recent events have reminded the world about the dangers of such a government.

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine offers an example of how a tyrannical administration can suddenly alter the course of history.

    It’s important to keep in mind that rhetoric around China’s modifications to the EHM strategy disguises the fact that China is using the same basic tactics as those employed by the US. Regardless of who implements this strategy, it’s exploiting resources, expanding inequality, burying countries in debt, harming all but a few elites, causing climate change, and worsening other crises that threaten our planet. In other words, it’s promoting a Death Economy that’s killing us.

    The EHM strategy, whether implemented by the US or China, must end. It’s time to replace the Death Economy based on short-term profits for the few with a Life Economy that’s based on long-term benefits for all people and nature.

    Taking action to usher in a Life Economy requires:

    1. Promoting economic activities that pay people to clean up pollution, regenerate destroyed environments, recycle, and develop technologies that do not ravage the planet;
    2. Supporting businesses that do the above. As consumers, workers, owners and/or managers, each of us can promote the Life Economy;
    3. Recognizing that all people have the same needs of clean air and water, productive soils, good nutrition, adequate housing, community, and love. Despite the efforts of governments to convince us otherwise, there’s no “them” and “us;” we’re all in this together;
    4. Ignoring and, when appropriate, denouncing propaganda and conspiracy theories aimed at dividing us from other countries, races, and cultures; and
    5. Realizing that the enemy is not another country, but rather the perceptions, actions, and institutions that support an EHM strategy and a Death Economy.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • The Road to De-Dollarisation Will Run through Saudi Arabia

    Balqis Al Rashed (Saudi Arabia), Cities of Salt, 2017.

    Balqis Al Rashed (Saudi Arabia), Cities of Salt, 2017.

    On 9 December, China’s President Xi Jinping met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to discuss deepening ties between the Gulf countries and China. At the top of the agenda was increased trade between China and the GCC, with the former pledging to ‘import crude oil in a consistent manner and in large quantities from the GCC’ as well to increase imports of natural gas. In 1993, China became a net importer of oil, surpassing the United States as the largest importer of crude oil by 2017. Half of that oil comes from the Arabian Peninsula, and more than a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s oil exports go to China. Despite being a major importer of oil, China has reduced its carbon emissions.

    A few days before he arrived in Riyadh, Xi published an article in al-Riyadh that announced greater strategic and commercial partnerships with the region, including ‘cooperation in high-tech sectors including 5G communications, new energy, space, and digital economy’. Saudi Arabia and China signed commercial deals worth $30 billion, including in areas that would strengthen the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Xi’s visit to Riyadh is only his second overseas trip since the COVID-19 pandemic; his first was to Central Asia for the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in September, where the nine member states (which represent 40% of the world’s population) agreed to increase trade with each other using their local currencies.

    Manal Al Dowayan, (Saudi Arabia) I Am a Petroleum Engineer, 2005–07.

    Manal Al Dowayan, (Saudi Arabia) I Am a Petroleum Engineer, 2005–07.

    At this first China-GCC summit, Xi urged the Gulf monarchs to ‘make full use of the Shanghai Petrol and Gas Exchange as a platform to conduct oil and gas sales using Chinese currency’. Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia suggested that it might accept Chinese yuan rather than US dollars for the oil it sells to China. While no formal announcement was made at the GCC summit nor in the joint statement issued by China and Saudi Arabia, indications abound that these two countries will move closer toward using the Chinese yuan to denominate their trade. However, they will do so slowly, as they both remain exposed to the US economy (China, for instance, holds just under $1 trillion in US Treasury bonds).

    Talk of conducting China-Saudi trade in yuan has raised eyebrows in the United States, which for fifty years has relied on the Saudis to stabilise the dollar. In 1971, the US government withdrew the dollar from the gold standard and began to rely on central banks around the world to hold monetary reserves in US Treasury securities and other US financial assets. When oil prices skyrocketed in 1973, the US government decided to create a system of dollar seigniorage through Saudi oil profits. In 1974, US Treasury Secretary William Simon – fresh off the trading desk at the investment bank Salomon Brothers – arrived in Riyadh with instructions from US President Richard Nixon to have a serious conversation with the Saudi oil minister, Ahmed Zaki Yamani.

    Simon proposed that the US purchase large amounts of Saudi oil in dollars and that the Saudis use these dollars to buy US Treasury bonds and weaponry and invest in US banks as a way to recycle vast Saudi oil profits. And so the petrodollar was born, which anchored the new dollar-denominated world trade and investment system. If the Saudis even hinted towards withdrawing this arrangement, which would take at least a decade to implement, it would seriously challenge the monetary privilege afforded to the US. As Gal Luft, co-director of the Institute for Analysis of Global Security, told The Wall Street Journal, ‘The oil market, and by extension the entire global commodities market, is the insurance policy of the status of the dollar as reserve currency. If that block is taken out of the wall, the wall will begin to collapse’.

    Ghada Al Rabea (Saudi Arabia), Al-Sahbajiea (‘Friendship’), 2016.

    Ghada Al Rabea (Saudi Arabia), Al-Sahbajiea (‘Friendship’), 2016.

    The petrodollar system received two serious sequential blows.

    First, the 2007–08 financial crisis suggested that the Western banking system is not as stable as imagined. Many countries, including large developing nations, hurried to find other procedures for trade and investment. The establishment of BRICS by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa is an illustration of this urgency to ‘discuss the parameters for a new financial system’. A series of experiments have been conducted by BRICS countries, such as the creation of a BRICS payment system.

    Second, as part of its hybrid war, the US has used its dollar power to sanction over 30 countries. Many of these countries, from Iran to Venezuela, have sought alternatives to the US-dominated financial system to conduct normal commerce. When the US began to sanction Russia in 2014 and deepen its trade war against China in 2018, the two powers accelerated upon processes of dollar-free trade that other sanctioned states had already begun forming out of necessity. At that time, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin called for the de-dollarisation of the oil trade. Moscow began to hurriedly reduce its dollar holdings and maintain its assets in gold and other currencies. In 2015, 90% of bilateral trade between China and Russia was conducted in dollars, but by 2020 it fell below 50%. When Western countries froze Russian central bank reserves held in their banks, this was tantamount to ‘crossing the Rubicon’, as economist Adam Tooze wrote. ‘It brings conflict in the heart of the international monetary system. If the central bank reserves of a G20 member entrusted to the accounts of another G20 central bank are not sacrosanct, nothing in the financial world is. We are at financial war’.

    Abdulhalim Radwi (Saudi Arabia), Creation, 1989.

    Abdulhalim Radwi (Saudi Arabia), Creation, 1989.

    BRICS and sanctioned countries have begun to build new institutions that could circumvent their reliance on the dollar. Thus far, banks and governments have relied upon the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) network, which is run through the US Federal Reserve’s Clearing House Interbank Payment Services and its Fedwire Funds Service. Countries under unilateral US sanctions – such as Iran and Russia – were cut off from the SWIFT system, which connects 11,000 financial institutions across the globe. After the 2014 US sanctions, Russia created the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), which is mainly designed for domestic users but has attracted central banks from Central Asia, China, India, and Iran. In 2015, China created the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), run by the People’s Bank of China, which is gradually being used by other central banks.

    Alongside these developments by Russia and China are a range of other options, such as payment networks rooted in new advances in financial technology (fintech) and central bank digital currencies. Although Visa and Mastercard are the largest companies in the industry, they face new rivals in China’s UnionPay and Russia’s Mir, as well as China’s private retail mechanisms such as Alipay and WeChat Pay. About half of the countries in the world are experimenting with forms of central bank digital currencies, with the digital yuan (e-CNY) as one of the more prominent monetary platforms that has already begun to side-line the dollar in the Digital Silk Roads established alongside the BRI.

    As part of their concern over ‘currency power’, many countries in the Global South are eager to develop non-dollar trade and investment systems. Brazil’s new minister of finance from 1 January 2023, Fernando Haddad, has championed the creation of a South American digital currency called the sur (meaning ‘south’ in Spanish) in order to create stability in interregional trade and to establish ‘monetary sovereignty’. The sur would build upon a mechanism already used by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay called the Local Currency Payment System or SML.

    Sarah Mohanna Al Abdali (Saudi Arabia), Kul Yoghani Ala Laylah (‘Each to Their Own’), 2017.

    Sarah Mohanna Al Abdali (Saudi Arabia), Kul Yoghani Ala Laylah (‘Each to Their Own’), 2017.

    A March 2022 report by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) entitled ‘The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance’ showed that ‘the share of reserves held in US dollars by central banks dropped by 12 percentage points since the turn of the century, from 71 percent in 1999 to 59 percent in 2021’. The data shows that central bank reserve managers are diversifying their portfolios with Chinese renminbi (which accounts for a quarter of the shift) and to non-traditional reserve currencies (such as Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and Singaporean dollars, Danish and Norwegian kroner, Swedish krona, Swiss francs, and the Korean won). ‘If dollar dominance comes to an end’, concludes the IMF, ‘then the greenback could be felled not by the dollar’s main rivals but by a broad group of alternative currencies’.

    Global currency exchange exhibits aspects of a network-effect monopoly. Historically, a universal medium emerged to increase efficiency and reduce risk, rather than a system in which each country trades with others using different currencies. For years, gold was the standard.

    Any singular universal mechanism is hard to displace without force of some kind. For now, the US dollar remains the major global currency, accounting for just under 60% of official foreign exchange reserves. Under the prevailing conditions of the capitalist system, China would have to allow for the full convertibility of the yuan, end capital controls, and liberalise its financial markets in order for its currency to replace the dollar as the global currency. These are unlikely options, which means that there will be no imminent dethroning of dollar hegemony, and talk of a ‘petroyuan’ is premature.

    Ramses Younane (Egypt), Untitled, 1939.

    Ramses Younane (Egypt), Untitled, 1939.

    In 2004, the Chinese government and the GCC initiated talks over a Free Trade Agreement. The agreement, which stalled in 2009 due to tensions between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is now back on the table as the Gulf finds itself drawn into the BRI. In 1973, the Saudis told the US that they wanted ‘to find ways to usefully invest the proceeds [of oil sales] in their own industrial diversification, and other investments that contributed something to their national future’. No real diversification was possible under the conditions of the petrodollar regime. Now, with the end of carbon as a possibility, the Gulf Arabs are eager for diversification, as exemplified by Saudi Vision 2030, which has been integrated into the BRI. China has three advantages which aid this diversification that the US does not: a complete industrial system, a new type of productive force (immense-scale infrastructure project management and development), and a vast growing consumer market.

    Western media has been near silent on the region’s humiliating loss of economic prestige and dominance during Xi’s trip to Riyadh. China can now simultaneously navigate complex relations with Iran, the GCC, Russia, and Arab League states. Furthermore, the West cannot ignore the SCO’s expansion into West Asia and North Africa. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Qatar are either affiliated or in discussions with the SCO, whose role is evolving.

    Five months ago, US President Joe Biden visited Riyadh with far less pomp and ceremony – and certainly with less on the table to strengthen weakened relations between the US and Saudi Arabia. When asked about Xi’s trip to Riyadh, the US State Department’s spokesperson said, ‘We are not telling countries around the world to choose between the United States and the PRC’. That statement itself is perhaps a sign of weakness.

    The post The Road to De-Dollarisation Will Run through Saudi Arabia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US-China Climate Cooperation Could Reduce Tensions and Military Expenditures

    As President Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping arrived on the resort island of Bali, Indonesia, for their November 14th “summit,” relations between their two countries were on a hair-raising downward spiral, with tensions over Taiwan nearing the boiling point. Diplomats hoped, at best, for a modest reduction in tensions, which, to the relief of many, did occur. No policy breakthroughs were expected, however, and none were achieved. In one vital area, though, there was at least a glimmer of hope: the planet’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters agreed to resume their languishing negotiations on joint efforts to overcome the climate crisis.

    These talks have been an on-again, off-again proposition since President Barack Obama initiated them before the Paris climate summit of December 2015, at which delegates were to vote on a landmark measure to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (the maximum amount scientists believe this planet can absorb without catastrophic consequences). The U.S.-Chinese consultations continued after the adoption of the Paris climate accord, but were suspended in 2017 by that climate-change-denying president Donald Trump. They were relaunched by President Biden in 2021, only to be suspended again by an angry Chinese leadership in retaliation for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August 2 visit to Taiwan, viewed in Beijing as a show of support for pro-independence forces on that island. But thanks to Biden’s intense lobbying in Bali, President Xi agreed to turn the interactive switch back on.

    Behind that modest gesture there lies a far more momentous question: What if the two countries moved beyond simply talking and started working together to champion the radical lowering of global carbon emissions? What miracles might then be envisioned? To help find answers to that momentous question means revisiting the recent history of the U.S.-Chinese climate collaboration.

    The Promise of Collaboration

    In November 2014, based on extensive diplomatic groundwork, Presidents Obama and Xi met in Beijing and signed a statement pledging joint action to ensure the success of the forthcoming Paris summit. “The United States of America and the People’s Republic of China have a critical role to play in combating global climate change,” they affirmed. “The seriousness of the challenge calls upon the two sides to work constructively together for the common good.”

    Obama then ordered Secretary of State John Kerry to collaborate with Chinese officials in persuading other attendees at that summit — officially, the 21st Conference of the Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP21 — to agree on a firm commitment to honor the 1.5-degree limit. That joint effort, many observers believe, was instrumental in persuading reluctant participants like India and Russia to sign the Paris climate agreement.

    “With our historic joint announcement with China last year,” Obama declared at that summit’s concluding session, “we showed it was possible to bridge the old divides… that had stymied global progress for so long. That accomplishment encouraged dozens and dozens of other nations to set their own ambitious climate targets.”

    Obama also pointed out that any significant global progress along that path was dependent on continued cooperation between the two countries. “No nation, not even one as powerful as ours, can solve this challenge alone.”

    Trump and the Perils of Non-Cooperation

    That era of cooperation didn’t last long. Donald Trump, an ardent fan of fossil fuels, made no secret of his aversion to the Paris climate accord. He signaled his intent to exit from the agreement soon after taking office. “It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, PA, along with many, many other locations within our great country, before Paris, France,” he said ominously in 2017 when announcing his decision.

    With the U.S. absent from the scene, progress in implementing the Paris Agreement slowed to a crawl. Many countries that had been pressed by the U.S. and China to agree to ambitious emissions-reduction schedules began to opt out of those commitments in sync with Trump’s America. China, too, the greatest greenhouse gas emitter of this moment and the leading user of that dirtiest of fossil fuels, coal, felt far less pressure to honor its commitment, even on a rapidly heating planet.

    No one knows what would have happened had Trump not been elected and those U.S.-China talks not been suspended, but in the absence of such collaboration, there was a steady rise in carbon emissions and temperatures across the planet. According to CO.2.Earth, emissions grew from 35.5 billion metric tons in 2016 to 36.4 billion tons in 2021, a 2.5% increase. Since such emissions are the leading contributor to the greenhouse-gas effect responsible for global warming, it should be no surprise that the past seven years have also proven the hottest on record, with much of the world experiencing record-breaking heatwaves, forest fires, droughts, and crop failures. We can be fairly certain, moreover, that in the absence of renewed U.S.-China climate cooperation, such disasters will become ever more frequent and severe.

    On Again, Off Again

    Overcoming this fearsome trend was one of Joe Biden’s principal campaign promises and, against strong Republican opposition, he has indeed endeavored to undo at least some of the damage wrought by Trump. It was symbolic indeed that he rejoined the Paris climate accord on his first day in office and ordered his cabinet to accelerate the government’s transition to clean energy. In August, he achieved a significant breakthrough when Congress approved the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which provides $369 billion in loans, grants, and tax credits for green-energy initiatives.

    Biden also sought to reinvigorate Washington’s global-warming diplomacy and the stalled talks with China, naming John Kerry as his special envoy for climate action. Kerry, in turn, reestablished ties with his Chinese colleagues from his time as secretary of state. At last year’s COP26 gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, he persuaded them to join the U.S. in approving the “Glasgow Declaration,” a commitment to step up efforts to mitigate climate change.

    However, in so many ways, Joe Biden and his foreign policy team are still caught up in the Cold War era and his administration has generally taken a far more antagonistic approach to China than Obama. Not surprisingly, then, the progress Kerry achieved with his Chinese counterparts at Glasgow largely evaporated as tensions over Taiwan only grew more heated. Biden was, for instance, the first president in memory to claim — four times — that U.S. military forces would defend that island in a crisis, were it to be attacked by China, essentially tossing aside Washington’s longstanding position of “strategic ambiguity” on the Taiwan question. In response, China’s leaders became ever more strident in claiming that the island belonged to them.

    When Nancy Pelosi made that Taiwan visit in early August, the Chinese responded by firing ballistic missiles into the waters around the island and, in a fit of anger, terminated those bilateral climate-change talks. Now, thanks to Biden’s entreaties in Bali, the door seems again open for the two countries to collaborate on limiting global greenhouse gas emissions. At a moment of ever more devastating evidence of planetary heating, from a megadrought in the U.S. to “extreme heat” in China, the question is: What might any meaningful new collaborative effort involve?

    Reasserting the Climate’s Centrality

    In 2015, few of those in power doubted the overarching threat posed by climate change or the need to bring international diplomacy to bear to help overcome it. In Paris, Obama declared that “the growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.” What should give us hope, he continued, “is the fact that our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it.”

    Since then, all too sadly, other challenges, including the growth of Cold War-style tensions with China, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, have come to “define the contours” of this century. In 2022, even as the results of the overheating of the planet become ever more obvious, few world leaders would contend that “it is within our power” to overcome the climate peril. So, the first (and perhaps most valuable) outcome of any renewed U.S.-China climate cooperation might simply be to place climate change at the top of the world’s agenda again and provide evidence that the major powers, working together, can successfully tackle the issue.

    Such an effort might, for instance, start with a Washington-Beijing “climate summit,” presided over by presidents Biden and Xi and attended by high-level delegations from around the world. American and Chinese scientists could offer the latest bad news on the likely future trajectory of global warming, while identifying real-world goals to significantly reduce fossil-fuel use. This might, in turn, lead to the formation of multilateral working groups, hosted by U.S. and Chinese agencies and institutions, to meet regularly and implement the most promising strategies for halting the onrushing disaster.

    Following the example set by Obama and Xi at COP21 in Paris, Biden and Xi would agree to play a pivotal role in the next Conference of the Parties, COP28, scheduled for December 2023 in the United Arab Emirates. Following the inconclusive outcome of COP27, recently convened at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, strong leadership will be required to ensure something significantly better at COP28. Among the goals those two leaders would need to pursue, the top priority should be the full implementation of the 2015 Paris accord with its commitment to a 1.5-degree maximum temperature increase, followed by a far greater effort by the wealthy nations to assist developing countries suffering from its effects.

    There’s no way, however, that China and the U.S. will be able to exert a significant international influence on climate efforts if both countries — the former the leading emitter of greenhouse gasses at this moment and the latter the historic leader — don’t take far greater initiatives to lower their carbon emissions and shift to renewable sources of energy. The Inflation Reduction Act will indeed allow the White House to advance many new initiatives in this direction, while China is moving more swiftly than any other country to install added supplies of wind and solar energy. Nevertheless, both countries continue to rely on fossil fuels for a substantial share of their energy — China, for instance, remains the greatest user of coal, burning more of it than the rest of the world combined — and so both will need to agree on even more aggressive moves to reduce their carbon emissions if they hope to persuade other nations to do the same.

    The Sino-American Fund for Clean Energy Transitions

    In a better world, next on my list of possible outcomes from a reinvigorated U.S.-Chinese relationship would be joint efforts to help finance the global transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. Although the cost of deploying renewables, especially wind and solar energy, has fallen dramatically in recent years, it remains substantial even for wealthy countries. For many developing nations, it remains an unaffordable option. This emerged as a major issue at COP27 in Egypt, where representatives from the Global South complained that the wealthy countries largely responsible for the overheating of the planet weren’t doing faintly enough (or, in many cases, anything), despite prior promises, to help them shoulder the costs of the increasingly devastating effects of climate change and the future greening of their countries.

    Many of these complaints revolved around the Green Climate Fund, established at COP16 in Cancún. The developed countries agreed to provide $100 billion annually to that fund by 2020 to help developing nations bear the costs of transitioning to renewable energy. Although that amount is now widely viewed as wildly insufficient for such a transition — “all of the evidence suggests that we need trillions, not billions,” observed Baysa Naran, a manager at the research center Climate Policy Initiative — the Fund has never even come close to hitting that $100 billion target, leaving many in the Global South bitter as, with unprecedented flooding and staggering heat waves, climate change strikes home ever more horrifically there.

    When the U.S. and China were working on the climate together at COP26 in Glasgow, filling the Green Climate Fund appeared genuinely imaginable. In their Glasgow Declaration of November 2021, John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart, Xie Zhenhua, affirmed that “both countries recognize the importance of the commitment made by developed countries to the goal of mobilizing jointly $100b per year by 2020 and annually through 2025 to address the needs of developing countries [and] stress the importance of meeting that goal as soon as possible.”

    Sadly enough, all too little came of that affirmation in the months that followed, as U.S.-China relations turned ever more antagonistic. Now, in the wake of Biden’s meeting with Xi and the resumption of their talks on climate change, it’s at least possible to imagine intensified bilateral efforts to advance that $100 billion objective — and even go far beyond it (though we can expect fierce resistance from the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives).

    As my contribution to such thinking, let me suggest the formation of a Sino-American Fund for Green Energy Transitions — a grant- and loan-making institution jointly underwritten by the two countries with the primary purpose of financing renewable energy projects in the developing world. Decisions on such funding would be made by a board of directors, half from each country, with staff work performed by professionals drawn from around the world. The aim: to supplement the Green Climate Fund with additional hundreds of billions of dollars annually and so speed the global energy transition.

    The Pathway to Peace and Survival

    The leaders of the U.S. and China both recognize that global warming poses an extraordinary threat to the survival of their nations and that colossal efforts will be needed in the coming years to minimize the climate peril, while preparing for its most severe effects. “The climate crisis is the existential challenge of our time,” the Biden administration’s October 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) states. “Without immediate global action to reduce emissions, scientists tell us we will soon exceed 1.5 degrees of warming, locking in further extreme heat and weather, rising sea levels, and catastrophic biodiversity loss.”

    Despite that all-too-on-target assessment, the NSS portrays competition from China as an even greater threat to U.S. security — without citing any of the same sort of perilous outcomes — and proposes a massive mobilization of the nation’s economic, technological, and military resources to ensure American dominance of the Asia-Pacific region for decades to come. That strategy will, of course, require trillions of dollars in military expenditures, ensuring insufficient funding to tackle the climate crisis and exposing this country to an ever-increasing risk of war — possibly even a nuclear one — with China.

    Given such dangers, perhaps the best outcome of renewed U.S.-China climate cooperation, or green diplomacy, might be increasing trust between the leaders of those two countries, allowing for a reduction in tensions and military expenditures. Indeed, such an approach constitutes the only practical strategy for saving us from the catastrophic consequences of both a U.S.-China conflict and unconstrained climate change.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Biden and Burns in Double Act to Split Putin and Xi

    U.S. President Joe Biden apparently sought to lower tensions with China this week when he promised Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that Washington was “not seeking a new Cold War” with Beijing.

    The two leaders met on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia. It was their first face-to-face meeting since Biden took office in January 2021. While Biden was all smiles for a handshake photo-op, Xi looked noticeably reserved, like a guy who was bracing himself as one about to hear loads of bullshit.

    After more than three hours of private discussions, the Americans and Western media subsequently tried to spin that both sides had agreed on condemning Russia’s alleged threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. This was the Americans taking license. Xi did not specify Russia, according to the White House readout of the meeting. Both leaders condemned nuclear war and said it should never be fought, a rebuke which applies as much to the United States as anyone else. The Western media, however, tried to spin it as joint condemnation of Russia.

    The Chinese side had quite a different take on what was conveyed in the meeting. No wonder that Xi had looked reserved when he greeted Biden earlier.

    President Xi was quoted as telling Biden: “A statesman should think about and know where to lead his country. He should also think about and know how to get along with other countries and the wider world… Instead of talking in one way and acting in another, the United States needs to honor its commitments with concrete action.”

    This was pretty close to the Chinese president calling out his American counterpart as a bare-faced liar who can’t be trusted in what he says.

    After all, Biden has continued the policy of massively arming China’s island province of Taiwan. That is a direct assault on Beijing’s sovereignty and China’s territorial integrity as well as posing a threat to its national security across the 150-km Taiwan Strait.

    This American president has said publicly on four occasions that the U.S. would defend Taiwan militarily if the Chinese mainland were to exercise its legal right to use force for bringing the island under full administrative control from Beijing. Those declarations by Biden violate the legally binding One China principle recognized by international law as well as under domestic U.S. laws. At the G20 summit this week, Biden said there was no change in American policy on Taiwan, despite his previous flagrant statements to the contrary.

    The Biden administration is planning to station nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in Australia aimed at provoking China as well as supplying Canberra with nuclear submarines as part of a new military coalition in the Asia-Pacific involving the United Kingdom, known as AUKUS.

    Washington has also stepped up economic warfare against China with bans on the export of hi-tech semiconductors vital for Chinese industry.

    The resumption of U.S. war drills off the Korean Peninsula in recent weeks after a three-year hiatus has sharply escalated tensions with between North and South Korea which poses a destabilizing national security risk for neighboring China.

    So, Biden’s talk of “not seeking a new Cold War” with China is contemptible in the face of empirical events and U.S. conduct.

    Which brings us to the question: what was Biden trying to achieve in soft-talking to Xi?

    It seems the U.S. president was really seeking to split China from Russia.

    Biden talked about no Cold War with China. But what about Russia? Seems the United States is full-on about aggravating Moscow. Can a presumed superpower be credibly in a Cold War with one adversary but not with another? That dichotomy doesn’t sound believable. So, what’s going on?

    It is significant that Putin did not attend the G20 summit this week. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was deputized to act as Russia’s dignitary for the event. Why Putin did not go to the summit was not clear.

    Also significant was a top-level meeting held in Turkey at the same time between the U.S. and Russia’s spy chiefs.

    William Burns, the CIA director, met with the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence Sergei Naryshkin in Ankara. The meeting was widely reported in the Western media which is unusual for such back-channel encounters. The impression is that the Biden administration wanted this meeting to be widely reported for the optics and headlines. Western headlines dutifully reported that Burns purportedly “warned Russia against using nuclear weapons in Ukraine”.

    The White House’s national security council emphasized that Burns was not engaged in talks to end the conflict in Ukraine.

    The heavily reported narrative of “warning Russia against nukes” reinforces the contrived notion that Russia is a pariah state that is threatening to use nuclear weapons, whereas it is Moscow that has repeatedly warned that the war being fueled in Ukraine by the United States and its NATO partners could spiral uncontrollably into a catastrophic confrontation.

    Russia has not threatened to use nuclear weapons, has not even mentioned the word, and it has warned of the reckless dangers that the U.S. and NATO are stoking. If anything, it is the United States and its partners who are implicitly threatening the risk of nuclear war. President Vladimir Putin’s warned in September that if Russia’s existential security is threatened by NATO then Moscow reserves “the right to use all means of defense”. That reasonable warning has been cynically distorted to appear like a menacing threat to use nukes by Russia.

    It seems that the Burns trip was aimed at further demonizing Russia as a nuclear threat to world security. Meanwhile, Biden was trying to ingratiate himself with Xi as a way to undermine the strong friendship that has developed between Beijing and Moscow, especially under Xi and Putin’s leadership.

    Biden’s bid to appease Xi by saying that there is no Cold War intended is a blatant lie that China no doubt can see through as plain as a glass of urine. Biden and Burns’ clunky double act is likely to not impress anyone in Beijing and Moscow.

    • First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

    The post Biden and Burns in Double Act to Split Putin and Xi first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden and Xi seek to avoid conflict at first US-China summit in years

    Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping shook hands in front of the two nations’ flags before starting a long-awaited sit down on the Indonesian resort of Bali ahead of a Group of 20 summit, following months of tension over Taiwan and other issues.
    Biden said that Beijing and Washington “share responsibility” to show the world that they can “manage our differences, prevent competition from becoming conflict.”

    Xi told Biden that the world has “come to a crossroads,” and added:

    The world expects that China and the United States will properly handle the relationship.

    Despite the upbeat public statements, both nations are increasingly suspicious of each other, with the United States fearing that China has stepped up a timeline for seizing Taiwan.

    Taiwan and more

    US officials said ahead of the meeting that Biden hoped to set up “guardrails” in the relationship with China and to assess how to avoid “red lines” that could push the world’s two largest economies into conflict.

    The most sensitive issue is Taiwan, the self-governing democracy claimed by China.

    The United States has been stepping up support for Taiwan, while China has ramped up its threats to seize control of the island. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei in August, China reacted by staging unprecedented military drills.

    On the eve of his talks with Xi, Biden met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol on the sidelines of a Southeast Asian summit in Cambodia, with the three leaders jointly calling for “peace and stability” on the Taiwan Strait.

    Biden is also expected to push China to rein in its ally North Korea after a record-breaking spate of missile tests has raised fears that Pyongyang will soon carry out its seventh nuclear test.

    Cold calculations

    US officials and experts have come to believe that Xi has no desire for moderation, with the new Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party stacked with hardliners and lacking any obvious heir apparent.

    Yun Sun, a senior fellow at the Stimson Centre in Washington, said:

    We all knew that Xi Jinping was going to prevail. But I think people are still surprised that Xi Jinping could not even find the grace to save some accommodation for his political opponents.

    With the Party Congress over, Xi now has greater space and flexibility to focus on his international push for a stronger China, she said. Sun concluded:

    We are not looking at a Xi Jinping who is going to be less emboldened

    Both Biden and Trump identified China as the preeminent global competitor to the United States. But while Trump by late in his term was railing against China on everything from trade to Covid-19, Biden has supported talks on narrow areas of cooperation. Biden told reporters Wednesday he would speak to Xi about each country’s “red lines” in the hopes of avoiding conflict.

    Biden has said three times that the United States would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacks, although the White House has walked back the apparent shift from longstanding US ambiguity.

    Inching away

    Biden’s meeting with Xi is notable as a departure from US-China relations under Trump. As the Canary’s John McEvoy reported:

    the US has adopted an increasingly confrontational stance towards China. In January 2018, Trump launched a trade war with China. In 2019, it imposed a ban on Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei. And following the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, Trump has consistently attempted to distract from his administration’s failures to contain the virus with anti-Chinese racism.

    Another element that casts doubts on this seemingly happy proceeding is the alliance of Australia, the UK, and the US. As the Canary’s Joe Glenton explained:

    Australia, the UK, and the US have signed a new military pact they say will protect their countries. The allies claim an AUKUS (pronounced ‘awk-us’) alliance will support a “peaceful and rules-based international order”. But critics have called the move a new Cold War against China. And some question the Western countries’ decision so soon after defeat and withdrawal from Afghanistan. It seems to ignore key lessons: that US power is in decline and that expeditionary warfare is a recipe for disaster.

    Indeed, Yun doubted China would be as obliging as they may appear, saying that Xi views co-operation as transactional:

    With competition the main theme of the US’s China policy, why would China cooperate?

    Their calculation is that they are not going to do anything from the goodness of their hearts. They want to see the US give something.

    Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse

    By Maryam Jameela

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Chinese Governance and Diverse Paths to Modernization

    President Xi Jinping made history by opening the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), when he announced the beginning of a New Era of socio-political development with focus on the Global South.

    The initiative embarks on a path of peaceful modernization and moderate prosperity, bringing more equilibrium to a world often beset by conflicts.

    He made history again by having been confirmed for his 3rd Five-Year term as China’s leader. This is good for continuity of a successful policy of growth and for the transformation of China as a moderately prosperous society – a socialism with Chinese characteristics.

    The next five years will focus on expanding the policy of growth and transformation with more emphasis on peacefully integrating the Global South.

    President Xi pointed out there would be no change in strategy vis-à-vis Taiwan, Hong Kong and China’s zero-covid policy. Regarding Taiwan, China is aiming at a nonviolent unification. This is entirely an internal matter. China would not tolerate any foreign intervention.

    The new 7 member Standing Committee are poised to make a strong team to tackle the many challenges China will face during the next 5 years, envisaging an even longer horizon, until 2049, the Centenario of Modern China.

    China has a stellar record of success stories during her 70-plus years of peaceful existence as a modern socialist country. Unfortunately, they are mostly ignored by western politicians and journalists.

    Just to mention a few of the many achievements during President Xi’s twenty-year tenure.

    • Poverty reduction – lifting 800 million people out of poverty (equivalent to ten times the population of Germany);
    • Health – impressive improvement in China’s health system; increasing China’s average life expectancy from about 71 years in 2000 to close to 79 years in 2021. This exceeds many so-called developed countries (compare this to the US – 76 years life expectancy in 2021). Most Chinese have access to FREE health care – which is rare in the west.
    • Dedollarization is achieved through the gradual debunking of the sanction-prone US-dollar, by concentrating on developing internal and Asian regional markets and through a massive de-dollarization program which includes:
    • Development of a Chinese digital central bank yuan, for use in international transactions;
    • China and ever more Asian and western countries are trading in Yuan and local currencies;
    • China’s economy and that of other Asian countries will be backed by their actual economic outputs – and most-likely by a basket of commonly used commodities;
    • Attracting many (former) “western orbit countries” into Asian regional organizations, such as (a) the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); (b) the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) of ASEAN+5 countries (15 altogether) – which is the worldwide largest free trade agreement; and (c) the BRICS-plus, …. to mention just a few. These countries will trade in other currencies than the US-dollar.
    • The Belt and Road Initiative – BRI – may be the Crown Jewel of China’s achievements during the past two decades. It is a direct Initiative of President Xi’s, launched in 2013. It will celebrate next year its tenth Anniversary.

    BRI has created already at least six land and maritime “roads” that are gradually spanning the globe to connect people of different cultures with infrastructure, with projects for joint research, learning, as well as the development of alternative sources of energies, and much more.

    At present more than 150 countries and international organizations are connected to the Belt and Road.

    The most recent addition of a BRI connection may be the Port of Hamburg, a Chinese participation, for which the German Government has just given its Green Light.

    Key Elements of China’s projected and visionary New Era include

    Continuation and enhancement of the new autonomous monetary system – detached from the fiat “dollar-world”. The new system could become a trailblazer for other countries. It might become the gateway for a sanction-free world economy.

    Embracing the Global South – proposing peaceful development and detachment from the fangs of western exploitation, while offering partner countries of the Global South technical assistance and development projects addressing their socioeconomic priorities.

    The Belt and Road, beyond its worldwide expansion, may become a first-class instrument to implement a program of peaceful modernization of the Global South, preparing joint ventures and connections between countries and regions, including for trade, as well as research into alternative energy resources.

    China’s Governance miracle is the result of a long-term strategic vision. Her peaceful and effective governance has successfully dealt with crises and problems. The path of the past will lead to successful governance into the future.

    Key Governance Challenges ahead may include

    • Peaceful integration of Taiwan into mainland China;
    • Maintaining Hong Kong’s internal peace, protecting HK from foreign interference;
    • Becoming rapidly self-sufficient in the semi-conductor production, for which the Biden Administration is attempting barring China from access to the needed technology.

    This new US sanctions scheme seems to be an unrealistic endeavor. China is already master of these technologies. Besides, China disposes of the necessary raw materials, rare earths, for which the West depends largely on China’s exports.

    In conclusion

    China has been successful in her 70-plus years existence because of her peaceful approach to development and to selective growth. China is pursuing a multipolar world, rather than hegemonic power.

    China uses her peaceful governance to address injustices and irrationalities in the current international order, including conflicts with the US and its western allies.

    Peaceful global governance initiatives include the BRI; Global Development Initiative; Global Security Initiative; BRICS+ Mechanism; Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); the world’s largest ever Free Trade Agreement; the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RECP); and more.

    Enhancing Global Governance initiatives is China’s long-term vision, an important feature of what distinguishes the East from the West.

    The 20th CPC Congress outlines an outlook to 2035 – with a horizon 2049 – pointing to the 100th Anniversary of the “New Communist China” – that successfully evolved to a socialism with Chinese characteristics.

    As a momentum for closing, please allow me to present a brief 3-minute video:

    “Who Am I?”  Chinese Path to the Success of the CPC

    https://jeffjbrown.substack.com/p/3-minute-video-who-am-i-or-why-the?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email#play  

    The post Chinese Governance and Diverse Paths to Modernization first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The China Model of Modernization

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

    • CPC 20th National Congress outcomes
    • The China model of modernization
    • World’s first perennial rice variety
    • Hope for Chinese women’s football

    The post The China Model of Modernization first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Guardian view on China’s response to dissent: repression, at home and away

    There are growing concerns over Beijing’s attempts to restrict political expression overseas

    Xi Jinping’s leadership of China is now indefinite. No one doubts what his third term will bring: more rigid political controls. The party demands obedience at home. It asserts itself more confidently abroad. A senior official told reporters that Chinese diplomacy would maintain its “fighting spirit”.

    That remark came days after Manchester police said that they were investigating the assault of a Hong Kong activist who had been dragged into the Chinese consulate’s grounds when men from the building disrupted a protest on the street outside. Asked about footage of him pulling the man’s hair the consul general, Zheng Xiyuan, denied attacking anyone but also said it was his “duty”. Police have now said they are investigating the full circumstances, and footage shows another man, apparently from the consulate, also being assaulted. What is beyond question is that the protest was peaceful until the officials came out and tore down a poster, and that China’s chargé d’affaires in London has warned that “[providing] shelter to the Hong Kong independence elements will in the end only bring disaster to Britain”.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Common Prosperity on the Road to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

    “Common prosperity” was mentioned at the 10th meeting of the Central Finance and Economic Committee of the Communist Party on August 17, 2021 where it was stated that it was common AND was an essential requirement of socialism and a key feature of China-style modernization. In that context, President Xi Jinping called for China to “clean up and adjust high income and rectify income distribution.” And, in his recent speech to the 20th Chinese Communist Party Congress, Xi said, ”We will steadfastly push for common prosperity. We will improve the system of income distribution… we will increase the income of low income earners and expand the size of the middle income group. We will keep income distribution and the means of accumulating wealth well-regulated.”

    We know that “Common prosperity” has been employed by many Chinese leaders since first used by Mao Zedong in the early 1950s and it appeared as slogan #38 in a series of 65 that were approved and listed in The People’s Daily on September 25, 1953. The slogan urged peasants to strive “for lives of common prosperity.” An article appeared in the People’s Daily on December 12,1953, titled “The Path of Socialism is the Path to Common Prosperity,” clarifying that common prosperity required collective ownership of the resources of production. The following was cited as the goal for Chinese farmers:

    Therefore, the development of mutual aid and cooperatives can only avoid division among peasants and avoid the path of capitalism, but can also enable peasants to achieve common prosperity step by step and finally reach a socialist society.

    Recall then, that in the 1970s and 1980s, Deng Xiaoping promoted reform and opening or gaige kaifeng and this meant “letting some get rich first” and others would be pulled along and enjoy common prosperity later. He said “from many aspects, right now we are merely implementing what Mao Zedong already put out, but unable to do himself.” In keeping with this admonition, Deng stressed that “the nature of socialism is to emancipate productive forces, develop productive forces, abolish exploitation, elimination, polarization and finally achieve common prosperity.” Continuity was there even though some Western China-watchers found it incongruous and chose to ignore it. In any event, Ken Hammond adroitly sums up three decades of reforms and opening to the outside as follows:

    China had largely subordinated itself to the interests the global bourgeoisie, in order  to gain access to state- of-the-art productive technologies, and to accumulate capital through the production of export goods. The overall goal was to use mechanisms of the marketplace to develop the productive economy,with the CPC playing a guiding role and with the ultimate goal of reaching a level of social wealth which allows for the beginnings of new forms of social distribution, an initial step on the path to true socialism. 1

    Simultaneously, expanding material wealth through state capitalism generated major structural contradictions that have yet to be resolved. As GNP grew 9.3 percent per year from 1979-1994, China also became one of the the most unequal societies on earth. In both 2003 and again in 2007, the CPC seemed determined to modify this course. But in 2012, private companies accounted for 70 percent of China’s GNP and the top 20 percent of China’s population owned 70 percent of the total wealth.

    n 2017, Xi said that that a new era of common prosperity had begun and those ”left behind” would make solid progress by 2035 and become part of a “great modern society 2050.“ Further, at that date, inequality should be “narrowed to a reasonable range” although the gaps have not been fleshed out. At the 2002 World Economic Forum, Xi spelled out that “The common prosperity we desire is not egalitarianism. To use an analogy, we will first make the pie bigger, and then divide it properly through reasonable institutional arrangements. As a rising tide lifts all boats, everyone will get a fair share of development, and development gains will benefit all our people in a more substantial and equitable way.” Beyond that, little was spelled out although Xi warned against ”slipping into the trap of welfarism that feeds the lazy.” 2

    China has admirably succeeded in eradicating extreme poverty among impoverished rural residents although some 600 million people still live on $154 a month. For example, there is a major disparity between rural and urban areas. Further, China has 607 billionaires, secondly only to the United States. This is 87 fewer than last year and Forbes reports that China’s billionaires are some $500 billion poorer than last year and worth $1.96 trillion to $2.5 trillion in 2021.3  A series of regulatory reforms wiped out over $1 trillion in market value for Chinese-linked firms, mostly in the high-tech sector. It’s notable that outside investors are still looking for opportunities but shifting to the Chinese domestic business sector. For example, Goldman Sachs recently came up with a 50-stock ”common prosperity” basket, presumably connected to domestic needs and demands.

    A recent program on CGTN, a news channel based in Beijing and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, may help in further discerning the future. The show’s panelists opined that common prosperity was about providing a “level playing field” and opportunities for poor people to “get ahead.” Echoing Xi, it’s not about scaring rich people with a social engineering project that would retard growth and “create common poverty.” It’s not a Robin Hood scheme of “robbing the rich to give to the poor.” Another important component is “encouraging” philanthropy, including the provision of tax incentives for rich people to donate money to common prosperity fund. TenCent’s ponying up of 100 billion yuan was cited as an example. 4

    Another possibly more explicit clue about the future occurred in August of last year: Li Guangman, a little-known blogger and retired editor of a marginal state-owned newspaper, wrote an incendiary essay on the need for radical reform in China. Li had authored over a thousand mostly ignored pieces but this one, entitled “Everyone Can Sense That A Profound Transformation Is Underway,” was quickly picked up and embraced by neo-Maoists and then by at least eight major Central Party state media sites, including The People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and CCTV television broadcasting.

    Li characterized the ongoing regulatory reforms as part of a “profound revolution” that “re-prioritizes socialism over capitalism.” After listing some of the punitive actions taken against tech executives and others, Li wrote “This change will wash away all the dust and the capital market will no longer be a paradise for capitalists to grow rich overnight. The red has returned, the heroes have returned, and the grit and valor have returned.” And then this seemingly ominous warning: “All those who block this people-centered change will be discarded.” I haven’t seen recent references to Li’s essay although I may have missed them. Was this a one-off by a frustrated, old school Maoist or a piece sanctioned by and/or coordinated by elements with the party for their own purposes? 5

    In the past, when talk has arisen about income adjustments, pro-market types and liberals have come to the defense of markets and the need to reassure foreign investors who might be tempted to flee. It’s also reasonable to assume there are powerful and privileged elements within China, including higher levels within the party — those advantaged by inequality — who are opposed to Xi’s initiatives. Personally, I find it both baffling and dismaying that some “socialist friends of China” are quick to label anyone raising this subject as a China-basher, someone doing Washington’s dirty work. In response, this quote from Samir Amin in 2013 remains acutely on point:

    …beginning in 1990 with the opening to private initiative, a new more powerful right began to make its appearance.  It should not be reduced to “businessmen” who have succeeded and made (sometimes colossal) fortunes, strengthened by their clientele — including state and party officials, who mix control with collusion, and even corruption. This success, as always, encourages support for rightist ideas in the educated middle classes. It is in this sense that growing inequality — even if it has nothing in common with inequality characteristic of other countries in the South — is a major political danger, the vehicle for the spread of rightist ideas, depoliticization and naive illusions.((Amin, op.cit.p. 28.))

    How this plays out behind closed doors is impossible to detect although the outcome of the recent party congress would indicate a consensus regarding Xi’s position.

    Further, I would be remiss not mention one important caveat regarding the challenging context for realizing Xi’s program: that is, the primary existential threat to China is U.S.-led imperialist aggression and Washington’s renewal of the Cold War. Emblematic of this behavior is Washington’s sanctions program which aims to use “choke points” to impede Chinese access to cutting edge chip capabilities. In his 2022 NPC report (not in the speech) Xi warned of external threats to “blackmail, contain, blockade, and exert maximum pressure on China.” The extent to which the need to prioritize national security may hobble progress toward realizing common prosperity cannot be discounted.

    Finally, it’s indisputable that what China has achieved on the long road to a possible socialist future is nothing short of spectacular and my reading of the available evidence suggests that from Mao to Xi continuity exists in the quest for common prosperity. Today, Xi is determined to correct the contradictions arising from using state capitalism to accumulate sufficient social wealth. The praxis of liberation is a continuing struggle with an uncertain future but it’s reasonable to assume that serious efforts are underway to give further concrete meaning to social, economic and cultural “common prosperity.”

    1. “Ten crises: The political economy of China’s development,” by Wen Tiejun, November 30, 2021, n.p.  Amin asserted that any society intent on liberating itself from historical capitalism and beginning the long journey to socialism/communism must pass through this preliminary phase. See Amin, Ibid. p. 20.
    2. Chen Tong, “Decoding the Common Prosperity: What is China’s Common Prosperity? Why Zhejiang?” 05-September-2022.
    3. Forbes, April 5, 2020.
    4. “How to Understand ‘common prosperity’ of China, CGTN, August 21, 2021. CGTN produced a ten-part series on common prosperity. See, CGTN, Sneak Preview: Road to Common Prosperity, 28-August-2022.
    5. A full translation can be found at Cindy Carter and Alex Yo, China Digital Times, August 21, 2021.For an on-going list of the crackdowns, see “Tracking all the…” China’s Red New Deal,” September 9, 2021.
    The post Common Prosperity on the Road to Socialism with Chinese Characteristics first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Western Media Smear President Xi’s “Aggressive China” As CIA Front Holds Secessionist Summit in Taiwan

    President Xi Jinping’s re-election for a record-breaking third term as China’s leader was promptly ambushed by Western media smears.

    Xi becomes the first Chinese leader since Chairman Mao to hold three terms in office after he was re-elected by delegates at the 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing last weekend.

    Western media rushed to predict that China would become more autocratic and repressive, without providing any substantiation for its lurid claims, and while ignoring the phenomenal economic and developmental successes of the People’s Republic under Xi during the past decade.

    The U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations cited the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace which predicted that China would become “more assertive and aggressive” in its foreign relations over the next five years.

    The BBC ran a particularly scurrilous hit piece by its veteran anti-China apparatchik, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, which alleged that President Xi’s policies are “creating the hostile world that he claims he is defending against”.

    Quoting Susan Shirk, a “China expert” dredged up from the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s, the BBC accused China of “self-encirclement”, “picking fights” with neighboring countries, “ramping up tensions with Taiwan” and “taking on America and trying to run it out of Asia”.

    “It is a kind of self-encirclement that Chinese foreign policy has produced,” the so-called China expert obligingly commented for the BBC.

    The negative focus on China’s government sounds absurdly misplaced coming from U.S. and British media whose own nations are assailed with political crises over governance. Polls show unprecedented numbers of American citizens losing faith in their political parties and election system. In Britain, the country is reeling from the sacking of a third prime minister in as many years.

    But what’s asinine about the smears against Xi purportedly turning China into a more aggressive power is that they turn reality on its head.

    This week sees the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED) holding a summit for “world democracy” in Taiwan. The event is being attended by over 300 activists and policymakers from some 70 nations to “promote freedom” and other virtue-signaling causes.

    The NED describes itself as a “non-governmental organization” even though it is bankrolled by the U.S. government and works closely with the Central Intelligence Agency. As American author, the late William Blum pointed out, the NED took over the CIA’s covert roles in the 1980s because it was more politically palatable given the agency’s notoriety for fomenting deadly coups and assassinations.

    Taiwan is officially recognized under international law as an integral part of China, albeit having an estranged relationship since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. The One China Policy is recognized legally by the United Nations and by most governments including the United States since the late 1970s.

    Washington nevertheless maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity” whereby it proclaims to support Taiwan’s defense from China’s ambitions to incorporate the island territory under Beijing’s sovereign authority.

    President Joe Biden has stretched this duplicity to breaking point by declaring on four occasions since he took office in January 2021 that the US would intervene militarily to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion from the Chinese mainland. Despite subsequent White House denials, Biden’s utterances are a flagrant violation of the One China Policy and a brazen attack on Chinese sovereignty.

    Since the strategic Pivot to Asia in 2011 taken by the Barack Obama administration, Washington has ramped up arms sales to Taiwan. The flow of arms and covert stationing of U.S. military trainers to Taiwan continued under Trump and now Biden.

    The calculated signals from Washington are promoting a more secessionist political climate in Taiwan, which feels emboldened that it has America’s backing to declare independence from China. Beijing has repeatedly warned against U.S. incitement in its backyard.

    When Democrat House of Representatives Leader Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August, the incident infuriated Beijing to mount massive military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. For a few days, it looked as if an invasion could take place.

    Since President Xi was first elected in 2013, he has strongly asserted China’s historic right to rule over Taiwan, preferably by peaceful means but also through force of arms if necessary. He repeated that aim during a keynote address to the 20th Congress.

    Any reasonable observer can see that Beijing’s resolve is being cynically provoked by Washington’s interference in China’s internal affairs with regard to Taiwan’s sovereign status. Arming the island to the teeth with American missiles and thumbing noses at Beijing with pro-separatist political delegations would be not tolerated in the slightest if the shoe were on the other foot. Indeed, the U.S. would have gone to war against China already in a reverse scenario.

    For the Western media to make out that Xi is taking China in a more aggressive direction is a ludicrous distortion that conceals who is the real aggressor – the United States and its NATO partners who relentlessly accuse Beijing of expansionism. The only “expansionism” China is engaging in is building mutual trade and commerce with other nations through its global Belt and Road Initiative.

    The National Endowment for Democracy [read “Destabilization”], the CIA’s very own Trojan horse, is this week calling on “activists” in Taiwan to overthrow autocracy. It is a veritable call to arms by the CIA conducted on Chinese sovereign territory.

    Not only that, the NED summit declares that Taiwan and Ukraine are “two major frontlines of the struggle for democracy”.

    NED was a major driver of the coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014 which ushered in a fascist anti-Russia regime in Kiev and which led to the current war with Russia. The Americans are blatantly using the same playbook for Taiwan.

    And yet China and President Xi are being smeared as the aggressors!

    Beijing might be better taking Taiwan now – once and for all – before it festers anymore under American influence.

    As Russia is finding out, to its cost, delaying the disease can lead to more fatal conditions.

    The post Western Media Smear President Xi’s “Aggressive China” As CIA Front Holds Secessionist Summit in Taiwan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Xi Jingping Wins Third Term Amid Deteriorating US-China Relations

    Chinese President Xi Jinping has begun a historic third term, cementing his place as the country’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. The Chinese Communist Party confirmed Xi’s third five-year term at a party congress in Beijing this week, elevating more Xi allies to top roles and demoting some who were seen as potential rivals. Under Xi, China has taken a much stronger role in economic management, as well as a “zero COVID” policy that has imposed severe restrictions in an effort to control outbreaks during the pandemic. He has also overseen a growing surveillance state to silence dissent and target ethnic minorities including Uyghurs. “In the past 10 years since Xi came to power, the horrendous human rights violations Xi Jinping committed was just striking. And now he’s going to have another five years at least,” says Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. We also speak with Johns Hopkins University professor Ho-fung Hung, who says characterizing the U.S.-China rivalry as a “new Cold War” is misleading, saying the countries are instead engaged in an “inter-capitalist competition” over economic dominance within China and elsewhere in the world.

    TRANSCRIPT

    This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

    AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, Democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. We begin today’s show looking at China where Xi Jinping has begun a historic third term as head of the Chinese Communist Party. The decision came over the weekend during the Party’s congress which is held every five years. There was also a major shakeup of the seven member Politburo Standing Committee which is China’s most powerful political body. China’s premier Li Keqiang, longtime rival to Xi, was demoted while four Xi loyalists were promoted. The Party’s top official in Shanghai, Li Qiang, appears set to become China’s new premier. He is a close ally of Xi. He oversaw the harsh COVID crackdown in Shanghai that lasted months.

    Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the Chinese Communist Party’s Congress came when former President Hu Jintao was abruptly escorted out of the closing ceremony. He had been sitting right next to Xi Jinping when two men came to escort him from his seat. Some analysts speculated the move was an assertion of Xi’s dominance. Chinese state media later said it was because the former leader was not feeling well.

    We turn now to look more closely at the future of China as Xi Jinping begins a third term. Under Xi, China has continued a decades-long effort to eradicate extreme poverty. Some 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty over the past four decades in what UN Secretary General António Guterres has called “the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history.” But Xi has also overseen a growing surveillance state to silence dissent and target ethnic minorities, including the Uyghurs. And Xi’s third term comes at a time of growing tension between the U.S. and China over Taiwan and other issues.

    We go now to two guests. Yaqiu Wang is Senior China Researcher at Human Rights Watch. She is in New York. And in Baltimore, Maryland, we are joined by Ho-fung Hung, Professor of Political Economy and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include Clash of Empires: From ‘Chimerica’ to the ‘New Cold War’ and The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule the World. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Thanks so much for joining us. Professor Ho-fung Hung, let’s begin with you. Talk about the significance of what happened this weekend. Talk about who Xi Jinping is and how his policies have changed over the years.

    HO-FUNG HUNG: My pleasure to be here. Thank you. What happened over the weekend is very significant, though we actually expected it to come for a while, because in 2018 Xi Jinping managed to abolish the two five-year term limit of the Chinese presidents. That is kind of a term limit that Deng Xiaoping led to impose in the Chinese Constitution in the 1980s, because after the Cultural Revolution, Deng and the Communist Party leaders think that it is not good to have lifelong leader; it is good to have check and balance within the party. Xi Jinping managed to take away this term limit, so that not like his predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, who each served two five-year terms as president of China, Xi can now theoretically serve unlimited term, until he dies, and he can be a lifelong leader of China.

    This kind of abolition of the term limit as a legacy of the Deng Xiaoping era is significant. It was done in 2018 but people didn’t believe that all the party elite will let him actually do it to have another, the third, five-year term, but he managed to do it. He has just proven over the weekend that he managed to do it. Not only that, but also he managed to put all of his own loyalties, absolute loyalties, in the Politburo Standing Committee. So the people from other factions, for example, some people who [inaudible] to be in the Politburo Standing Committee or the Politburo who belong to the Hu Jintao, the previous president faction, were not there. So it seems that in the next five years at least, Xi Jinping will establish his own absolute personal control of everything in China without much check and balance within the party.

    AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what happened this weekend. Do you think that was deliberately staged to remove the former leader sitting next to Xi Jinping, as a message that he was consolidating his power? Or in fact do you think it is what China said, what the government said, that he wasn’t feeling well?

    HO-FUNG HUNG: In these kind of carefully choreographed rituals of the Communist Party, it is unimaginable that this is kind of an accident or incident that is totally out of nowhere. Of course there is a possibility that he actually felt unwell, but now more video footage emerged from the Spanish and the Singaporean TV showing what happened before former President Hu Jintao was escorted away from the Congress, and it didn’t seem like he is unwell at all. It appears in the video footage that he tried to open a folder with some documents and Li Zhanshu, who is sitting next to him, tried to prevent him from looking at the document and seized the folder, and then Xi Jinping called somebody to come and take him away. Initially, he appeared to be reluctant to leave. Then the guards and the person behind Hu Jintao seems to be using some kind of force to take him away and then he eventually left the Congress reluctantly. After he decided to leave, and he walked quite fast, and then he can walk on his own, and it didn’t seem to me that he is actually really feeling unwell. I don’t think it is the real reason that he left.

    Then, why Xi Jinping called somebody to escort him or even really forcefully take him away from the Congress? I think Xi Jinping’s move is carefully considered and calculated to show that he can do whatever he wants, and he can even take out a former president from the Congress in front of the camera. Of course people are speculating, and I think it is reasonable to suppose so, that Hu Jintao might not be very happy about the so-called election result of the Politburo and the Politburo Standing Committee without any of his loyalties there, and Xi Jinping might worry that he might give a face or not raising hands or not clapping hands in the final section, so it is a possibility that Xi Jinping deliberately asked somebody to take him out to prevent this embarrassment.

    AMY GOODMAN: Yaqiu Wang of Human Rights Watch, your response to what has taken place and the significance of Xi Jinping beginning this historic third term?

    YAQIU WANG: Well, I think we expected this to happen because in 2018, the term limit for the president was eliminated, but it was still a very depressing moment because it became a fact. I talked to friends and families back in China; people were depressed. Because in the past ten years since Xi came to power, the horrendous human rights violations Xi committed was just striking. And now he’s going to have another five years, at least. I think people are expecting things can go worse, so people were quite depressed. At the same time, people now are very angry with the zero-COVID policy. People are protesting in China. A guy in Beijing posted a banner on a bridge and people responded to that. So on the one hand, I see people are unhappy and depressed. On the other hand, I see people are waking up, and they want to say, “I want freedom. I want human rights. I want to decide how I am governed by my government.”

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Ho-fung Hung, Xi’s human rights record, what that means and your assessment of his role and the effect he has had on the Chinese people? And your response to the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres talking about this what he called monumental taking on—largest anti-poverty program in history?

    HO-FUNG HUNG: Definitely Xi Jinping, like his predecessor Hu Jintao, is kind of a brutal repressor of human rights. It’s not that human rights violations started with Xi Jinping. Actually in the Jiang Zemin era, in the Hu Jintao era, we already see a lot of crackdowns in the Han majority area and also the non-Han minority regions. But Xi just raised it to a new level as we now are very much aware of. What happened to the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, it is happening under Xi Jinping’s watch.

    So in terms of the repression of human rights, the Communist Party, whether it is collective leadership or it is a one-man dictatorship, it has been pretty much the same. What Xi Jinping brought in something new compared to the Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin era is that he even cracked down brutally on his allies, his other elite within the Communist Party. Because after Xi Jinping became the president, he launched an anti-corruption campaign. Then many elites, even senior officials and private business people, disappeared or mysteriously commit suicide or taken to jail under the name of anticorruption campaign. Maybe people would see that it is not exactly anti-corruption campaign; it is more like a purge. In China nowadays, not only dissidents and minorities are afraid, but also some elites and middle-class.

    Also Xi Jinping doubled down on expanding the state sectors, state companies, and making private companies and foreign companies’ life more difficult in making money in China and keeping their wealth and jeopardizing their private property as well. In the next five years at the very least, this kind of draconian policy that I’d call some kind of a North Koreanization of China politics and economy, is going to double down and is going to get even worse.

    AMY GOODMAN: Yaqiu Wang, the significance of Li Qiang? A longtime rival to Xi, he is demoted, while his loyalist Li Qiang looks like he is about to be China’s new premier. You mentioned the crackdown in Shanghai but talk about the significance of the COVID crackdown, what it actually felt and looked like in this massive city.

    YAQIU WANG: It lasted from April to June, for two months that a city of 20 million people are confined to their homes. As a result, people had huge difficulties to have food delivered to them and access to hospitals. I’ve heard stories from people whose parents had a heart attack or other emergency and they could not leave their apartment complex, or even if they managed to leave their apartment complex, they couldn’t actually get into the hospital. So there are people who died as a result of the lack of access to hospital facilities. Then there were the people who had no food. Then there were the people who lost their jobs and they couldn’t pay to get food delivered. So the human rights violations associated with this draconian lockdown was massive. Then it ended, and the people say Li Qiang, the Party secretary of Shanghai, is ultimately responsible for this, and now this guy was promoted. So we can see Xi is rewarding people who were loyal to his policy rather than rewarding people who are good for the public.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Ho-fung Hung, relations with China are, if not at an all-time low, extremely bad right now. I am wondering if you can comment on what is taking place. In one of the pieces you wrote, you said the dynamics of U.S.-China rivalry is an inter-imperial rivalry driven by inter-capitalist competition. Competition for the world market could soon turn into intensifying clashes of spheres of influence and even war. So you’re not talking about the difference of ideologies. In fact you’re talking about a similar capitalist ideology.

    HO-FUNG HUNG: Yes, indeed. I myself am not not quite supportive of the framing of the U.S.-China rivalry as a new Cold War. It is a catchphrase used a lot of time nowadays, indicating that the difference between China and U.S. is fundamentally ideological and political. I think of course that this difference is real. It’s very true; there’s a large difference. But it is not a necessary and sufficient conditions that lead to this rivalry between the U.S. and China today. Because right after the 1989 massacre, human rights is already a huge concern about China in the discussion in the U.S., and many people are already very unhappy about what is going on in China with regard to human rights. And Tibet, Xinjiang. It is an old problem, in the 1990s, but in the 1990s, U.S.-China relations get more and more harmonious regardless of this human rights difference and political system difference.

    What is different now in comparison to the 1990s and 2000s is that back in the 1990s and 2000s, transnational corporations, American corporations, they are very happy making money in China. They have a good time in China, and so they don’t care about human rights, they don’t care about labor rights, they don’t care about all kind of political difference between U.S. and China. But so far as they are making big money, they are finding it very profitable in China, so they lobby the U.S. government, the U.S. Congress, to have a more amicable and harmonious relation with China. Whenever there is a concern about labor rights, human rights violation in China, in the Congress, they will lobby against those bills, in the 1990s and 2000s. So the U.S. corporations have been kind of ambassadors of the Chinese government to soften U.S. policy on China, even though geopolitically and in terms of human rights, political system, and ideology, there is already a vast difference.

    What happened around 2010 is that the China economy started to lose steam. Their economic pie no longer expanded that fast. Then the U.S. corporation market share in China started to stagnate or even decline, because the Chinese government is helping the Chinese state enterprise and Chinese private enterprise to expand the market share in China and around the world in the Belt and Road countries, at the expense of U.S. corporations. So it is the turning point.

    U.S. corporations rarely individually voiced their concerns about this business environment in China. Of course there’s also other problems like intellectual property theft and unfair competition and unfair enforcement of regulations, so on and so forth. They don’t voice this concern individually but in the survey, the anonymous survey conducted by for example American Chamber of Commerce in China, and US-China Business Council and all these kinds of business associations in the U.S. all show the American business in China situation is deteriorating. They are looking for diversifying their investment, and they are no longer eager to lobby in the names of Chinese interests.

    This is why the geopolitical difference between U.S. and China, human rights and political difference between U.S. and China can now prevail and influence largely the direction of U.S.-China policy. Fundamentally, it is a kind of inter-capitalist competition between U.S. corporations and China corporations in the Chinese market and in the Belt and Road and all the developing countries’ markets that lead to this deterioration of U.S.-China relations.

    AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the flashpoint, Taiwan. During his opening address at the Communist Party Congress, Xi Jinping lauded his government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, addressed the economy, China’s military and foreign policy. He also praised Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, claiming Hong Kong shifted from chaos to governance. President Xi also addressed the issue of Taiwan, which has become this flashpoint between China and the U.S.

    PRESIDENT XI JINPING: [translated] The resolution of the Taiwan issue is a matter for the Chinese ourselves to decide. We insist on striving for the prospect of peaceful reunification with the greatest sincerity and with the greatest effort. However, we are not committed to abandoning the use of force and we reserve the option of taking all necessary measures.

    AMY GOODMAN: Yaqiu Wang, your response?

    YAQIU WANG: I think yes, it is obvious that there’s more aggressive rhetoric coming from the Chinese government on the Taiwan issue, and I know people in Taiwan are nervous. But at the same time, I see people in Taiwan, they are very protective of the freedom, of the human rights they have, and they organize themselves together and they want to maintain that freedom. They are alert of the situation and they are active in pushing back the kind of pressure coming from China. Also I’m seeing that governments around the world including the U.S. government are also doing more to support the vibrant democracy in Taiwan. So yes, China has become more aggressive, there is more hostile rhetoric. But at the same time, I also see more pushback from Taiwan and the democracies around the world.

    AMY GOODMAN: Professor Ho-fung Hung, your response?

    HO-FUNG HUNG: Yes, actually I think there are two sides of the question. On the one hand, China is closing closer to using military force to forcefully take Taiwan, on the one hand because the Zero-COVID policy, and many things it did, that Beijing did, over Hong Kong, show that it is no longer a regime that prioritize economic growth and economic prosperity. They prioritize national security and control, absolute control of the Communists Party. Even when it comes to sacrificing the economy, they will do it. So on that regard, that Beijing has less restraint when it decides to attack Taiwan.

    But on the other hand, I think the immediate military threat is not there yet. Because you look at, for example, Russia’s military action against, invasion against Ukraine, there is a path, from the Russian foreign intervention and overseas military deployment in Georgia in 2008, Syria, and also Ukraine in 2014. So these dictators’ logic is that they try a smaller-scale intervention, and if they succeed, they get more confident, more confident, and then full-scale invasion.

    And you look at China; if the leadership is still rational, they will look back to their military history and they will find that the last time China fought a war overseas was 1979 against Vietnam. And the last time China actually have a serious military mobilization of its military, of its army, is 1989, which is against its own people. So China has not actually used the military against any overseas target for decades, so I don’t think it will easily jump from zero to an all-out invasion of Taiwan.

    But I think that Beijing might try to talk up the military rhetoric, the threat, and also might even do some limited military action to take some outlying islands of Taiwan, or some South China Sea Taiwan now controlled by the Taiwan government, as a kind of a threat, or even a partial blockade of Taiwan, to create a kind of tense situation to influence the Taiwan election, to influence what Taiwan people might want to elect for. If Beijing managed to get some of its allies or even its agents elected in Taiwan through election, then the pro-Beijing government can sign agreement with Beijing and do a lot of things that U.S. cannot find a reason to intervene or to deter.

    But I’m confident that the Taiwan people is very clear what is going on and they have a will and they have the capacity to defend their vibrant democracy, which is kind of a miracle, and it is why Beijing finds that Taiwan is a thorn on its back, because it is an ethnic Chinese democracy, and a liberal society which is very vibrant. It shows that actually democracy can work in Chinese society, which actually contradicts Beijing’s propaganda that actually democracy is not suitable for Chinese people. So I am confident that the Taiwan people will have the will and capacity and alertness to defend itself.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ho-fung Hung, we want to thank you for being with us, Sociology Professor at Johns Hopkins University. And thank you so much to Yaqiu Wang of Human Rights Watch. When we come back, midterms are less than two weeks away. Democrats are facing tight races. We’ll speak with former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader and author Mark Green about their project Winning America and the new report “Crushing the GOP, 2022.” Stay with us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • What is China’s Political System?

    The 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China is currently taking place and Dongsheng will be publishing a series of videos in order to better understand this political event. China is at the center of the world’s economy and geopolitics, however little is known about its internal politics.

    So, what is China’s political system? Is it really a dictatorship like the Western media claims?

    The post What is China’s Political System? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 20th CPC National Congress Report

    This week’s News on China in 2 minutes.

    • 20th CPC National Congress report
    • China’s EV battery supplies to the US
    • Rice growing in salty, alkaline soil
    • Physical growth of rural children in a decade

    The post 20th CPC National Congress Report first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • China’s Xi ramps investment in technology arms race

    China’s president Xi Jinping touted a $626 billion investment in science and technology over the last decade and reaffirmed a national goal of becoming one of the world’s most innovative nations by 2035 during a landmark Communist Party address at the weekend. The renewed commitment to sovereign science, technology and skills comes as the United…

    The post China’s Xi ramps investment in technology arms race appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

  • The most powerful man in China since Mao: Xi Jinping is on the brink of total power

    The Communist party will this week confirm Xi as China’s most powerful leader since Mao. What will his extended term of office mean for the country and for its neighbour Taiwan?

    This week in Beijing, Xi Jinping will preside over one of his country’s great shows of political theatre and seal a long-planned political triumph, consolidating his power and extending his rule.

    The Chinese Communist party is poised to formally hand Xi another five years as party boss, and therefore leader of the country, at a summit that will also move his allies into key roles and elevate the status of his writings on power and government.

    Continue reading…

  • Dissidents in China detained and harassed as Beijing prepares for party congress

    Government critics and activists intimidated by police ahead of Sunday’s Communist party meeting, where Xi Jinping is expected to gain third term

    Chinese authorities have stepped up surveillance and harassment of government critics as part of a crackdown on dissent ahead of the Communist party’s upcoming 20th congress, its key political gathering.

    Since mid-September, numerous activists and petitioners seeking to lobby the government have been detained or put under house arrest across China, while many human rights lawyers have been intimidated, harassed and followed by agents. They say authorities, wary that their criticisms of the government could lead to social discontent and threaten the regime, are pulling out all the stops to silence them ahead of the twice-in-decade event, set to start on Sunday.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Ukraine Isn’t the Only Place Nuclear War Could Threaten to Erupt

    Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s recent implicit threat to employ nuclear weapons if the U.S. and its NATO allies continue to arm Ukraine — “This is not a bluff,” he insisted on September 21st — the perils in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict once again hit the headlines. And it’s entirely possible, as ever more powerful U.S. weapons pour into Ukraine and Russian forces suffer yet more defeats, that the Russian president might indeed believe that the season for threats is ending and only the detonation of a nuclear weapon will convince the Western powers to back off. If so, the war in Ukraine could prove historic in the worst sense imaginable — the first conflict since World War II to lead to nuclear devastation.

    But hold on! As it happens, Ukraine isn’t the only place on the planet where a nuclear conflagration could erupt in the near future. Sad to say, around the island of Taiwan — where U.S. and Chinese forces are engaging in ever more provocative military maneuvers — there is also an increasing risk that such moves by both sides could lead to nuclear escalation.

    While neither American nor Chinese officials have explicitly threatened to use such weaponry, both sides have highlighted possible extreme outcomes there. When Joe Biden last spoke with Xi Jinping by telephone on July 29th, the Chinese president warned him against allowing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to visit the island (which she nonetheless did, four days later) or offering any further encouragement to “Taiwan independence forces” there. “Those who play with fire will perish by it,” he assured the American president, an ambiguous warning to be sure, but one that nevertheless left open the possible use of nuclear weapons.

    As if to underscore that point, on September 4th, the day after Pelosi met with senior Taiwanese officials in Taipei, China fired 11 Dongfeng-15 (DF-15) ballistic missiles into the waters around that island. Many Western observers believe that the barrage was meant as a demonstration of Beijing’s ability to attack any U.S. naval vessels that might come to Taiwan’s aid in the event of a Chinese blockade or invasion of the island. And the DF-15, with a range of 600 miles, is believed capable of delivering not only a conventional payload, but also a nuclear one.

    In the days that followed, China also sent nuclear-capable H-6 heavy bombers across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, a previously respected informal boundary between China and that island. Worse yet, state-owned media displayed images of Dongfeng-17 (DF-17) hypersonic ballistic missiles, also believed capable of carrying nuclear weapons, being moved into positions off Taiwan.

    Washington has not overtly deployed nuclear-capable weaponry in such a brazen fashion near Chinese territory, but it certainly has sent aircraft carriers and guided-missile warships into the area, signaling its ability to launch attacks on the mainland should a war break out. While Pelosi was in Taiwan, for example, the Navy deployed the carrier USS Ronald Reagan with its flotilla of escort vessels in nearby waters. Military officials in both countries are all too aware that should such ships ever attack Chinese territory, those DF-15s and DF-17s would be let loose against them — and, if armed with nuclear warheads, would likely provoke a U.S. nuclear response.

    The implicit message on both sides: a nuclear war might be possible. And although — unlike with Putin’s comments — the American media hasn’t highlighted the way Taiwan might trigger such a conflagration, the potential is all too ominously there.

    “One China” and “Strategic Ambiguity”

    In reality, there’s nothing new about the risk of nuclear war over Taiwan. In both the Taiwan Strait crises of 1954-1955 and 1958, the United States threatened to attack a then-nonnuclear China with such weaponry if it didn’t stop shelling the Taiwanese-controlled islands of Kinmen (Quemoy) and Mazu (Matsu), located off that country’s coast. At the time, Washington had no formal relations with the communist regime on the mainland and recognized the Republic of China (ROC) — as Taiwan calls itself — as the government of all China. In the end, however, U.S. leaders found it advantageous to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in place of the ROC and the risk of a nuclear conflict declined precipitously — until recently.

    Credit the new, increasingly perilous situation to Washington’s changing views of Taiwan’s strategic value to America’s dominant position in the Pacific as it faces the challenge of China’s emergence as a great power. When the U.S. officially recognized the PRC in 1978, it severed its formal diplomatic and military relationship with the ROC, while “acknowledg[ing] the Chinese position that there is but one China and [that] Taiwan is part of China.” That stance — what came to be known as the “One China” policy — has, in fact, underwritten peaceful relations between the two countries (and Taiwan’s autonomy) ever since, by allowing Chinese leaders to believe that the island would, in time, join the mainland.

    Taiwan’s safety and autonomy has also been preserved over the years by another key feature of U.S. policy, known as “strategic ambiguity.” It originated with the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, a measure passed in the wake of the U.S. decision to recognize the PRC as the legal government of all China. Under the act, still in effect, the U.S. is empowered to supply Taiwan with “defensive” arms, while maintaining only semi-official ties with its leadership. It also says that Washington would view any Chinese attempt to alter Taiwan’s status through violent means as a matter “of grave concern,” but without explicitly stating that the U.S. will come to Taiwan’s aid if that were to occur. Such official ambiguity helped keep the peace, in part by offering Taiwan’s leadership no guarantee that Washington would back them if they declared independence and China invaded, while giving the leaders of the People’s Republic no assurance that Washington would remain on the sidelines if they did.

    Since 1980, both Democratic and Republican administrations have relied on such strategic ambiguity and the One China policy to guide their peaceful relations with the PRC. Over the years, there have been periods of spiking tensions between Washington and Beijing, with Taiwan’s status a persistent irritant, but never a fundamental breach in relations. And that — consider the irony, if you will — has allowed Taiwan to develop into a modern, prosperous quasi-state, while escaping involvement in a major-power confrontation (in part because it just didn’t figure prominently enough in U.S. strategic thinking).

    From 1980 to 2001, America’s top foreign-policy officials were largely focused on defeating the Soviet Union, dealing with the end of the Cold War, and expanding global trade opportunities. Then, from September 11, 2001, to 2018, their attention was diverted to the Global War on Terror. In the early years of the Trump administration, however, senior military officials began switching their focus from the War on Terror to what they termed “great-power competition,” arguing that facing off against “near-peer” adversaries, namely China and Russia, should be the dominant theme in military planning. And only then did Taiwan acquire a different significance.

    The Pentagon’s new strategic outlook was first spelled out in the National Defense Strategy of February 2018 in this way: “The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition” with China and Russia. (And yes, the emphasis was in the original.) China, in particular, was identified as a vital threat to Washington’s continued global dominance. “As China continues its economic and military ascendance,” the document asserted, “it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”

    An ominous “new Cold War” era had begun.

    Taiwan’s Strategic Significance Rises

    To prevent China from achieving that most feared of all results, “Indo-Pacific regional hegemony,” Pentagon leaders devised a multipronged strategy, combining an enhanced U.S. military presence in the region with beefed-up, ever more militarized ties with America’s allies there. As that 2018 National Defense Strategy put it, “We will strengthen our alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific to a networked security architecture capable of deterring aggression, maintaining stability, and ensuring free access to common domains.” Initially, that “networked security architecture” was only to involve long-term allies like Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Soon enough, however, Taiwan came to be viewed as a crucial part of such an architecture.

    To grasp what this meant, imagine a map of the Western Pacific. In seeking to “contain” China, Washington was relying on a chain of island and peninsular allies stretching from South Korea and Japan to the Philippines and Australia. Japan’s southernmost islands, including Okinawa — the site of major American military bases (and a vigorous local anti-base movement) — do reach all the way into the Philippine Sea. Still, there remains a wide gap between them and Luzon, the northernmost Philippine island. Smack in the middle of that gap lies… yep, you guessed it, Taiwan.

    In the view of the top American military and foreign policy officials, for the United States to successfully prevent China from becoming a major regional power, it would have to bottle up that country’s naval forces within what they began calling “the first island chain” — the string of nations stretching from Japan to the Philippines and Indonesia. For China to thrive, as they saw it, that nation’s navy would have to be able to send its ships past that line of islands and reach deep into the Pacific. You won’t be surprised to learn, then, that solidifying U.S. defenses along that very chain became a top Pentagon priority — and, in that context, Taiwan has, ominously enough, come to be viewed as a crucial piece in the strategic puzzle.

    Last December, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs Ely Ratner summed up the Pentagon’s new way of thinking about the island’s geopolitical role when he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last December. “Taiwan,” he said, “is located at a critical node within the first island chain, anchoring a network of U.S. allies and partners that is critical to the region’s security and critical to the defense of vital U.S. interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

    This new perception of Taiwan’s “critical” significance has led senior policymakers in Washington to reconsider the basics, including their commitment to a One China policy and to strategic ambiguity. While still claiming that One China remains White House policy, President Biden has repeatedly insisted all too unambiguously that the U.S. has an obligation to defend Taiwan if attacked. When asked recently on Sixty Minutes whether “U.S. forces…would defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion,” Biden said, without hesitation, “Yes.” The administration has also upgraded its diplomatic ties with the island and promised it billions of dollars’ worth of arms transfers and other forms of military assistance. In essence, such moves constitute a de facto abandonment of “One China” and its replacement with a “one China, one Taiwan” policy.

    Not surprisingly, the Chinese authorities have reacted to such comments and the moves accompanying them with increasing apprehension and anger. As seen from Beijing, they represent the full-scale repudiation of multiple statements acknowledging Taiwan’s indivisible ties to the mainland, as well as a potential military threat of the first order should that island become a formal U.S. ally. For President Xi and his associates, this is simply intolerable.

    “The repeated attempts by the Taiwan authorities to look for U.S. support for their independence agenda as well as the intention of some Americans to use Taiwan to contain China” are deeply troubling, President Xi told Biden during their telephone call in November 2021. “Such moves are extremely dangerous, just like playing with fire. Whoever plays with fire will get burned.”

    Since then, Chinese officials have steadily escalated their rhetoric, threatening war in ever more explicit terms. “If the Taiwanese authorities, emboldened by the United States, keep going down the road for independence,” Qin Gang, China’s ambassador to the U.S., typically told NPR in January 2022, “it most likely will involve China and the United States, the two big countries, in military conflict.”

    To demonstrate its seriousness, China has begun conducting regular air and naval exercises in the air- and sea-space surrounding Taiwan. Such maneuvers usually involve the deployment of five or six warships and a dozen or more warplanes, as well as ever greater displays of firepower, clearly with the intention of intimidating the Taiwanese leadership. On August 5th, for example, the Chinese deployed 13 warships and 68 warplanes in areas around Taiwan and two days later, 14 ships and 66 planes.

    Each time, the Taiwanese scramble their own aircraft and deploy coastal defense vessels in response. Accordingly, as China’s maneuvers grow in size and frequency, the risk of an accidental or unintended clash becomes ever more likely. The increasingly frequent deployment of U.S. warships to nearby waters only adds to this explosive mix. Every time an American naval vessel is sent through the Taiwan Strait — something that occurs almost once a month now — China scrambles its own air and sea defenses, producing a comparable risk of unintended violence.

    This was true, for example, when the guided-missile cruisers USS Antietam and USS Chancellorsville sailed through that strait on August 28th. According to Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson for the foreign ministry, China’s military “conducted security tracking and monitoring of the U.S. warships’ passage during their whole course and had all movements of the U.S. warships under control.”

    No Barriers to Escalation?

    If it weren’t for the seemingly never-ending war in Ukraine, the dangers of all of this might be far more apparent and deemed far more newsworthy. Unfortunately, at this point, there are no indications that either Beijing or Washington is prepared to scale back its provocative military maneuvers around Taiwan. That means an accidental or unintended clash could occur at any time, possibly triggering a full-scale conflict.

    Imagine, then, what a decision by Taiwan to declare full independence or by the Biden administration to abandon the One China policy could mean. China would undoubtedly respond aggressively, perhaps with a naval blockade of the island or even a full-scale invasion. Given the increasingly evident lack of interest among the key parties in compromise, a violent outcome appears ever more likely.

    However such a conflict erupts, it may prove difficult to contain the fighting at a “conventional” level. After all, both sides are wary of another war of attrition like the one unfolding in Ukraine and have instead shaped their military forces for rapid, firepower-intensive combat aimed at securing a decisive victory quickly. For Beijing, this could mean firing hundreds of ballistic missiles at U.S. ships and air bases in the region with the aim of eliminating any American capacity to attack its territory. For Washington, it might mean launching missiles at China’s key ports, air bases, radar stations, and command centers. In either case, the results could prove catastrophic. For the U.S., the loss of its carriers and other warships; for China, the loss of its very capacity to make war. Would leaders of the losing side accept such a situation without resorting to nuclear weapons? No one can say for sure, but the temptation to escalate would undoubtedly be great.

    Unfortunately, at the moment, there are no U.S.-China negotiations under way to resolve the Taiwan question, to prevent unintended clashes in the Taiwan Strait, or to reduce the risk of nuclear escalation. In fact, China quite publicly cut off all discussion of bilateral issues, ranging from military affairs to climate change, in the wake of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. So, it’s essential, despite the present focus on escalation risks in Ukraine, to recognize that avoiding a war over Taiwan is no less important — especially given the danger that such a conflict could prove of even greater destructiveness. That’s why it’s so critical that Washington and Beijing put aside their differences long enough to initiate talks focused on preventing such a catastrophe.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • The Russia-China Polar Silk Road Speeds Ahead

    Since China’s Arctic extension of the New Silk Road was first unveiled in a January 2018 white paper, a process of Arctic development has been unleashed which represents one of the most important and under-appreciated developments on Earth. Not only will 10 days be saved by goods moving between China and Europe via the Arctic route, but a new set of civilization building measures are now being unleashed in opposition to the anti-human degrowth program attempting to steer the world into a post-nation state system of de-growth and world government.

    While NATO’s geopolitical unipolarists obsess over global governance and militarization of the Arctic, Eurasian Arctic policy has taken a very different character with an emphasis on economic development and cooperation.

    Of course, Russia has not neglected the military component of its northern military policy, but unlike the west which has no economic vision, Russia’s Arctic military posture is definitively defensive and principally diplomatic. As Foreign Minister Lavrov said at the end of last year’s Arctic Summit in Alaska: “Russia is doing and will do a lot to make sure the Arctic develops as a territory of peace, stability and cooperation.”

    This conjunction of Russia and China’s northern policies around the Polar Silk Road should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the close strategic friendship between both countries since the 2015 announcement of an alliance between the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union and Belt and Road Initiative. This northern extension of the Maritime Silk Road represents a powerful force to transform the last unexplored frontier on the Earth, converting the Arctic from a geopolitical zone of conflict towards a new paradigm of mutual cooperation and development.

    Putin gave a speech at a recent BRI forum stating:

    the Great Eurasian Partnership and Belt and Road concepts are both rooted in the principles and values that everyone understands: the natural aspiration of nations to live in peace and harmony, benefit from free access to the latest scientific achievements and innovative development, while preserving their culture and unique spiritual identity. In other words, we are united by our strategic, long-term interests.

    Weeks before this speech Russia unveiled a bold plan for Arctic development during the conference Arctic: Territory of Dialogue which has since grown in leaps and bounds. This bold plan ties to the “Great Eurasian Partnership“, not only extending roads, rail and new cities into the Far East, but also extending science and civilization into a terrain long thought totally inhospitable. One of the keystone projects driving this program involves the completion of the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) launched as an Indian-Iranian-Russian program in 2002 and which has been given new life in the last several years.

    While the west has not built any new cities in several generations, Russia has announced the construction of five major Arctic cities supporting up to 1 million people each in the coming years with Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu leading the plan. Reporting on this program Atle Staalesen wrote in Arctic Today:

    Shoigu sees his masterplan for Siberia as closely connected with the markets in nearby China. But the new cities will also be important for the development of the Arctic, he argues, and makes a reference to the famous 18th Century scientist and writer Mikhail Lomonosov who wrote that “Russian power will grow with Siberia and the Arctic Ocean, […]”. According to Shoigu, Lomonosov did not coincidently connect the Arctic and Siberia. “They should be developed together and not separately,” he underlines, and adds that “the focus on the development of the Siberian region is both timely and reasonable.”

    Typically framed as an “anti-BRI” megaproject by small-minded geopoliticians, the INSTC and BRI are really two sides of the same program and should much rather be seen as a sister program for Eurasian, Southwest Asian and even African industrial growth. The INSTC currently enjoys the cooperation of 12 participating nations and has recently seen its northern extension moved from St Petersburg further north to the port of Lavna in Murmansk, Russia. China’s western “middle corridor” branch of the east-west BRI stretching through Xinjiang also features several rail and road corridors that tie directly into the INSTC not to mention the obvious Arctic far east connections.

    When fully completed, the INSTC will not only circumvent the NATO-controlled zone of the Mediterranean zone via the overly congested Suez canal but will cut approximately 10 days and 40% of the transportation costs off the current Suez route.

    In 2019 China and Russia signed the first scientific cooperation agreement together setting up the “China-Russia Arctic Research Center” as a part of the Polar Silk Road.

    The BRI’s Success So Far

    The Belt and Road Initiative has already won over much of Africa as BRI-connected rail, ports, and other infrastructure are providing a breath of fresh air to nations long held hostage by IMF/World Bank conditionalities.

    Pakistan and much of Southwest Asia are also increasingly on board the BRI through the growing China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Twenty Arab states have signed onto the BRI and much of Latin America has also joined with hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure projects.

    The Eurasian Economic Union is now in the final stages of a long planned economic treaty between China and the Russian-led economic block recently outlined by Putin advisor Sergey Glazyev.

    Although both the USA and Canada have been invited to the BRI on many occasions since its 2013 inception, no positive response has been permitted by the NATO-Deep State power structures manipulating the west.

    While China’s activity in the Arctic is only manifesting now, its Arctic Strategy began many years ago.

    The importance of the Arctic Silk Road for China

    China deployed their first Arctic research expedition in 1999, followed by the establishment of their first Arctic research station in Svalbard, Norway in 2004. After years of effort, China achieved a permanent observer seat at the Arctic Council in 2011, and began building icebreakers soon thereafter surpassing Canada and nearly surpassing the USA whose two out-dated ice breakers have passed their shelf life by many years.

    As the Arctic ice caps continue to recede, the Northern Sea Route has become a major focus for China. The fact that shipping time from China’s Port of Dalian to Rotterdam would be cut by 10 days makes this alternative very attractive. Ships sailing from China to Europe must currently follow a transit through the congested Strait of Malacca and the Suez Canal which is 5000 nautical miles longer than the northern route. The opening up of Arctic resources vital for China’s long term outlook is also a major driver in this initiative.

    In preparation for resource development, China and Russia created a Russian Chinese Polar Engineering and Research Center in 2016 to develop capabilities for northern development such as building on permafrost, creating ice resistant platforms, and more durable icebreakers. New technologies needed for enhanced ports, and transportation in the frigid cold was also a focus. China additionally has a 30% stake in the Yamal LNG Project and the ‘Power of Siberia’ 3000 mile Russia-China gas pipeline has become the primary supplier of China’s oil and natural gas needs since it began operations in 2019.

    While western states race to shut down all hydrocarbon-based fuels in a suicidal race to de-carbonize, Russia and China have signed off on a 2600km Power of Siberia 2 which will not only satisfy China’s growth needs for the coming decades, but will easily compensate for the loss of gas sales to Europe as the iron curtain is erected once more. The Yamal Peninsula gas fields which supply the Power of Siberia 2 to China currently only service European needs which will soon change drastically.

    Where the Belt Goes, the Road Follows

    While the Belt and Road features two components (land and sea), the fact is that they are inextricably connected. Rails, ports and other civilization-building practices driven by a belief in scientific and technological progress have given this design a power and flexibility to adapt to every nation’s chosen developmental pathways. This is the mysterious “secret ingredient” to the BRI’s powerful adaptability which boggles the minds of closed-minded geopoliticians who can only think in zero-sum terms.

    Scientific and technological progress, when shaped by the intention to uphold the common good represent UNIVERSAL requirements for human survival and satisfy a creative yearning at the deepest core of all people. Without this commitment to the continual improvement of productive powers of society and quality of life, a society will always be divided by the localized self interest of its parts fighting for their own short term benefits. Such has been the fate of the west as it embarked upon a consumer society driven by a “post-industrial mode of existence” after the assassinations of the 1960s and floating of the US dollar in 1971.

    This concept of the common development of mankind both as a whole and in all of its parts was echoed recently by Xi Jinping who stated:

    China is ready to jointly promote the Belt and Road Initiative with international 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 that brings together different civilizations.

    Over the past decade, the BRI has evolved from a loose, open concept in 2013 to the most ambitious endeavor in human history growing into three primary rail lines, thousands of miles of high speed rail, Arctic and space-based extensions, new industrial corridors, new modes of shaping education policy and especially new modes of executing banking activities unlike anything done in the west.

    Of course, anti-BRI slanders increase with every passing day catering to mainstream normies who are led to believe that China is using “debt-trap diplomacy” or that Russia seeks global domination as soon as it conquers Ukraine.

    Even more scrutinizing conspiracy theorists are led to believe that the Russia-China alliance is just another part of the Great Reset seeking to reduce global population to stupedified cattle status. How this insidious goal will be achieved via the construction of large scale infrastructure projects, mass-technical training, scientific breakthroughs and full spectrum industrial growth is a question which such black pilled cynics fail to think about.

    The post The Russia-China Polar Silk Road Speeds Ahead first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Global Inflation and China’s Measures to Stabilize Her Economy

    • This article was first published by the International Monetary Institute, China.

    Under normal circumstances inflation occurs when too many monetary units (US-dollars, Euros, Chinese Yuan) chase too few goods. But we are not living in normal times. To the contrary. We are living in an increasingly divided world, not only in political terms – West vs. East / Global North vs. Global South – but also in monetary terms.

    The gradual but ever faster faltering of the US-dollar hegemony, followed by related so-called hard currencies, like the Euro, the British Pound, the Japanese Yen, as well as the Australian and Canadian dollars – is giving eastern currencies, especially the Chinese Yuan and to some extent also the Russian Ruble a thrive towards stability.

    Why is that? For a number of reasons. First, the Chinese Yuan and the Russian Ruble, as well as many other eastern currencies, are backed by their economies and in both cases also by gold. For that reason alone, they have an inherent stability that western fiat currencies – which are based on nothing – do not have.

    A new and coming eastern currency stability mechanism may soon be a basket of some twenty commodities that are widely and universally used, in addition to the strength of the local economy.

    This idea is not new, but has recently been reintroduced by Russia’s Sergei Glazyev.  As of 2021, he is the Commissioner for Integration and Macroeconomics within the Eurasian Economic Commission, the executive body of the Eurasian Economic Union. Sergei Glazyev is also President Putin’s economic advisor.

    It is a clear distinction from western fiat currencies which are based on no solid substance, other than debt creation. In other words, western dollar-based currencies, beginning with the US-dollar itself, are unsustainable pyramid schemes which sooner or later are bound to implode, or at best, gradually collapse.

    What we are witnessing today is a steady decay of western currencies which are currently been artificially propped up by manipulation of interest rates, as well as artificially caused inflation, based on artificially created shortages of food, energy and other commodities. The pretext used for such shortages – totally false indeed – is the Russian-Ukraine war.

    Such shortages, especially food shortages and resulting mass famine, had been planned for over ten years and were already reflected in the 2010 Rockefeller Report. They are being carried out now.

    In today’s (western) world, inflation and monetary (in)stability are manufactured or manipulated. They are being used like “cold war” weapons by the west internally, initiated by the US, to play western currencies against each other and to assure dollar hegemony will continue. To the extent possible and especially through the east-west trade-related interdependency, mostly through the powerhouse China, the west is hoping to also destabilize the economies of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) members, especially China.

    China’s western currency reserves amounted in May 2022 to some US$ 3.12 trillion equivalent, at least two thirds of which are in US-dollar denominated assets. Given the Chinese, US, as well as western economies’ trading interrelation, dedollarization remains a challenge for China.

    The Federal Reserve – FED

    Despite forecasters’ expectations of a half-a basic point increase, under the pretext of fighting inflation, the FED announced on June 15 the largest interest rate hike in 28 years, namely an increase of three-quarters of a percentage point — the biggest hike since 1994. That follows a quarter-point increase in March and a half-point jump in May. On July 5, 2022, the FED’s base rate was between 1.5% and 1.75%.

    This, the FED said, was a move towards regaining control over soaring consumer prices.

    However, consumer prices were up 8.6% from a year ago. In other words, the FED pretends to fight an 8.6% annual inflation with an interest rate hike of less than 2%. This is unrealistic.

    The real reason for these sudden interest rate increases is to be sought elsewhere. Namely, the gradual but steady loss of the US-dollar’s value in the global monetary market. This has to do with a number of factors, among them the steadily faltering trust in the US economy, but predominantly with Washington’s dollar-based worldwide “sanctioning” of countries that do not conform to US policies, but instead want to preserve their political and economic sovereignty.

    Increasing interest rates is expected to draw investors to dollar denominated assets, at least temporarily; thereby “postponing” the collapse of the US-dollar hegemony.

    The global flow of US-dollars accounts today for between 50% and 60% of all trading currencies in the world. With this quantitative supremacy, plus interest rates increases, the US-dollar may be able to extend her currency domination provisionally – but the fall of the dollar and dollar-related and dependent currencies will undoubtedly follow.

    The result of this FED interest hike can already be seen, in as much as the exchange rate US dollar and Euro is almost 1:1, and the dollar is moving in the same direction vis-à-vis the British Pound.

    The inflation-driven price increases reflect not only rising costs for gasoline and groceries, but also for rent and airfares and a wide range of services.

    Overall, however, the FEDs interest hike, even at a record-level over the past almost 30 years,  does not stop or even brake inflation – which is expected to soon enter the two-digit dimension. The gap between base-interest and inflation is too wide. But it may bring temporarily more stability to the US-dollar.

    What is China doing for their currency’s – the Yuan’s – stability?

    In addition to having already a real economy-based currency, and the prospect of moving towards commodity-based and backed currency, the State Council of China issued at the end of May 2022 a policy package, including 33 measures covering fiscal and financial policies, as well as policies on investment, consumption, food and energy security, industrial and supply chains, and people’s livelihoods. These are some highlights of the package:

    — In finance, China will further enhance value-added tax credit refund policies and quicken its fiscal spending schedule. Local government special bonds issuance and utilization will be accelerated with a service extension. Government financing guarantee policies will be activated and social security premiums deferral and employment support policies will be enhanced;

    — In terms of monetary and financial policies, China encourages delayed repayment of capital and interests on loans for small and medium-sized enterprises, self-employed individuals, truck drivers, and personal housing and consumption loans affected by COVID-19. Inclusive loans to micro and small businesses will be expanded. Real lending rates will be stable with a slight decline, and improvements will be made to the financing efficiency of capital markets;

    — In stabilizing investment and promoting consumption, China will accelerate some approved water conservancy projects and speed up investment on transportation infrastructure, continue to build urban underground pipelines, stabilize and expand private investment, promote the healthy and standardized development of the platform economy, and stimulate purchases of cars and home appliances;

    — Regarding food and energy security, policies on grains profit guarantee for farmers will be intensified. Quality coal will be produced while ensuring safety, environment-friendliness and efficient utilization. In addition, some major [alternative] energy projects will be launched;

    — To stabilize industrial and supply chains, China will reduce utility costs for market entities, gradually reduce and exempt their rent, and help ease the burden on sectors and companies severely affected by the pandemic. Enterprises’ work resumption and smooth transportation and logistics policies will be optimized. More support will be provided to logistics hubs and enterprises. Major foreign-funded projects will be prioritized to attract foreign investments; and

    — As for policies concerning people’s livelihoods, China will implement support policies for housing provident funds, bolster the employment and entrepreneurship of rural migrant population and rural labor, and enhance social security guarantee measures.

    From a Uni-Polar to a Multi-Polar World

    The future points clearly away from a western-dominated unipolar world or One World Order (OWO) to a multi-polar world, that may be based on some strong economic “hubs”, while preserving individual countries’ sovereignty.

    The above policies are to strengthen and stabilize in the long-term the Chinese economy – which will be further enhanced by trade and political association with other related regional economies, like those of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the SCO, as well as further down the road the BRICS+ countries.

    Among the particular socioeconomic achievements that will keep China’s and associated currencies and financial systems stable and apart from the western shortage and inflation-driven economies, is the ASEAN-plus Five world’s largest and most comprehensive free-trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

    The RCEP is a free trade agreement among the Asia-Pacific ASEAN nations of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The trade deal also includes five non-ASEAN signatories, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and China.

    The RCEP is the world’s largest free trade agreement. It was negotiated during eight years and entered into effect on 1 January 2022. According to a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) study, it represents 30.5% of the world’s GDP. The only other blocs coming close to that are the US-Mexico-Canada agreement – NAFTA (28%) and the EU (17.9%).

    The RCEP is expected to expand quickly, as the 15 countries will likely generate world-embracing dynamics, while at the same time remaining self-contained as a sovereign bloc, meaning trading within and protected from western influences.

    The bloc’s trading currencies will be predominantly the Yuan (a digital yuan primarily for international trade is expected to be rolled out possibly as early as later this year or early 2023), but also local currencies – but not the US-dollar and other western currencies under the dollar hegemony.

    Another element for enhancing eastern financial stability, is the BRICS bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Earlier this year, Iran applied for BRICS membership. Iran is already a member of the SCO.

    At present, the BRICS represent 40 percent of world population, 25 percent of the global economy, 18 percent of world trade. The BRICS are the fastest growing bloc of countries, contributing some 50% to world economic growth.

    Finally – but not least – is the interrelated Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), initiated by President Xi Jinping in 2013. The BRI is also called the New Silk Road, inspired by the concept of the Silk Road established during the Han Dynasty over 2,000 years ago – an ancient network of trade routes that connected China to the Mediterranean via Eurasia for centuries.

    In March 2022, the number of countries that have joined the BRI by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with China is 146, plus 32 international organizations. The countries of the BRI are spread across all continents: 43 countries are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

    The BRI has several trading routes, including maritime routes, connecting countries with transport and other infrastructure links, as well as joint ventures for energy exploitation or industrial production processes, cultural and educational exchanges, and many more country and regional links. It is “Globalization” with Chinese characteristics, where individual autonomies are respected.

    This initiative goes hand in hand with another one, the Global Development Initiative (GDI), announced by President Xi Jinping at the UN General Assembly in 2021.

    GDI complements BRI as a support and cooperation mechanism for large international financial and development bodies, such as the South-South Cooperation Fund, the International Development Association (IDA is part of the World Bank Group), the Asian Development Fund (ADF), and the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

    This eastern, China-based network of mutually enhancing financial institutions, trade agreements, economic policy think tanks – and much more – shield against western attempts to interfere with and destabilize these eastern bloc financial, economic and monetary mechanisms.

    These networks also represent a stronghold for a sound future for an eastern-led socioeconomic development framework – a solid base for a common future in PEACE for mankind.

    The post Global Inflation and China’s Measures to Stabilize Her Economy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • An International Spokesman for Chinese Nationalism

    Eric Li, a Western-educated venture capitalist, now plays an important role in the media ecosystem of state-aligned nationalism.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Xi Jinping defends China’s human rights record to visiting UN commissioner

    Leader warns against using issue as ‘excuse to interfere in internal affairs of other countries’ as Michelle Bachelet goes to Xinjiang

    China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has spoken with the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, as she visited the Xinjiang region, warning against the politicisation of human rights as an “excuse to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries” and defending his government’s record.

    It comes amid renewed defensiveness in Beijing after the publication of a significant data leak from Xinjiang’s security apparatus, including mugshots of thousands of detained Uyghurs and internal documents outlining shoot-to-kill policies for those who try to escape.

    Continue reading…

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

  • Coexistence or Carnage

    If the conflicts of interest are real, and the stakes are felt to be high enough, then war between the United States and China is a real possibility, and our foreign policy must be oriented toward avoiding it.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • On Ukraine, The World Majority Sides With Russia Over U.S.

    2014 saw two pivotal events that led to the current conflict in Ukraine.

    The first, familiar to all, was the coup in Ukraine in which a democratically elected government was overthrown at the direction of the United States and with the assistance of neo-Nazi elements which Ukraine has long harbored.

    Shortly thereafter the first shots in the present war were fired on the Russian-sympathetic Donbass region by the newly installed Ukrainian government.  The shelling of the Donbass which claimed 14,000 lives, has continued for 8 years, despite attempts at a cease-fire under the Minsk accords which Russia, France and Germany agreed upon but Ukraine backed by the US refused to implement.  On February 24, 2022, Russia finally responded to the slaughter in Donbass and the threat of NATO on its doorstep.

    Russia Turns to the East – China Provides an Alternative Economic Powerhouse

    The second pivotal event of 2014 was less noticed and, in fact, rarely mentioned in the Western mainstream media.  In November of that year according to the IMF, China’s GDP surpassed that of the U.S. in purchasing power parity terms (PPP GDP).  (This measure of GDP is calculated and published by the IMF, World Bank and even the CIA.  Students of international relations like economics Nobel Laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, Graham Allison and many others consider this metric the best measure of a nation’s comparative economic power.)   One person who took note and who often mentions China’s standing in the PPP-GDP ranking is none other than Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

    From one point of view, the Russian action in Ukraine represents a decisive turn away from the hostile West to the more dynamic East and the Global South.  This follows decades of importuning the West for a peaceful relationship since the Cold War’s end.  As Russia makes its Pivot to the East, it is doing its best to ensure that its Western border with Ukraine is secured.

    Following the Russian action in Ukraine, the inevitable U.S. sanctions poured onto Russia.  China refused to join them and refused to condemn Russia.  This was no surprise; after all Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China had been drawing ever closer for years, most notably with trade denominated in ruble-renminbi exchange, thus moving toward independence from the West’s dollar dominated trade regime.

    The World Majority Refuses to Back U.S. Sanctions

    But then a big surprise. India joined China in refusing to honor the US sanctions regime.  And India kept to its resolve despite enormous pressure including calls from Biden to Modi and a train of high level US, UK and EU officials trekking off to India to bully, threaten and otherwise attempting to intimidate India.  India would face “consequences,” the tired US threat went up.  India did not budge.

    India’s close military and diplomatic ties with Russia were forged during the anti-colonial struggles of the Soviet era.  India’s economic interests in Russian exports could not be countermanded by U.S. threats.  India and Russia are now working on trade via ruble-rupee exchange.  In fact, Russia has turned out to be a factor that put India and China on the same side, pursuing their own interests and independence in the face of U.S. diktat.  Moreover with trade in ruble-renminbi exchange already a reality and with ruble-rupee exchange in the offing, are we about to witness a Renminbi-Ruble-Rupee world of trade – a “3R” alternative to the Dollar-Euro monopoly?  Is the world’s second most important political relationship, that between India and China, about to take a more peaceful direction?  What’s the world’s first most important relationship?

    India is but one example of the shift in power.  Out of 195 countries, only 30 have honored the US sanctions on Russia.  That means about 165 countries in the world have refused to join the sanctions.   Those countries represent by far the majority of the world’s population.  Most of Africa, Latin America (including Mexico and Brazil), East Asia (excepting Japan, South Korea, both occupied by U.S. troops and hence not sovereign, Singapore and the renegade Chinese Province of Taiwan) have refused.  (India and China alone represent 35% of humanity.)

    Add to that fact that 40 different countries are now the targets of US sanctions and there is a powerful constituency to oppose the thuggish economic tactics of the U.S.

    Finally, at the recent G-20 Summit a walkout led by the US when the Russia delegate spoke was joined by the representatives of only 3 other G-20 countries, with 80% of these leading financial nations refusing to join!  Similarly, a US attempt to bar a Russian delegate from a G-20 meeting later in the year in Bali was rebuffed by Indonesia which currently holds the G-20 Presidency.

    Nations Taking Russia’s side are no longer poor as in Cold War 1.0.

    These dissenting countries of the Global South are no longer as poor as they were during the Cold War.  Of the top 10 countries in PPP-GDP, 5 do not support the sanctions.  And these include China (number one) and India (number 3).  So the first and third most powerful economies stand against the US on this matter.  (Russia is number 6 on that list about equal to Germany, number 5, the two being close to equal, belying the idea that Russia’s economy is negligible.)

    These stands are vastly more significant than any UN vote.  Such votes can be coerced by a great power and little attention is paid to them in the world.  But the economic interests of a nation and its view of the main danger in the world are important determinants of how it reacts economically – for example, to sanctions. A “no” to US sanctions is putting one’s money where one’s mouth is.

    We in the West hear that Russia is “isolated in the world” as a result of the crisis in Ukraine.  If one is speaking about the Eurovassal states and the Anglosphere, that is true.  But considering humanity as a whole and among the rising economies of the world, it is the US that stands isolated.  And even in Europe, cracks are emerging.  Hungary and Serbia have not joined the sanctions regime and, of course, most European countries will not and indeed cannot turn away from Russian energy imports crucial to their economies.  It appears that the grand scheme of U.S. global hegemony to be brought about by the US move to WWII Redux, both Cold and Hot, has hit a mighty snag.

    For those who look forward to a multipolar world, this is a welcome turn of events emerging out of the cruel tragedy of the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.  The possibility of a saner, more prosperous multipolar world lies ahead – if we can get there.

    The post On Ukraine, The World Majority Sides With Russia Over U.S. first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Xi Era

    The seismic shifts in the global world order during Xi’s rule call for new tools for understanding China and the varied lives and views of its inhabitants.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • The Grassroots Intellectuals

    China’s social and intellectual spheres remain less monolithic than the tightly controlled public transcripts would suggest, and their possibilities deserve our continued attention.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.