China

China is an old civilization with traditions. Now it has adopted Western science, Western engineering. China is on the rise as the West falters. There will be consequences. Economic power will make things different.  China Today has insights from Mark Steyn, regarding Demography with A Forest of Bare Branches and Fred regarding technology in Comparing China and America Economies Diverge, Police States Converge.

A lot of Mainstream Media output is third rate tosh. Mark and Fred are much better.  Then there is China Uncensored, a video operation rather than text. It is run by Chris Chappell, , an American. He is known for his work on Journey to the East (2011), China Uncensored (2012) and Killed for Organs: China's Secret State Transplant Business (2012). He is mentioned with approval by John Derbyshire.

China owns and runs Huawei, perhaps the world's leading telecommunications company. Its research budget is enormous - and paying off. America is different. Bell Laboratories, the world's leading telecomm research outfit has been sold to foreigners, whence no 5G.

Now in October 2019 Pat Buchanan puts a view of China, an industrial giant whose mask of benevolence is slipping. He also tells us about American political incompetence, asking Is China The Country Of The Future? - https://buchanan.org/blog/is-china-the-country-of-the-future-137564.

A Chinaman, Minxin Pei explains #China’s Coming Upheaval, it could be bad news for many outside China as well as in.

China And World Conquest
Xi Jinping, the de facto ruler of China has imperial ambitions and a tyrannical attitude. Perhaps the take over of Hong Kong shows it. At all events Keith Windschuttle, once a man of the left has been over the ground and sees danger ahead.

 

Taiwan
Is offshore China and also on the up as America & Europe get poorer.

 

China Makes Progress   
Fred explains all.

 

China Setting Up A Forward Operating Base In The Solomon Islands
QUOTE
China’s new security agreement with the Solomon Islands has sparked controversy and garnered attention far beyond the relatively remote Southwest Pacific. Dr Euan Graham examines the drivers and implications for the major actors in this strategically sensitive location. It is convenient for invading Australia, New Zealand and tropical places in the Pacific area.

 

Chinese Communist Party Collapse Is Coming Soon - Or Not As The Case May Be  [ 13 March 2015 ]
One scholar thinks that the CCP is on the skids. Others have different views for different reasons.
PS Oh well, wrong again. Apologise? Admit we were wrong? No chance. That's  "Foreign Policy" for you.

 

China And Political Philosophy
China is looking to England for its political ideas but an England of the Enlightenment. So did America with great success. The Chinese have had enough of revolutions. They could do with stability, calm, good sense, which lets the French approach straight out.

 

China’s Glass Ceiling
China is not going to be the top superpower because it can't make friends in Asia says Foreign Policy.

 

China Hoax from Godfree Roberts
QUOTE              
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. Noam Chomsky.

I was researching Chinese censorship when–irony of ironies–I fell afoul of American censorship, providing an opportunity to update you on the state of the art under both regimes, starting at home, with the recent attempt to frame the President [ That is dear old Don ] for crimes he did not commit.

Like many attempts to frame people, events and nations–Vietnam, Iraq, 9/11, JFK, Bin Laden–it was a State hoax, a falsehood deliberately fabricated to masquerade as truth . An atrocity story sustained by artful censorship and loud, proud, bold and brassy propaganda. An expensive, in-your-face, preposterous conspiracy, sustained for two years at great financial and reputational cost to the nation. Wildly ambitious, batshit crazy and so self-destructive as to boggle the mind, it was one of many propaganda-driven frame-ups, another of which [ is ] in progress as you read these lines.

It checks all the boxes: big, bold, loud and proud, expensive, in-your-face, a preposterous hoax, daringly ambitious and utterly self-destructive.

The China Hoax frames China’s Confucian politics and economics as if they were–or should be–Roman. It explains why thousands of predictions of China’s collapse have been one hundred percent wrong for seventy years and why we keep repeating them, and why we think of China’s government as oppressively authoritarian when ninety-five percent of Chinese think it’s super [ Another #survey says it is only 86% - Editor ]. It also helps us see how the narrative is sustained by an almost totalitarian censorship regime [ the American one. - Editor ].
UNQUOTE
Godfree Roberts, writes of what he writes. Believe him if you want. Lotsa people do not.

 

China Versus India
It begins with sabre rattling. This is good news for the Merchants of Death. Then people start getting hurt. It can blow up in their faces and ours. Nuclear fall out spreads far and wide.

 

Chinese Empire Building
Building a Forward Operating Base in the Solomon Islands is indicative. It is going to threaten the east coast of Australia and New Zealand

 

Chinese Threat Level
The threat is a consequence of their industrial rise. Economic power means they can afford a bigger navy to protect their imports from Africa and the Middle East. It will look like aggressive intent. It might turn into that.

 

Chinese Infiltration of Australia
QUOTE
Chen’s apotheosis, and his account of the prosecution within Australia of a campaign against the “Five Poisons”—the Uighurs, Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhists, Taiwanese splittists and democracy activists—threw into the spotlight the vitality and diversity of political, cultural and religious commitments in Chinese Australia, matching the Chinese world’s drive towards economic and diplomatic success. One of the reasons for the intensity of the debate inside the Chinese community here is that it cannot take place inside China itself. In Hong Kong and in Taiwan, yes, but in the People’s Republic, no.
UNQUOTE
Much of this applies to England with a Chinese take away on every high street.

 

Chinese Weaknesses
Morgan Stanley, a financial heavy weight talks to serious investors in Kuwait and China. There are big tensions in China. A lot of money is going in so it is getting richer but the peasants are not seeing much of it. They aren't quite starving - yet but a bad harvest could change that.  It could all turn sour.

 

The Geopolitics of Sexual Frustration
The lost boys of Professor Albert Macovski are upon us. Twenty years ago, the ultrasound scanning machine came into widespread use in Asia. It meant that parents would know whether they had a boy or a girl on the way. In China they want boys so girls got aborted and they now have too many young men coming through. Young men with no wives are prone to other influences. Politicians on the make and war are just two. We will live in interesting times.

 

Good Government - China Has It. Russia Ditto
QUOTE
"Eighty-six percent of Chinese people surveyed said they were content with the country's direction, up from 48 percent in 2002. ... And 82 percent of Chinese were satisfied with their national economy, up from 52 percent," said the Times. [ Economy Helps Make Chinese The Leaders In Optimism, Survey Finds, By Brian Knowlton, July 23, 2008 ]
UNQUOTE
Good government is possible. England hasn't got it. Nor has America.

 

Donald Trump Talks To Taiwan - China Is Annoyed
Pandering to China has paid off, or has it? Pat Buchanan asks. What is the pay off? NB There isn't one. Don really should think this one through.

 

Social Darwinism Made Modern China's Success [  11 March 2013 ]
QUOTE
During the three decades following Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms, China achieved the fastest sustained rate of economic growth in human history, with the resulting 40-fold rise in the size of China’s economy leaving it poised to surpass America’s as the largest in the world. A billion ordinary Han Chinese have lifted themselves economically from oxen and bicycles to the verge of automobiles within a single generation.

China’s academic performance has been just as stunning. The 2009 Program for International Student Assessment(PISA) tests placed gigantic Shanghai—a megalopolis of 15 million—at the absolute top of world student achievement.[1] PISA results from the rest of the country have been nearly as impressive, with the average scores of hundreds of millions of provincial Chinese—mostly from rural families with annual incomes below $2,000—matching or exceeding those of Europe’s most advanced and successful countries, such as Germany, France, and Switzerland, and ranking well above America’s results.[2]

These successes follow closely on the heels of a previous generation of similar economic and technological gains for several much smaller Chinese-ancestry countries in that same part of the world, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the great academic and socioeconomic success of small Chinese-descended minority populations in predominantly white nations, including America, Canada, and Australia. The children of the Yellow Emperor seem destined to play an enormous role in Mankind’s future.................

Chinese society is notable for its stability and longevity. From the gradual establishment of the bureaucratic imperial state based on mandarinate rule during the Sui (589–618) and T’ang (618–907) dynasties down to the Communist Revolution of 1948, a single set of social and economic relations appears to have maintained its grip on the country, evolving only slightly while dynastic successions and military conquests periodically transformed the governmental superstructure.

A central feature of this system was the replacement of the local rule of aristocratic elements by a class of official meritocrats, empowered by the central government and selected by competitive examination. In essence, China eliminated the role of hereditary feudal lords and the social structure they represented over 1,000 years before European countries did the same, substituting a system of legal equality for virtually the entire population beneath the reigning emperor and his family.
UNQUOTE
Ron Unz writes at length, saying in summary that life for ordinary Chinamen was a case of every man for himself and Devil take the hindmost. Whence success in the Imperial Examinations was a gateway to prosperity. It was also a de facto IQ test. Quasi-Intellectuals in Western Civilization claim that intelligence can not be measured. They are wrong.

 

China Building 155 New Coal Fired Electricity Plants This Year [ 11 November 2015 ]
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DONGXIANPO, China — Just outside the southwest border of Beijing, a new coal-fired power and heating plant is rising in Dongxianpo, a rural town in Hebei Province. Cement mixers roll onto the site. Cranes tower above a landscape of metal girders.

When finished, the plant, run by a company owned by the Beijing government, is expected to have a generating capacity of 700 megawatts of power, more than the total of similar plants in Ohio. But whether it will actually be used to its fullest is questionable, despite the investment of $580 million.

That is because the plant is scheduled to come online in three years amid a glut of coal-fired power plants — an astounding 155 planned projects received a permit this year alone, with total capacity equal to nearly 40 percent of operational coal power plants in the United States.
UNQUOTE
The Chinese aren't stupid enough to believe the Global Warming stories. But they are willing to sell nuclear power plants to anyone fool enough to buy, e.g. Cameron.

 

China Raises Doubts Over £100 Billion Investment In UK [ 3 August 2016 ]
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China has issued a thinly veiled threat to Downing Street that cancelling the Hinkley Point nuclear plant project would jeopardise more than £100 billion of investment in Britain over the next decade.

The Chinese foreign ministry urged Britain to ensure the “smooth implementation” of the project “as soon as possible” in its first response to Theresa May’s surprise decision to review plans to build the £18 billion reactor. The prime minister delayed final approval of the Somerset plant on Thursday night amid security concerns about the involvement of state-owned Chinese companies in Britain’s infrastructure.
UNQUOTE
There are worries about the effectiveness of nuclear power. The Ban The Bomb crowd object regardless. They are deeply ignorant about science. They are also Lenin's Useful Idiots. They talk nice; they act nasty. They called themselves Communist but too many people know the reality so now they call themselves Anti-fascists. They are murderous fools but this is about commerce, negotiating the price.

 

China Bullying Viet Nam  [ 10 August 2017 ]
Viet Nam has decided not to drill for offshore oil within its 200 mile zone after Chinese threats. Donald Trump wants China to lean on the fat fool running North Korea instead.

 

Chinese Universities Still Produce Marxists   [ 10 October 2018 ]
QUOTE
HUIZHOU, China — They were exactly what China’s best universities were supposed to produce: young men and women steeped in the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

They read Marx, Lenin and Mao and formed student groups to discuss the progress of socialism. They investigated the treatment of the campus proletariat, including janitors, cooks and construction workers. They volunteered to help struggling rural families and dutifully recited the slogans of President Xi Jinping.

Then, after graduation, they attempted to put the party’s stated ideals into action, converging from across China last month on Huizhou, a city in the south, to organize labor unions at nearby factories and stage protests demanding greater protections for workers.

That’s when the party realized it had a problem.

The authorities moved quickly to crush the efforts of the young activists, detaining several dozen of them and scrubbing the internet of their calls for justice — but not before their example became a rallying cry for young people across the country unhappy with growing inequality, corruption and materialism in Chinese society.
UNQUOTE
Why does anyone take Marxist drivel seriously? You would think their families would tell them about reality. The Chinese government knows how to deal with them; the Tiananmen Square Massacre could get an action replay. Then there is the way they treat the people of Tibet. They use Ethnic Fouling, just like Her Majesty's Government but that is another problem.

 

Robots Will Takeover Says Chinese Expert  [ 11 January 2019 ]
QUOTE
Half of current jobs will be taken over by AI [ Artificial Intelligence ] within 15 years, one of China's leading AI experts has warned........

'People aren't really fully aware of the effect AI will have on their jobs,' he said.
UNQUOTE
Doctor Kai-Fu is likely to be right; at all events he is on the right lines. He does not mention self-driving cars, which are much more difficult to design than once thought. We have the edge in that area. The Mail's readers are not very interested.

 

China targets nuclear fusion power generation by 2040 [ 12 April 2019 ]            
It is not an easy one but if they get there, the payoff will be enormous. The Lunatic Fringe will object loudly. Their ignorance will be enhanced by liars with agendas, by Useful Idiots and the Puppet Masters.

 

China Can No Longer Afford The Silk Road, And That Is A Blessing For The World     [ 27 April 2019 ]
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard explains. Do you understand what he is writing about or is it just me? An explanation would be appreciated. NB the Wikipedia's biography of AEP is hostile. China is on the up; a country creating a trade empire.

 

China Extorting Technology From West Or Not  [ 20 May 2019 ]
QUOTE
BEIJING, May 20 (Reuters) - Cases of European firms forced to transfer technology in China are increasing despite Beijing saying the problem does not exist, a European business lobby said, adding that its outlook on the country’s regulatory environment is “bleak”.

China’s trading partners have long complained that their companies are often compelled to hand over prized technology in exchange for access to the world’s second-largest economy.

Demands by the United States that China address the problem are central to the two countries’ ongoing trade war, which has seen both sides pile tariffs on billions of dollars of each other’s goods.

The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China said on Monday that results from its annual survey showed 20% of members reported being compelled to transfer technology for market access, up from 10% two years ago.

Nearly a quarter of those who reported such transfers said the practice was currently ongoing, while another 39% said the transfers had occurred less than two years ago.

“Unfortunately, our members have reported that compelled technology transfers not only persist, but that they happen at double the rate of two years ago,” European Chamber Vice President Charlotte Roule said at a news briefing on the survey.

“It might be due to a number of reasons... Either way, it is unacceptable that this practice continues in a market as mature and innovative as China,” Roule said.

In certain “cutting edge” industries the incidence of reported transfers was higher, such as 30% in chemicals and petroleum, 28% in medical devices, and 27% in pharmaceuticals, she added.

China’s top Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, said on Saturday that Washington’s complaints on the issue were “fabricated from thin air”.

Amid the escalating U.S.-China trade war, Beijing has put pressure on the EU to stand with it against U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade policies, though the world’s largest trade bloc has largely rebuffed those efforts.

The EU has also become increasingly frustrated by what it sees as the slow pace of economic opening in China, even after years of granting China almost unfettered access to EU markets for trade and investment. However, European officials say publicly that they do not support the use of tariffs as a solution.

Trump earlier this month raised tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese imports to 25 percent from 10 percent, and has said the duties are causing companies to move production out of China to Vietnam and other countries in Asia.

The majority of European firms in the chamber’s survey said that their business strategies were not changed by the trade war, though it was completed by 585 respondents in January and February, well before the United States’ latest tariff increase.

At the time, 6% of respondents said they were moving or had moved production out of China as a result of the tariffs, and 4% said they were considering or had already decreased investment in China. Forty-nine percent of the respondents affected by U.S. tariffs said their companies had covered the cost themselves and kept prices the same.

The chamber added that members had a “bleak outlook” on China’s regulatory environment, with 72% of members saying they expected obstacles to increase or stay the same in the coming five years, even as the Chinese government has vowed continued reform and opening. (Reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
UNQUOTE

 

Foreign suspicion is hemming in China Inc.’s global rise [ 21 May 2019 ]
QUOTE
Foreign suspicion is hemming in China Inc’s global rise
If China wants to see more of its companies succeed abroad, it should cut them slack at home
TEENS EVERYWHERE love lip-synching to TikTok. Parents may be less enamoured of the boppy music-video app, whose popularity has exploded of late. For different reasons, governments appear wary, too. In February TikTok paid a record $5.7m fine in America for illegally collecting data on users under the age of 13. This month an Indian court banned the app on the grounds that it abets sexual predators. Bangladesh and, briefly, Indonesia, have banned it in the past year, alleging it promotes porn.

TikTok is not the only social-media app to perturb regulators concerned about data privacy, fake news or dangerous content. But there is another reason for the attention: TikTok is Chinese. The angst surrounding its parent company, Bytedance, and China’s other tech titans is a measure of their rising global relevance. Five of the ten most popular apps used by Indians last year were Chinese. Two in five TikTok users live in India, Bytedance’s largest market outside China, ahead of America. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent—technology behemoths collectively known as the BATs—hold stakes in 150 companies abroad, according to Abacus, a research arm of the South China Morning Post, a newspaper. Alibaba has 56 data centres overseas. Tencent owns 17.5% of Snap, creator of a popular American messaging app, and 7.5% of Spotify, a Swedish music-streaming service.

No firm has animated worries about China Inc’s overseas forays more than Huawei, its most successful global company. Governments worry that its telecoms gear might enable spying on behalf of the Chinese state (see article). Scrutiny of Huawei is understandable, given the strategic importance of 5G. But “the Huawei effect”, as Samm Sacks of New America, a think-tank in Washington, DC, calls it, is infecting internet and consumer-electronics firms hitherto viewed as innocuous, because their technologies were regarded as less important and their links to the Communist party looser.

In foreign eyes, both of these mitigating factors appear to be weakening. The BATs in particular have moved beyond their core businesses of internet search, e-commerce and gaming, respectively. They control and crunch flows of data, at home and abroad, and manage cloud-computing services. This allies them to the state-led “Made in China 2025” scheme to dominate advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, a two-year-old security law compels firms to participate in intelligence-gathering when the party asks them to. Since November the police can enter the offices of any Chinese internet-services provider to copy data deemed relevant to cyber-security. Hard as it is to imagine Chinese companies refusing requests from their authoritarian government even in the absence of formal rules, these developments highlighted the risk. Now, observes Ms Sacks, “if you pair the words ‘China’ and ‘tech’, red flags go up”.

As a result, more Chinese acquisitions that involve the transfer of sensitive technologies are being scotched. Last summer America’s Congress beefed up the screening regime for foreign investments, making life harder for acquisitive firms from China. On April 1st Beijing Kunlun Tech, a gaming company, said that it was in talks with American government officials over its ownership of Grindr, a popular gay dating app that it acquired last year. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an American agency that vets foreign deals for national-security risks, has reportedly ordered it to sell. CFIUS fears, it is thought, that personal data submitted by the app’s users, which include messages, location and even HIV status, could be used by the Chinese government to blackmail American officials.

In a similar case this month PatientsLikeMe, which helps connect people suffering from the same illness, was reported to be looking for a buyer after CFIUS had forced iCarbonX, a Chinese health-data analytics firm backed by Tencent, to sell its majority stake in the American platform. Last year CFIUS blocked the $1.2bn purchase of MoneyGram, a money-transfer firm, by Ant Financial, an Alibaba affiliate, on national-security grounds. Investment by Chinese firms in America fell below $5bn last year, from $46bn in 2016, according to Rhodium Group, a consultancy.

Authorities are beginning to restrict not just Chinese companies’ investments, but their products. In 2017 American officials warned that those of DJI, a leading drone-maker, were probably sending data on critical infrastructure back to China’s government; the US Army barred DJI drones from its bases. In 2018 American government agencies were banned from using cameras made by Hikvision, the world’s biggest manufacturer of CCTV kit. Some large American funds have quietly sold their stakes in the firm, which also risks sanctions in America for supplying technology that aids repression in parts of China.

It is not just America picking on its chief geopolitical rival. Defence ministries in Australia and India have prohibited staff from using WeChat, Tencent’s messaging app. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has urged the app’s 1.5m Australian users to beware of propaganda and censorship. In March India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party complained to the election commission that Bytedance’s social-media apps were interfering in elections. It wants to ban a Bytedance news aggregator called Helo. Fearing Chinese propaganda ahead of its own general election in 2020, Taiwan may ban Baidu’s iQIYI, called China’s Netflix, and stop Tencent from launching its own video-streaming service on the island (which China views as a part of its territory). Israel, where Chinese investors accounted for 12% of tech deals in the first nine months of 2018, is thinking of creating a CFIUS-like oversight body.

As China’s businesses push overseas, its all-powerful president, Xi Jinping, expects more loyalty at home. After the government nixed its popular six-year-old jokes app last year, Bytedance’s founder, Zhang Yiming, apologised publicly. The firm’s news app, Jinri Toutiao, has devoted a channel to party pronouncements. According to Reuters, a widespread app launched in February called “Study the Great Nation”—a little red book for the digital age—was built by Alibaba (which declined to comment). The firm has 200-odd Communist-party branches; 600 party members reportedly join its workforce yearly. A recent revelation by a state newspaper that Jack Ma, its boss, was a party member stunned outsiders, who viewed him as the embodiment of a market-driven China.

Chinese companies are doing “a lot of persuading” to show they have no political agenda, says William Chou, vice-chairman of the China practice at Deloitte, a consulting and accountancy firm. Alibaba and Tencent have spent lavishly on their foreign holdings, but would relish a bigger global footprint. Barely 10% of Alibaba’s revenues come from outside China.

In China’s “socialist market economy” it is hard to tell which firms are closer to the party, and so more deserving of suspicion. Assuming they are all an arm of the state, as some foreign politicians urge, carries its own risks. Blacklist too many Chinese firms and you hurt your own. China can retaliate by blocking access to the world’s biggest market. Even if it doesn’t, spurning Chinese advances deprives foreigners of opportunities. PatientsLikeMe hoped the iCarbonX tie-up would grant it access to Chinese machine-learning technology.

Treating all Chinese companies alike also underestimates the vibrancy of China’s private sector. Ms Sacks reckons that the new cyber-security laws may be a tacit recognition by the party that the BATs have grown powerful—more so, even, than some government ministries. If Mr Xi really wants Chinese firms to succeed abroad, he should cut them some slack at home.
UNQUOTE
This is fairly low grade waffle from the Economist. In fact China is going in for heavyweight research; churning out science PhDs by the thousand means they are serious. Stealing foreign technology works well up to a point but doing it in house gives a solid basis for progress. Huawei is a world leader in 5G mobile phone networks. They are being treated with grave suspicion.

 

Chinese Concentration Camps Brainwashing A Million Islamics   [ 26 November 2019 ]
QUOTE
Leaked documents reveal for the first time how  China is running a network of high security prisons designed to brainwash hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities. China has consistently claimed the camps in the Xinjiang region offer voluntary education and training.

But official documents leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists show how inmates are locked up, indoctrinated and punished.

The highly classified Chinese Communist Party documents show the secret plans behind the mass-detention camps that are thought to have held around one million ethnic Uighurs and other minority Muslims in China's Xinjiang province...........

The papers also show how Beijing is pioneering a new form of social control using data and artificial intelligence. Drawing on data collected by mass surveillance technology, computers issued the names of tens of thousands of people for interrogation or detention in just one week.
UNQUOTE
ICIJ is likely to be a competent and reliable source. The combination of Artificial intelligence and total surveillance are highly dangerous. Her Majesty's Government is doing the same of course. Brainwashing comes via Propaganda machines and the Education Industry. They haven't started the Concentration Camps yet.

 

Chinese Annoyed By Coronavirus Cartoon In A Danish Newspaper     [ 28 March 2020 ]

Danes favour Free Speech. China prefers re-education & Concentration Camps, holding  up to 3 million prisoners - see Xinjiang Re-education Camps

 

China Today
China is making progress. Back in 1989 there were, maybe three Superpowers, all Nuclear Then the Berlin Wall fell, to be followed by the USSR. Now there is one, or should that be two? China is suffering from growing pains but America has something more like its death throes. Various people put calmly considered views. Mark Steyn writes about the results of the well known One-Child Policy. It got China out of the habit of having families, therefore the population is declining. Whence his title, A Forest of Bare Branches. The  Wiki disagrees. Read for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself. Then Fred enlightens us with Comparing China and America Economies Diverge, Police States Converge. Their government has its public view of threats, the Five Poisons

A Forest of Bare Branches
by
Mark Steyn
QUOTE
In 2006 I wrote an international bestseller about demography. Which is harder to do than you might think. But it was leavened with Dean Martin gags and whatnot. Nevertheless, it made some big-picture points:

Will China be the hyperpower of the 21st century? Answer: No. Its population will get old before it's got rich.

That's a cute line. I've been using it since the dawn of the millennium and I've been interested to watch it catch on. A few years back, I had the pleasure of hearing Henry Kissinger use it: It sounds so much more geopolitically persuasive in his gravelly voice. And the point is a serious one: Japan's demographic crisis began after they'd got rich, which is the better way to arrange things. In China, alas, the statistics are catching up with Steynian doom-mongering:

China's population shrank last year for the first time in 70 years, experts said, warning of a "demographic crisis" that puts pressure on the country's slowing economy...

The number of live births nationwide in 2018 fell by 2.5 million year-on-year, contrary to a predicted increase of 790,000 births, according to analysis by U.S.-based academic Yi Fuxian.

Yi is at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and he's been tracking just how old China's getting:

China's median age was 22 in 1980. By 2018, it was 40. That will rise to 46 in 2030 and 56 in 2050. In the US, the median age was 30 in 1980 and 38 in 2018. In 2030, it will be 40, and 44 in 2050. India, by comparison, had a median age of 20 in 1980 and 28 in 2018.

What happened between 1980 and 2018 to make a country age that fast? Well, for two generations Chinese mothers gave birth to boys and aborted all the girls. From page thirty of yours truly's America Alone:

The People's Republic's most distinctive structural flaw [is] the most gender-distorted demographic cohort in global history, the so-called guang gun – 'bare branches': Since China introduced its 'one child' policy in 1978, the imbalance between the sexes has increased to the point where in today's generation there are 119 boys for every 100 girls. The pioneer generation of that male surplus are now adults. Unless China's planning on becoming the first gay superpower since Sparta, what's going to happen to those young men? As a general rule, large numbers of excitable lads who can't get any action are useful for manning the nuttier outposts of the jihad but not for much else.

The catastrophe of that policy was obvious when I wrote that passage, but it took the geniuses of the Politburo another decade to catch up to it. Not until three years ago did they issue the magisterial pronouncement that "couples will now be allowed to have two children".

Unfortunately, as Tucker Carlson noted in the American context the other night, it's easier for the state to demolish the family than to rebuild it. China wound up with an unintended Cultural Revolution: The cultural norm of having households with multiple children faded away so totally that, even when it's no longer illegal to have two kids, very few Chinese want to; they've gotten out of the habit. In Germany, by comparison, there are many, many childless couples, but you'll also run across the occasional parents who have two, three, or maybe even four kids, and thus keep the idea of family alive. When the state is powerful enough to insist that every couple has no more than one child, the notion of a big family doesn't even survive as a minority pastime. If no one's seen a two-child household for two generations, the rhythms of life shift - and are hard to shift back. Yi Fuxian again:

China, meanwhile, has been hit by two further blows: the one-child policy has changed Chinese childbearing attitudes and distorted moral values about life; and, the economy, social environment, education and almost everything else relates back to the one-child policy. Having just one child or no children has become the social norm in China.

Northeast China – Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin provinces – has a population of about 109 million, and its socio-educational level is several years ahead of the country average. The fertility rate in northeast China was only 0.9 in 2000 and 0.56 in 2015. This means that the next-generation population in this region is only a quarter the size of the last generation.

It was young China that closed the gap with middle-aged America. Against a still middle-aged America, can an old China retain its edge? Very unlikely. As I warned in America Alone:

The central fact of a new Dark Ages is this: it would be not a world in which the American superpower is succeeded by other powers but a world with no dominant powers at all. Today, lots of experts crank out analyses positing China as the unstoppable hegemon of the 21st century. Yet the real threat is not the strengths of your enemies but their weaknesses. China is a weak power: its demographic and other structural defects [ e.g. the Five Poisons ]are already hobbling its long-term ambitions.

Weak powers behave more irrationally than strong ones. And a still developing nation with death-spiral demographics isn't going to be fun for its neighbors or the world.

Towards the end of America Alone, I speculate on which nation will be the first to take a flyer on the transhuman future. You can see its seeds already in Japan, with its robot nurses at the old folks' home and talking dolls for adults to serve as the children and grandchildren they never bothered having themselves. Those periodic wacky stories about lonely Tokyo millennials marrying their favorite manga character foreshadow a world where the middle-aged businessman, starting to slow down a bit and with intimations of his own mortality, starts to develop feelings for his robot housekeeper... A comparatively small number of comparatively wealthy Japanese will turn to robots and clones and whatever it takes.

But a comparatively large number of comparatively poor Chinese will face cruder, tougher choices. As we see in trade negotiations, China today is an aggressive and demanding power - and for very good reasons: It has to use its moment, because the moment is already passing.
UNQUOTE
Has state planning broken China? Perhaps. We will see in a decade or two. NB some of the readers' comments are perceptive.

Fewer babies mean fewer adults twenty years on.

 

Comparing China and America Economies Diverge, Police States Converge
The headline is verbatim. No, Fred is not selling anything. Yes, he did serve,  in the US Marine Corps, for real at that. He says that China has more and better engineers. A good start; a sometimes benevolent Tyranny determined to make progress as well. America has a problem.

 

Chip wars China, America and silicon supremacy - Superpowers and technology   
The Economist explains after a fashion. Fred explains better. He has actually been there.

 

One Belt, One Road ex Infogalactic     
The Silk Road Economic Belt and the 21st-century Maritime Silk Road
, also known as The Belt and Road (abbreviated B&R), One Belt, One Road (abbreviated OBOR) or the Belt and Road Initiative is a development strategy and framework, proposed by Chinese paramount leader Xi Jinping that focuses on connectivity and cooperation among countries primarily between the People's Republic of China and the rest of Eurasia, which consists of two main components, the land-based "Silk Road Economic Belt" (SREB) and oceangoing "Maritime Silk Road" (MSR). The strategy underlines China's push to take a bigger role in global affairs, and its need to export China's production capacity in areas of overproduction such as steel manufacturing.[1][2]

It was unveiled in September and October 2013 in announcements revealing the SREB and MSR, respectively. It was also promoted by Premier Li Keqiang during the State visit in Asia and Europe.

 

One-Child Policy ex Wiki    
China's one-child policy was part of a birth planning program designed to control the size of its population. Distinct from the family planning policies of most other countries (which focus on providing contraceptive options to help women have the number of children they want), it set a limit on the number of children parents could have, the world's most extreme example of population planning. It was introduced in 1979 (after a decade-long two-child policy),[1] modified in the mid 1980s to allow rural parents a second child if the first was a daughter, and then lasted three more decades before being eliminated at the end of 2015. The policy also allowed exceptions for some other groups, including ethnic minorities. The term one-child policy is thus a misnomer, because for nearly 30 years of the 36 years that it existed (1979-2015) about half of all parents in China were allowed to have a second child. Provincial governments could (and did) require the use of contraception, sterilizations and abortions to ensure compliance and imposed enormous fines for violations. Local and national governments created commissions to raise awareness and carry out registration and inspection work.

According to the Chinese government, 400 million births were prevented, starting from 1970 a decade before the start of the one child policy. Some scholars have disputed this claim, with Martin King Whyte and Wang et al contending that the policy had little effect on population growth or the size of the total population.[2][3][4] China has been compared to countries with similar socioeconomic development like Thailand and Iran, along with the Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, which achieved similar declines of fertility without a one-child policy.[5] However, a recent demographic study challenged these scholars by showing that China's low fertility was achieved two or three decades earlier than would be expected given its level of development, and that more than 500 million births were prevented between 1970 and 2015 (a calculation based on an alternate model of fertility decline proposed by the scholars themselves),[3] some 400 million of which may have been due to one-child restrictions.[6] In addition, by 2060 China's birth planning policies may have averted as many as 1 billion people in China when one adds in all the eliminated descendants of the births originally averted by the policies.[7][8] Although 76% of Chinese people said that they supported the policy in a 2008 survey, it was controversial outside of China.[9]

Effective from January 2016, the birth planning policy became a universal two-child policy that allowed each couple to have two children.

 

Superpowers ex Wiki        
Superpower
is a term used to describe a state with a dominant position, which is characterised by its extensive ability to exert influence or project power on a global scale. This is done through the combined-means of economic, military, technological and cultural strength, as well as diplomatic and soft power influence. Traditionally, superpowers are preeminent among the great powers.

The term was first applied post World War II to the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union. However, after the end of World War II and the Suez Crisis in 1956, the United Kingdom's status as a superpower was greatly diminished, leaving just the United States and Soviet Union as superpowers. For the duration of the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union came to be generally regarded as the two remaining superpowers, dominating world affairs. At the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, only the United States appeared to be the world's superpower.[1][2][3]

Alice Lyman Miller defines a superpower as "a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemony."[4]

 

Five Poisons ex Wiki      
The Five Poisons (Chinese: 五毒; Pinyin: wǔ dú) or the five noxious creatures can refer to an ancient Chinese set of poisonous or otherwise hazardous animals or five perceived threats the Communist Party of China sees for its rule over Mainland China.............

The Five Poisons of the Communist Party of China

The 'five poisons' are:

Notice that three of the five are foreigners, outsiders or not of mainstream  Han descent. The Chinese are not fool enough to believe that Multiculturalism is good news. Nor are Jews; that is why they inflict it on us.

 

Boris Johnson Prepared To Import Three Million Chinese From Hong Kong  [ 12 June 2020 ]
QUOTE
THE government is considering allowing some three million Hong Kongers holding or entitled to British National (Overseas) (BNO) passports to settle here whenever they so choose. The proposal was characterised as a response (threat?) to China should it impose national security laws on Hong Kong in contravention of the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984 by Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping.

As our recent Migration Watch briefing paper explains, this path to settlement for nearly half the population of the former colony was casually mentioned to journalists before an announcement in the House of Commons on June 2. This is the latest illustration that the government have lost the plot on immigration..........

Then there was the absurd idea, not yet entirely abandoned, of a mass amnesty for illegal migrants (our petition against this last year – closed early due to the General Election – gained tens of thousands of signatures). The cross-Channel shambles [ sic - make that collusion with hostile aliens - Editor ] was next and continues – this concerns predominantly young men from Iran and elsewhere from the Middle East who need only to utter the word ‘asylum’ and hey presto, they are here to stay, legally or otherwise. See our briefing paper on this topic, and make sure you visit our Tracking Station regularly

That system itself is laden with risks and pitfalls which could substantially increase immigration from around the world. And it was devised before the devastating effects of the lockdown on the economy and the skyrocketing unemployment that is in train.

And now, settlement for Hong Kongers, perhaps the most significant loosening of immigration control of all..........

It is impossible to overstate the risk inherent in what amounts to a huge gamble. It is worth recalling Tony Blair’s catastrophic miscalculation over the EU accession of the eight Eastern European states when a maximum of 13,000 per year were expected to come. In the event, more than one million workers from Eastern Europe arrived between 2004 and the end of 2009 – an average of around 200,000 a year............

What has happened to all the arguments of the need to moderate immigration and election promises to reduce it?
UNQUOTE
Election promises got the votes. Now they don't matter. We swallowed the lies. Boris Johnson is a Traitor, one of the Enemy Within just like  Blair, BrownCameronHeath, May and the rest.

 

China’s Coming Upheaval ex Foreign Affairs  [
QUOTE
Over the past few years, the United States’ approach to China has taken a hard-line turn, with the balance between cooperation and competition in the U.S.-Chinese relationship tilting sharply toward the latter. Most American policymakers and commentators consider this confrontational new strategy a response to China’s growing assertiveness, embodied especially in the controversial figure of Chinese President Xi Jinping. But ultimately, this ongoing tension—particularly with the added pressures of the new coronavirus outbreak and an economic downturn—is likely to expose the brittleness and insecurity that lie beneath the surface of Xi’s, and Beijing’s, assertions of solidity and strength.

The United States has limited means of influencing China’s closed political system, but the diplomatic, economic, and military pressure that Washington can bring to bear on Beijing will put Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) he leads under enormous strain. Indeed, a prolonged period of strategic confrontation with the United States, such as the one China is currently experiencing, will create conditions that are conducive to dramatic changes.

As tension between the United States and China has grown, there has been vociferous debate about the similarities and, perhaps more important, the differences between U.S.-Chinese competition now and U.S.-Soviet competition during the Cold War. Whatever the limitations of the analogy, Chinese leaders have put considerable thought into the lessons of the Cold War and of the Soviet collapse. Ironically, Beijing may nevertheless be repeating some of the most consequential mistakes of the Soviet regime.

During the multidecade competition of the Cold War, the rigidity of the Soviet regime and its leaders proved to be the United States’ most valuable asset. The Kremlin doubled down on failed strategies—sticking with a moribund economic system, continuing a ruinous arms race, and maintaining an unaffordable global empire—rather than accept the losses that thoroughgoing reforms might have entailed. Chinese leaders are similarly constrained by the rigidities of their own system and therefore limited in their ability to correct policy mistakes. In 2018, Xi decided to abolish presidential term limits, signaling his intention to stay in power indefinitely. He has indulged in heavy-handed purges, ousting prominent party officials under the guise of an anticorruption drive. What is more, Xi has suppressed protests in Hong Kong, arrested hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists, and imposed the tightest media censorship of the post-Mao era. His government has constructed “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, where it has incarcerated more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. And it has centralized economic and political decision-making, pouring government resources into state-owned enterprises and honing its surveillance technologies. Yet all together, these measures have made the CCP weaker: the growth of state-owned enterprises distorts the economy, and surveillance fuels resistance. The spread of the novel coronavirus has only deepened the Chinese people’s dissatisfaction with their government. 

The economic tensions and political critiques stemming from U.S.-Chinese competition may ultimately prove to be the straws that broke this camel’s back. If Xi continues on this trajectory, eroding the foundations of China’s economic and political power and monopolizing responsibility and control, he will expose the CCP to cataclysmic change. 

A PAPER TIGER
Since taking power in 2012, Xi has replaced collective leadership with strongman rule. Before Xi, the regime consistently displayed a high degree of ideological flexibility and political pragmatism. It avoided errors by relying on a consensus-based decision-making process that incorporated views from rival factions and accommodated their dueling interests. The CCP also avoided conflicts abroad by staying out of contentious disputes, such as those in the Middle East, and refraining from activities that could encroach on the United States’ vital national interests. At home, China’s ruling elites maintained peace by sharing the spoils of governance. Such a regime was by no means perfect. Corruption was pervasive, and the government often delayed critical decisions and missed valuable opportunities. But the regime that preceded Xi’s centralization had one distinct advantage: a built-in propensity for pragmatism and caution.

In the last seven years, that system has been dismantled and replaced by a qualitatively different regime—one marked by a high degree of ideological rigidity, punitive policies toward ethnic minorities and political dissenters at home, and an impulsive foreign policy embodied by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a trillion-dollar infrastructure program with dubious economic potential that has aroused intense suspicion in the West. The centralization of power under Xi has created new fragilities and has exposed the party to greater risks. If the upside of strongman rule is the ability to make difficult decisions quickly, the downside is that it greatly raises the odds of making costly blunders. The consensus-based decision-making of the earlier era might have been slow and inefficient, but it prevented radical or risky ideas from becoming policy. 

Under Xi, correcting policy mistakes has proved to be difficult, since reversing decisions made personally by the strongman would undercut his image of infallibility. (It is easier politically to reverse bad decisions made under collective leadership, because a group, not an individual, takes the blame.) Xi’s demand for loyalty has also stifled debate and deterred dissent within the CCP. For these reasons, the party lacks the flexibility needed to avoid and reverse future missteps in its confrontation with the United States. The result is likely to be growing disunity within the regime. Some party leaders will no doubt recognize the risks and grow increasingly alarmed that Xi has needlessly endangered the party’s standing. The damage to Xi’s authority caused by further missteps would also embolden his rivals, especially Premier Li Keqiang and the Politburo members Wang Yang and Hu Chunhua, all of whom have close ties to former President Hu Jintao. Of course, it is nearly impossible to remove a strongman in a one-party regime because of his tight control over the military and the security forces. But creeping discord would at the very least feed Xi’s insecurity and paranoia, further eroding his ability to chart a steady course.

A strongman who has suffered setbacks—as Mao Zedong did after the Great Leap Forward, a modernization program that centralized food production, leading to some 30 million deaths by famine in the early 1960s—naturally fears that his rivals will seize the opportunity to conspire against him. To preempt such threats, the strongman typically resorts to purges, which Mao did four years after the end of the Great Leap Forward by launching the Cultural Revolution, a movement intended to eliminate “bourgeois elements” in society and in the government. In the years ahead, Xi may come to rely on purges more than he already does, further heightening tensions and distrust among the ruling elites.

LEAN TIMES AHEAD
A key component of Washington’s strategic confrontation with Beijing is economic “decoupling,” a significant reduction of the extensive commercial ties that the United States and China have built over the last four decades. Those advocating decoupling—such as U.S. President Donald Trump, who launched a trade war with China in 2018—believe that by cutting China off from the United States’ vast market and sophisticated technology, Washington can greatly reduce the potential growth of China’s power. In spite of the truce in the trade war following the interim deal that Trump struck with Xi in January 2020, U.S.-Chinese economic decoupling is almost certain to continue in the coming years regardless of who is in the White House, because reducing the United States’ economic dependence on China and constraining the growth of China’s power are now bipartisan aims. 

Since the Chinese economy today is less dependent on exports as an engine of growth—exports in 2018 accounted for 19.5 percent of GDP, down from 32.6 percent in 2008—decoupling may not depress China’s economic growth as much as its proponents have hoped. But it will certainly have a net negative impact on the Chinese economy, one that may be amplified by the country’s domestic economic slowdown, which is itself the product of a ballooning debt, the exhaustion of investment-driven growth, and a rapidly aging population. The slowdown may be further exacerbated by Beijing’s attempt to shore up near-term growth with unsustainable policies, such as increased bank lending and investment in wasteful infrastructure projects.

As the economy weakens, the CCP may have to contend with the erosion of popular support resulting from a falling or stagnant standard of living. In the post-Mao era, the CCP has relied heavily on economic overperformance to sustain its legitimacy. Indeed, the generations born after the Cultural Revolution have experienced steadily rising living standards. A prolonged period of mediocre economic performance—say, a few years in which the growth rate hovers around three or four percent, the historical mean for developing countries—could severely reduce the level of popular support for the CCP, as ordinary Chinese grapple with rising unemployment and an inadequate social safety net. 

In such an adverse economic environment, signs of social unrest, such as riots, mass protests, and strikes, will become more common. The deepest threat to the regime’s stability will come from the Chinese middle class. Well-educated and ambitious college graduates will find it difficult to obtain desirable jobs in the coming years because of China’s anemic economic performance. As their standard of living stalls, middle-class Chinese may turn against the party. This won’t be obvious at first: the Chinese middle class has traditionally shied away from politics. But even if members of the middle class do not participate in anti-regime protests, they may well express their discontent indirectly, in demonstrations over such issues as environmental protection, public health, education, and food safety. The Chinese middle class could also vote with its feet by emigrating abroad in large numbers. 

An economic slowdown would also disrupt the CCP’s patronage structure, the perks and favors that the government provides to cronies and collaborators. In the recent past, a booming economy provided the government with abundant revenue—total revenue in absolute terms tripled between 2008 and 2018—providing the resources the CCP needed to secure the loyalty of midlevel apparatchiks, senior provincial leaders, and the managers of state-owned enterprises. As the Chinese economic miracle falters, the party will find it harder to provide the privileges and material comforts that such officials have come to expect. Party elites will also need to compete harder among themselves to get approval and funding for their pet projects. Dissatisfaction among the elites may spiral if Xi’s prized priorities, such as the BRI, continue to receive preferential treatment and everyone else must economize. 

Finally, in the event of a dramatic slowdown, the Chinese government will most likely find itself confronting greater resistance in the country’s restive periphery, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang, which contain China’s most vocal ethnic minorities, and in Hong Kong, which was British territory until 1997 and retains a different system of governance with far more civil liberties. To be sure, escalating tensions in China’s periphery will not bring the CCP down. But they can be costly distractions. Should the party resort to overly harsh responses to assert its control, as is likely to be the case, the country will incur international criticism and harsh new sanctions. The escalation of human rights violations in China would also help push Europe closer to the United States, thus facilitating the formation of a broad anti-China coalition, which Beijing has been desperately trying to prevent. 

Although middle-class discontent, ethnic resistance, and pro-democracy protests won’t force Xi out of power, such pervasive malaise would undoubtedly further erode his authority and cast doubts on his capacity to govern effectively. Economic weakness and elite demoralization could then push Beijing over the edge, leading the CCP toward calamity.

BEATING THE DRUMS OF NATIONALISM
In theory, the CCP should be capable of avoiding or mitigating the damage from an economic slowdown. An effective strategy would incorporate some of the valuable lessons Xi’s predecessors learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Moscow continued to provide significant aid to Cuba, Vietnam, and several vassal states in Eastern Europe well into the Soviet Union’s twilight years. The regime also pursued a costly military intervention in Afghanistan and funded proxies in Angola and Southeast Asia. To avoid those kinds of mistakes, Beijing should prioritize the conservation of its limited financial resources to sustain the open-ended great-power conflict. In particular, China should retrench from its expansionist projects, above all the BRI, and other foreign assistance programs, such as the grants and concessional loans it has provided to Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela, and several developing countries in Africa. Beijing might incur considerable short-term costs—namely, the loss of prestige and goodwill—but over the long term, China would avoid the perils of imperial overreach and preserve enough funds to recapitalize its banking system, which has been exhausted by excessive lending in the last decade.

Beijing should also build stronger ties with U.S. allies to prevent Washington from recruiting them into a broad anti-China coalition. To do so, the regime will have to offer enormous economic, diplomatic, military, and political concessions, such as opening the Chinese market to Japan, South Korea, and Europe; ensuring the protection of intellectual property; making significant improvements in human rights; and abandoning certain territorial claims. Xi’s government has already taken steps to repair ties with Japan. But to truly court U.S. allies and avert a slowdown, either Xi or his successors will need to go further, undertaking market-oriented reforms to offset the economic losses caused by decoupling. The large-scale privatization of state-owned enterprises is a good place to start. These inefficient behemoths control nearly $30 trillion in assets and consume roughly 80 percent of the country’s available bank credit, but they contribute only between 23 and 28 percent of GDP. The efficiency gains that would be unleashed by reining in the state’s direct role in the economy would be more than enough to compensate for the loss of the U.S. market. The economist Nicholas Lardy has estimated that genuine economic reforms, in particular those targeting state-owned enterprises, could boost China’s annual GDP growth by as much as two percentage points in the coming decade.

Unfortunately, Xi is unlikely to embrace this strategy. After all, it runs against his deeply held ideological views. Most of China’s recent foreign and security policy initiatives bear his personal imprint. Curtailing or abandoning them would be seen as an admission of failure. As a result, the CCP might be limited to tactical adjustments: promoting public-private partnerships in the economy, deregulating certain sectors, or reducing government spending. Such steps would represent an improvement but would probably neither raise sufficient revenue nor appeal strongly enough to U.S. allies to decisively alter the course of the U.S.-Chinese confrontation. 

Instead, Xi will probably beat the drums of Chinese nationalism to counter the United States. Ever since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests—which shook the party to its core and resulted in a government crackdown on dissent—the CCP has ceaselessly exploited nationalist sentiment to shore up its legitimacy. In the event of decoupling and an economic slowdown, the party will likely ramp up those efforts. This should not be hard at first: most Chinese are convinced that the United States started the current conflict to thwart China’s rise. But ironically, fanning the flames of nationalism could eventually make it harder for the party to switch to a more flexible strategy, since taking a vigorous anti-American stance will lock in conflict and constrain Beijing’s policy options.

The party would then have to turn to social control and political repression. Thanks to its vast and effective security apparatus, the party should have little difficulty suppressing internal challenges to its authority. But repression would be costly. Faced with rising unrest fueled by economic stagnation, the party would have to devote substantial resources to stability, largely at the expense of other priorities. Strict social control would also likely alienate some elites, such as private entrepreneurs and high-profile academics and writers. Escalating repression could generate greater resistance in China’s periphery—Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong—and elicit international criticism, especially from the European countries that China needs to court.

AFTER THE DELUGE
The CCP is still far from dead. Short of China’s losing a direct military conflict with the United States, the party can conceivably hang on to power. That said, a regime beset by economic stagnation and rising social unrest at home and great-power competition abroad is inherently brittle. The CCP will probably unravel by fits and starts. The rot would set in slowly but then spread quickly.

It is possible, but unlikely, that mounting dissatisfaction within the regime could motivate senior members to organize a palace coup to replace Xi. The party, however, has adopted sophisticated coup-proofing techniques: the General Office of the Central Committee monitors communication among members of the committee, the only body that could conceivably remove Xi. What is more, Xi’s loyalists dominate the membership of the Politburo and the Central Committee, and the military is firmly under his control. Under such circumstances, a conspiracy against the top leader would be exceedingly difficult to pull off. 

Typically, the fight for power that follows the end of strongman rule produces a weak interim leader.

Another possible scenario is a crisis that creates a split among China’s top elites, which in turn paralyzes the regime’s fearsome repressive apparatus. Such an event could be precipitated by mass protests that the security forces are unable to contain. As with the Tiananmen protests, divisions could emerge among top leaders over how to deal with the protesters, thus allowing the movement to gain momentum and attract broad-based support nationwide. But this scenario, although tantalizing, is unlikely to materialize, since the party has invested heavily in surveillance and information control and has developed effective methods to suppress mass protests. 

The scenario that would entail the greatest likelihood of radical change is a succession struggle that would occur if Xi were to pass away or resign owing to infirmity. Typically, the fight for power that follows the end of strongman rule produces a weak interim leader: consider Soviet Premier Georgy Malenkov, who followed Stalin, or CCP Chair Hua Guofeng, who followed Mao. Such leaders are often pushed out by a stronger contender with a transformative vision: think Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping in China. Given this new leader’s need to assert his authority and offer a different, more appealing agenda, it is unlikely that Xi’s hard authoritarianism would survive the end of his rule.

That would leave the new leader with only two options. He could return to the survival strategy that the party had before Xi by restoring collective leadership and a risk-averse foreign policy. But he might find this to be a hard sell, as the party and all its previous survival strategies might have been discredited by this point. So he might instead opt for more radical reforms to save the party. Although stopping short of liberal democracy, he would, in this case, roll back repression, relax social control, and accelerate economic reform, just as the Soviet Union did between 1985 and its collapse in 1991. Such a course of action might be more attractive to a party elite traumatized by two decades of strongman rule; it might also resonate with Chinese youth yearning for a new direction.

If reformers gained the upper hand and embarked on such a path, the most critical issue would be whether they could avoid “the Tocqueville paradox,” named after the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, who observed that the reforms that a weakened dictatorship pursues have a tendency to trigger a revolution that eventually topples the reformist dictatorship itself. 

Moderate reforms might be more effective in China than they were in the Soviet Union, however, because a new Chinese leader would not have to deal with a collapsing external empire, as the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, did in Eastern Europe. Nor would a new leader face national disintegration, as the Soviet Union did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when all 15 Soviet republics bolted from the center, because non-Chinese ethnic minorities make up less than ten percent of China’s population. They may cause serious problems in Tibet and Xinjiang, but otherwise, ethnic minorities pose no real threat to China’s territorial integrity.

Whatever the outcome after Xi’s political exit, the CCP will likely undergo dramatic changes. In the best-case scenario, the party may succeed in transforming itself into a “kinder, gentler” regime, one that endorses economic and political reforms and seeks a geopolitical reconciliation with the United States. By the end, the CCP could be unrecognizable. In the worst-case scenario, deep institutional rot, inept leadership, and the mobilization of anti-regime movements could very well cause a hard landing. Should that happen, it would be one of history’s greatest ironies. Despite the lessons the CCP has learned from the Soviet implosion and the steps it has taken since 1991 to avoid the same fate, the end of one-party rule in China could follow an eerily similar script.

THE SICK MAN OF EAST ASIA
Such a scenario will likely be dismissed as pure fantasy by those who believe in the durability and resilience of CCP rule. But the Chinese party-state’s botched initial response to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus and the subsequent eruption of public outrage should make them think again. The worst public health crisis in the history of the People’s Republic of China has revealed a number of significant weaknesses. The regime’s capacity to collect, process, and act on critical information is much less impressive than most would have anticipated. Considering the enormous investments in disease control and prevention that China has made since the SARS outbreak in 2002–3 and the implementation of laws on emergency management in 2007, it has been staggering to see how thoroughly the Chinese government initially mishandled the new coronavirus epidemic. Local authorities in Wuhan—the epicenter of the outbreak—concealed critical information from the public even after medical professionals sounded the alarm, just as Jiang Yanyong, a veteran army doctor, did in 2003 about SARS. Although they received reports from Wuhan about the spread of the virus in early January, most members of the senior leadership did not take any serious action for two weeks.

The crisis has also revealed the fragility of Xi’s strongman rule. One likely reason that Beijing failed to take aggressive action to contain the outbreak early on was that few crucial decisions can be made without Xi’s direct approval, and he faces heavy demands on his limited time and attention. A strongman who monopolizes decision-making can also be politically vulnerable during such a crisis. A series of decisions Xi made after the Wuhan lockdown began—such as sending Li, the premier, to the epicenter of the virus instead of going himself and remaining unseen in public for nearly two weeks—undermined his image as a decisive leader at precisely the moment the system seemed to be rudderless. He reasserted control only weeks after the crisis began—by firing the party chiefs in charge of the city and the province where the outbreak started and imposing tight censorship rules on the press and social media.

But the brief window during which Chinese social media and even the official press erupted in outrage revealed just how tenuous the CCP’s control over information has become and highlighted the latent power of Chinese civil society. For unknown reasons, China’s censorship system performed poorly for about two weeks after the lockdown in Wuhan was announced. During that period, people were able to learn how the government had muzzled medical professionals who had tried to warn the public. Criticism of the government reached a peak when Li Wenliang—a doctor who in late December was among the first to warn Chinese authorities about the danger of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and who was subsequently interrogated and silenced by local police—died of the illness on February 7, showing that the CCP could lose public support quickly in a crisis situation.

The events of the past few months have shown that CCP rule is far more brittle than many believed. This bolsters the case for a U.S. strategy of sustained pressure to induce political change. Washington should stay the course; its chances of success are only getting better and better.
UNQUOTE
Written by Minxin Pei, rather perceptive.

 


 

Chinese Are Stealing More Intellectual Property  [ 9 September 2020 ]
QUOTE
BEIJING (Reuters) - Cases of European firms forced to transfer technology in China are increasing despite Beijing saying the problem does not exist, a European business lobby said, adding that its outlook on the country’s regulatory environment is “bleak”

China’s trading partners have long complained that their companies are often compelled to hand over prized technology in exchange for access to the world’s second-largest economy. Demands by the United States that China address the problem are central to the two countries’ ongoing trade war, which has seen both sides pile tariffs on billions of dollars of each other’s goods.
UNQUOTE
Huawei, the leading telecomm firm in China has a huge investment in 5G technology. It claims having 76,000 researchers. The Americans were   the world leaders but they sold off Bell Labs to foreigners. So the Chinese are in a hurry while America has lost its way. True or false? See the next one and wonder if we are being set up for World War III.

 

The Anger Campaign Against China  [ 9 September 2020 ]
It was in the newspaper so it must be true, mustn't it? NO! The Mainstream Media are used by liars, as Propaganda machines, as weapons against us. Two originators were Edward Bernays, the author of Propaganda and Walter Lippmann, Jews both. Larry Romanoff in this article tells us that both world wars were started by Jews? Is he right? Quite possibly. He gives sources so you don't have to believe him. Read his evidence for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself. NB He has been accused of generating Fake News. See Who is behind misinformation about Lugar Lab spread by News Front and Geworld? Romanoff's own website is called Moon of Shanghai.

See how the Puppet Masters work.

 

Chinaman Sneers At Western Human Rights Critics   [ 29 March 2021 ]
One of the journalists holds up a microphone with a logo that looks similar to 'BBC News'. At the bottom of the illustration reads: 'Can you tell us what unfair treatment you have suffered, Miss Scarecrow?' A placard next to the scarecrow says: 'I've been sexually assaulted and abused.' 

It was created by the artist who goes by the name Wuheqilin, referring to a one-horned Chinese mythical beast. 

Western governments and rights groups have accused authorities in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang of detaining and torturing Uighurs in camps, drawing fierce denials from Beijing, who says the camps are vocational training centres that help combat religious extremism. Earlier this year, BBC reported that women in the camps had been subject to rape, sexual abuse and torture.

The Chinese foreign ministry said at the time that the BBC report was 'without factual basis' and the people interviewed by the BBC have been 'proved multiple times' to be 'actors disseminating false information'.............

Entitled 'Blood Cotton Initiative', the illustration also refers to the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI), an international group that promotes sustainable cotton production which said in October it was suspending its approval of cotton sourced from Xinjiang, citing human rights concerns...............

Wuheqilin, who has 2 million followers on China's Twitter-like microblog Weibo, in December published a digitally manipulated image of an Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife to the throat of an Afghan child, drawing the fury of Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Wuheqilin declined to comment when reached by Reuters.
UNQUOTE
Wuheqilin is a Chinese patriot and satirist, rather like the Brazilian, Latuff. They are both cartoonists. Anyone who abuses the Paedophile loving traitors of the BBC is on the right lines. The policeman in the picture is a reference to Derek Chauvin, currently on trial for killing George Floyd, a vicious black criminal. The black slavery referenced was for the Cotton Industry that made the founder of The Guardian rich. Wuheqilin's cotton picture is an answer to the Better Cotton Initiative, a propaganda outfit.

 

China Creates Its Own Digital Currency  [ 6 April 2021 ]
QUOTE
A thousand years ago, when money meant coins, China invented paper currency. Now the Chinese government is minting cash digitally, in a re-imagination of money that could shake a pillar of American power.

It might seem money is already virtual, as credit cards and payment apps such as Apple Pay in the U.S. and WeChat in China eliminate the need for bills or coins. But those are just ways to move money electronically. China is turning legal tender itself into computer code.

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin have foreshadowed a potential digital future for money, though they exist outside the traditional global financial system and aren’t legal tender like cash issued by governments.

China’s version of a digital currency is controlled by its central bank, which will issue the new electronic money. It is expected to give China’s government vast new tools to monitor both its economy and its people. By design, the digital yuan will negate one of bitcoin’s major draws: anonymity for the user........

When bitcoin launched in 2009, most nations’ policy makers largely played down its significance. China paid attention.

Always hypervigilant to threats, the leadership feared that a cryptocurrency could undermine government power if people began using it in earnest. Zhou Xiaochuan, China’s top central banker from 2002 to 2018, has said bitcoin both dazzled and frightened him. In 2014, he launched a formal study for a possible Chinese digital currency...........

The U.S., as the issuer of dollars that the world’s more than 21,000 banks need to do business, has long demanded insight into major cross-border currency movements. This gives Washington the ability to freeze individuals and institutions out of the global financial system by barring banks from doing transactions with them, a practice criticized as “dollar weaponization.”

American sanctions on North Korea and Iran for nuclear programs hobble their economies. Swiss banks abandoned their famous secrecy eight years ago to avoid Washington’s wrath in a showdown over taxes. After the February coup in Myanmar, the U.S. used sanctions to block the movement of top military officials’ financial assets through banks. The Treasury’s database of sanctioned individuals and firms—the “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List”—touches virtually every nation on earth...........

The digital yuan could give those the U.S. seeks to penalize a way to exchange money without U.S. knowledge. Exchanges wouldn’t need to use SWIFT, the messaging network that is used in money transfers between commercial banks and that can be monitored by the U.S. government.

The chance to weaken the power of American sanctions is central to Beijing’s marketing of the digital yuan and to its efforts to internationalize the yuan more generally. Speaking at a forum last month, China’s Mr. Mu, the central bank official, repeatedly said the digital yuan is aimed at protecting China’s “monetary sovereignty,” including by offsetting global use of the dollar.
UNQUOTE
The American dollar is the world's reserve currency so if they want more they print more. It beats working for a living The Chinese are side stepping it. Why bother with dollars? And it is all secret. The Americans won't know where our money is.

 

China Fines Alibaba $2.8 Billion For Trust Abuses  [ 10 April 2021 ]
QUOTE
China's antitrust regulator imposed a fine equivalent to $2.8 billion against Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA -2.16% for abusing its dominant position over rivals and merchants on its e-commerce platforms, a record penalty in the country that comes amid a wave of scrutiny on the business empire of company founder Jack Ma.

China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said Saturday in Beijing that Alibaba punished certain merchants who sold goods both on Alibaba and on rival platforms, a practice that it dubbed “er xuan yi”—literally, “choose one out of two.”

As part of the penalty, regulators will require that Alibaba carry out a comprehensive revamp of its operations and submit a “self-examination compliance report” within the next three years, they said. The 18.2 billion yuan fine is equivalent to 4% of the company’s domestic annual sales, the regulator added. Under Chinese rules, antitrust fines are capped at 10% of a company’s annual sales.
UNQUOTE
Was this wonderful firm named after Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? Yes is the Wikipedia's answer but it skates round the thieving aspect. Now Jackie Ma has an opportunity to clean up his act. It looks as though China is getting serious about Capitalism as Biden markets the tyranny of Socialism. See the next one.

 

 

China And Politics
China was not a nice place to live for the ordinary people. It has lived through revolutions, too many of them. Now it seems that they are looking to England for Political Philosophy, progress, for calm, stability, good sense. This is while our politicians destroy something worthwhile by malice, greed, incompetence, corruption Treason or some combination thereof.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a first class journalist explains. He told us about the evil of the Clinton era in America, which may be why his Wikipedia write up is hostile.  Edmund Burke was a philosopher greatly respected in his day. The Chinese are not warming to Tom Paine but then Tom was more of a revolutionary. China has had its fill of them.

UPDATE 2021:
Their wonderful government has gone back to the heavy handed approach. Taking over Hong Kong and destroying its somewhat democratic government show that.

China embraces 'British Model', ditching Mao for Edmund Burke ...
David Cameron might be reassured to know that China's Communist leadership is studying the long arc of British history with intense interest, even if Russia's Vladimir Putin deems our small island to be of no account. Professor Li said the 18th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke is now all the rage in Chinese universities, studied for his critique of violent revolution, and esteemed as the prophet of stability through timely but controlled change.

"We want to learn from the British model," said Daokui Li, a member China's upper chamber or `House of Lords' (CPPCC) and a professor at Beijing's Tsinghua University.

"Today's leaders in China are looking carefully at the British style of political change over the last 400 years, analysing the difference with France," he told me at the annual Ambrosetti gathering of world policy-makers at Villa d'Este on Lake Como.

"England went through incredible changes: a war against the US; wars against France; wars against Germany twice, the rise and decline of empire; and universal suffrage. Yet society remained stable through all this turmoil, with the same institutions and political structure. We think the reason is respect for tradition, yet willingness to make changes when needed."

"It is a contrast with France. We know from de Tocqueville's  study of the Ancien Regime that if you don't do reforms, you will end up with a revolution, and that is what will happen in China if we don't reform in time,"

Professor Li said the 18th Century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke is now all the rage in Chinese universities, studied for his critique of violent revolution, and esteemed as the prophet of stability through timely but controlled change. They are enamoured by his theories of inheritance, the "living contract" through the generations, the limits of liberty, and -- a harder sell -- his small battalions.

Hobbes too is sweeping China's intelligentsia, and so is [ the Jew ] Hannah Arendt,  the philosopher of the twin totalitarian movements Left and Right. It is a ferment of ideas. Mao is out, even if the Communist Party is still coy about saying this too publicly.

"We went through the Revolution of 1911 when we overthrew the emperor, then the May 4th Revolution of 1919, then the Communist Revolution of 1949, and then the Cultural Revolution. We're looking back at our history, and we are tired of this."

"This is why Bo Xilai scares people. He was embracing Mao's practice of continuous revolution, and it brings back bad memories."

I was aware that Burke is making a much-deserved come-back in Britain, propelled by Jesse Norman's splendid book "Edmund Burke: The First Conservative". But China's enthusiasm for his work has more global "gearing", as traders say.

The Nobel peace laureate -- and dissident -- Liu Xiaobo is a Burkean, as were many of those who signed the 2008 human rights charter.

Needless to say, Burke has much in common with Confucius, the ancient Chinese philosopher of order, tradition, and harmony, now enjoying a revival in China as a post-Maoist source of authority. Jiang Qing cites Burke extensively in his classic work on the rise of a new Confucian political order published in 2008: "China: Democracy, or Confucianism?"

You will recognise the words and style if you have read Burke's masterful Reflections on the French Revolution, the book that unmasked the squalid character of the Paris Putsch, and shattered the illusions of Jacobin fellow-travellers across Europe.

''Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.’’

“To avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.

By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitutions and renovate their father’s life.”

To hack that aged parent to pieces. How resonant that must seem to survivors of the Cultural Revolution.

Prof Li said the new team of President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang -- both singing from the same hymn sheet according to him, though not others -- will start reforming the one-child policy, the hukuo code of rural `serfdom', and much else, before the end of the year. The last team coasted complacently, he said, relying on post-Lehman stimulus to keep growth going as the old system festered.

Whether China can really pull it off in an orderly way after letting rip with the biggest credit bubble in modern market history is a very open question.

But let us wish them the best of British luck, and celebrate our new Special Relationship with China.

 

Chinese Communist Party Exposed   [ 7 July 2021 ]
QUOTE
I think this issue of “Chinese communism” should be addressed at length, again. I’m not going to do that right now, because I’m exhausted. But I will say: China is not a communist country, and the so-called “Chinese Communist Party” is not a communist party..................

You have to go to China to really understand that this is an ultra-futuristic society of tremendous wealth and prosperity, as well as national pride and sense of national identity.

Obviously, China could not have undergone the massive project of modernization that they’ve undergone since the death of Mao if it was a communist system. Communism, as we are aware, leads to mass starvation and general doom. The Chinese system is called “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” The number one “Chinese characteristic” is “mercantilism,” which is basically the opposite of communism.

The only relationship that China has to “communism” is some of the wholesome and cutesy aesthetics here and there.

But you say “what about the fact that it’s called the communist party????” Well, actually, if you think it is called that, then you don’t understand the Chinese language. It’s not really called that.

It is called: “中国共产党.”

Those are characters. Not letters and not really words. The entire structure of the language is totally different.

““中国” means “China” and “共产党” is translated as “communist party” in English. The word is “Gòngchǎndǎng.” That is “gong,” “chǎn” and “dǎng.” A direct translation, as it would be spoken in Chinese, would be “The Party of People Working Together to be Productive.” That is how it sounds in Chinese, and that is how people hear it in Chinese. In the Chinese mind, there is no reference to Marx, collectivization, abolition of property, or anything else that is associated with Marxist communism.

To give an example of how Chinese translations are manipulated – back in the 1950s up through the 1990s, the leader of China was called a “Chairman” in the English media. Then, when the West thought China was going to become a “democracy,” they all of a sudden changed the word to “President.” The word in Chinese, “主席,” remained the same. It means something like “the seat of the lord.”

But by changing the word from “Chairman” to “President” in the translated English media, it gave the impression that there was some massive political shift in China, that they had somehow rearranged their entire governmental system, and were no longer alien to us.............

You should remember this fact every time you see one of these assholes on TV saying “CHINESE COMMUNISM.” They are purposefully trying to confuse you by dragging up imagery of boogiemen from the 20th century.
UNQUOTE
Words are tools used by speakers, writers, politicians, liars, criminals, mass murderers, etc. This is part of a Big Lie

 

China Using Stolen Technology To Improve Its War Machines Says Rand Corporation  [ 26 July 2021 ]
QUOTE
China is racing to catch up to the military superiority of the United States. It’s doing so by beefing up domestic innovation efforts in tandem with ongoing intellectual property theft efforts, according to a recent think tank report.

At the same time, the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is hindered by both the trappings of a socialist command economy and the inability to develop cutting-edge technology on its own, the RAND Corporation report (pdf) titled “Defense Acquisition in Russia and China,” said.

According to the June report, “China’s reliance on intellectual property theft means its weapons are years behind, but the Chinese recognize that shortcoming and are investing in and growing organic capabilities through joint ventures and acquisition of foreign technology.”...............

The CCP’s “reliance on theft of intellectual property for its weapon development has helped keep it competitive but has pegged it several years behind the cutting edge,” according to RAND. This has led China to increase efforts in its own R&D....................

Further, “The design of Chinese defense contracts also does little to encourage transparency and accountability.” The language in contracts is vague, contract winners are guaranteed a share of profits on top of costs, and low bidders for contracts are given consolation projects. These vestiges of the command economy result in little to no incentive to innovate, according to RAND.
UNQUOTE
The Rand Corporation is paid to produce reports that do not tread on too many toes. A lot of students in American universities are Chinese. Some go to defence firms in America to see how it is done then go back. The Americans are whistling in the wind. For the truth about American decline as China prospers look at what Fred Reed tells us about the Anatomy Of A Suicide. Or just watch Joe Biden presiding over American death throes. Before taking RAND seriously look at what The Saker says about Many Interesting Developments In Russia. Their war machines are very good. World War III will be well worth missing.

 

China Considering Preemptive Nuclear Strike Policy   [ 25 September 2021 ]
QUOTE
China must be ready to use nuclear weapons and should abandon its 'no-first-use' policy to push back against new alliances forming in the Pacific, a senior diplomat has said. 

Sha Zukang, the country's former ambassador to the UN, told a summit of Chinese nuclear policy experts that it is time to 're- examine and fine-tune' a long-standing commitment to only use nukes in retaliation as the US 'builds new military alliances and as it increases its military presence in our neighbourhood.'

Beijing's current policy - which has been in place since the 1960s - has given China the 'moral high ground' but 'is not suitable . . . unless China-US negotiations agree that neither side would use [nuclear weapons] first,' he said at a meeting in Beijing last week.

Zukang's comments - which come as China builds hundreds of new nuclear missile silos - are significant because Beijing often floats changes of policy through senior diplomats. The body he was speaking to - the China Arms Control and Disarmament Association - is officially independent, but has strong ties to the Communist party.

He spoke in the same week the US announced a major new alliance with the UK and Australia - dubbed AUKUS - to provide the latter with its first nuclear-powered submarines, a major technological advancement that is clearly designed to counter-balance Chinese power in the Pacific.

Zukang's warning also comes in the wake of another alliance between the US, India, Japan and Australia - dubbed the Quad - with Joe Biden set to host the first in-person summit of leaders today. While the four are cooperating on a range of security issues, the growing threat from China is at the top of the agenda.
UNQUOTE
Do we need the problems? No! An interesting issue is the target list. Washington is the obvious front runner. Canberra or Perth, where Australian submarines live are possible. London? Well yes, preferably when  Johnson is there. A better choice would be Tel Aviv. The Chinese are bright enough to know who really runs America & it ain't the White House.

 

China Leads The World In Coal Pollution   [ 26 September 2021 ]
QUOTE
The billowing clouds of steam and smoke are visible from miles away. As night falls and the lights turn the sky neon bright as far as the eye can see, the chimneys keep remorselessly pumping out their toxic fumes. This is the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, one of the biggest industrial complexes in the world...........

Much of The Base, as it is known locally, is home to mines, which produce 130 million metric tones of coal a year — about the same as the annual total dug from all 233 deep mines still in use in Britain when coal was our biggest energy source in the 1970s.

The coal — the most polluting of all fossil fuels — is fed into an array of huge power stations at the complex, which have the capacity to generate 17.3 gigawatts. That would be enough to satisfy a third of the UK’s peak demand for electricity. Also to be found at The Base are 32 companies that use coal to make chemicals, so generating still more carbon pollution.

And on top of all this is the showpiece: the world’s largest coal-to-liquid (CTL) plant, run by the state-owned Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry Group.

Simply burning coal is dirty enough, producing more carbon dioxide than any other method of generating electricity — almost twice as much as burning natural gas. But making oil from coal is far worse: it can double the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere from every unit of energy..............

And The Base is not China’s only large CTL plant. There are at least six others in the country that are already built or under construction — and China says it plans to build still more in nations where it has lavished investment, such as Pakistan. 
UNQUOTE
This not really news but it is true. What does little Greta Thunberg have to say this? Not a lot. And the Greenies; they have produced a Deafening Silence. The agenda comes first; Truth is an inconvenient second.

 

China Does Some Sabre Rattling Near Taiwan  [ 2 October 2021 ]
QUOTE
China has flown 25 aircraft into Taiwan's airspace in the largest incursion for months as tensions in the region continue to build. 

Taipei said 22 fighters including 18 J-16 jets and four Su-30s accompanied two nuclear-capable H-6 bombers and one Y-8 recon plane on a mission Friday.

Fighters were scrambled in response while radio warnings were broadcast and missile defences activated to monitor the situation, Taiwan's military said.

It is the largest number of aircraft to enter Taiwan's 'air defence identification zone' since June 15, when 28 aircraft approached the island.

The mission comes amid mounting tensions in the region, following the AUKUS submarine pact which has enraged Beijing.
UNQUOTE
Would Joe Biden be fool enough to start World War III over Taiwan? Has he got what it takes to dress himself? Getting a grip of murderous hooligans like Milley and the other Chiefs of Staff is beyond him. But Fred understands the realities that Joe does not. Fred was there, for real in Viet Nam. Now he tells us How Taiwan Will Fall into Beijing’s Lap, Like an Overripe Mango.

 

Prisons At The Centre Of Peking's Clampdown On Muslims In Xinjiang Caught On Video  [ 22 November 2021 ]
QUOTE
As he strolled along the street in the Chinese city of Urumqi, trying his best to look like a tourist, Guan Guan’s heart was in his mouth. 

He knew this was not a place often visited by holidaymakers – and a camera hidden on his backpack was secretly filming the Communist regime’s internment camps.

The brave young man was on a covert mission: to expose to the world the hideous network of re-education camps, detention centres and prisons at the centre of Beijing’s brutal clampdown on Muslim minorities, especially the Uighurs, in Xinjiang province.

He knew that if caught by police, he would face terrible punishment for daring to reveal fresh evidence about the regime’s genocidal atrocities – which include holding an estimated two million people in such horrifying centres.

Guan had cycled around the region two years ago and heard about the camps, along with the banning of Uighur language in schools and use of slave labour. 

After discovering foreign journalists were barred from carrying out investigations, he decided to return to document the repression.
UNQUOTE
Heroic little Chinaman exposes evil Concentration Camps In China; the Mail exposes the truth. The Israel Prison Service exposes some of the brutal Concentration Camps In Israel; the Mail keeps very quiet about them, while Mohammed bin Salman approves of them, the Chinese that is.

 

Ten China Predictions For 2021 ex Godfree Roberts
QUOTE
A year ago in these pages, I made ten predictions about China’s upcoming year. Here’s how they turned out:

  1. GDP will expand by 10%. Wrong (it grew 8%).
  2. Most Fortune 500 companies will be Chinese. Right.
  3. China will create five new billionaires each week. Right. (It’s now the world’s richest country)
  4. Extreme poverty and homelessness will disappear. Right
  5. China will narrow its Gini gap. Unknown.
  6. Average Chinese will outlive Americans. Right. (US life expectancy fell 3 years).
  7. Chinese vaccines will protect 60% of the world . Wrong. (It was 50%)
  8. China will revolutionize urban life. Wrong. The new city will open in 2022 .
  9. China will unveil the first exascale computer . Right. Three, and the Gordon Bell Prize)
  10. China will announce another quantum surprise. Right. (A quantum computer 10,000 times faster than Google’s Sycamore).

In fact, 2021 was the best year in Chinese history. Here’s what they did:

  • Eliminated extreme poverty.
  • Achieved 98% home ownership.
  • Mastered Covid, with a death rate 0.6% of America’s.
  • Grew the economy faster than ever, by $2 trillion PPP, four times America’s rate.
  • Became the richest country on earth.
  • Built three exascale computers. One runs AI problems 88,000 times faster.
  • Brought two gas-cooled Pebble Bed nuclear power plants online.
  • Fired up two thorium-fueled reactors, eliminating uranium from power generation.
  • Certified a Covid treatment that reduces hospitalizations and deaths 78%.
  • Became the world’s largest movie market.
  • Successfully tested the world’s most powerful solid rocket engine.
  • Flew three hypersonic missiles around the planet.
  • Released a fractional orbital bombardment missile, at 17,000 mph.
  • Commissioned three warships at a time to become the biggest navy.
  • Issued the most patents of any country and dominated scientific research.
  • Sold $140 billion retail online in 24 hours. Amazon’s record is $5 billion.
  • Made 55% of global energy savings.
  • Generated 1 terawatt of renewable energy.
  • Produced a new billionaire and 300 millionaires every work day.
  • Completed new train lines in seven countries, including Laos’ first.
  • Ran 12,000 cargo trains to and from Europe, up 30% on last year.
  • Joined RCEP, the world’s biggest trade pact.
  • Launched the world’s first central bank digital currency.
  • Built a programmable quantum computer 10,000x faster than Google’s.
  • Operated the first integrated, 3,000-mile, commercial quantum communications network.
  • Installed one-million 5G base stations, giving Tibet better 5G service than New York.
  • Communicated between satellites via lasers, 1,000x faster than radio waves.

Godfree wrote Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom, and publishes the newsletter, Here Comes China.
UNQUOTE
I do not trust our little Godfree; nor do the Chinese. At all events they don't let him live there. Is he telling the truth? Probably. Links make things checkable. China is on the up as America is being destroyed by Jews.

 

G7 Governments Opposing Chinese New Silk Road With $600 Billion Plan   [ 28 June 2022 ]
QUOTE
G7 leaders last night revealed a $600billion investment plan for the developing world in a stinging rebuke to China's Belt and Road Initiative for global expansion.

The £488billion Partnership for Global Infrastructure (PGII) will go head-to-head with China's multi-trillion dollar investment plan for scores of low and middle-incomes nations.

Under Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Chinese firms are already building roads, bridges and airports in 70 countries where China is seeking greater influence.

The pursuit of a 'new Silk Road' trade route between Asia and Europe is the flagship of President Xi Jinping's plans for Chinese expansion.

It is made up of a 'belt' of six overland corridors that direct trade to and from China and a maritime 'road' of shipping routes and seaports from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.
UNQUOTE
The Chinese are building up their export routes so they can make more and sell more. That is their Belt and Road Initiative with more railways & better deep water ports all over. The American approach is wasting money, building more war machines. Just how many aircraft carriers do they need? They have maybe 12 operational and three more on the stocks.

This Partnership for Global Infrastructure (PGII) seems like a pathetic response to China's free trade operations, throwing money at what? A lot of it will be wasted on the Green New Deal or similar nonsense. Be aware that Sanctions against Russia are reducing oil and gas imports from Russia. There will be real shortages in Europe, factories shutting, lights going out, even food riots.
PS  A City man explains the disaster that Sanctions imposed by the American Department of State are causing; it is going to get much worse.

 

Chinese Will Shoot Down Pelosi Going To Taiwan  [ 1 August 2022 ]
QUOTE
China fired its most direct warning shot yet amid reports that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may visit Taiwan on Friday, saying that if the speaker's plane is accompanied by U.S. fighter jets, they would not rule out shooting them down.

'If US fighter jets escort Pelosi's plane into Taiwan, it is invasion. The PLA has the right to forcibly dispel Pelosi's plane and the US fighter jets, including firing warning shots and making tactical movement of obstruction. If ineffective, then shoot them down,' Hu Xijin, a commentator with the Chinese state-affiliated Global Times, wrote on Twitter.  

Earlier China warned the U.S. against crossing a 'red line' as it released not-so-subtle warnings against the speaker, which China has reasoned is number three in line in U.S. government, from visiting Taiwan................

National Security Spokesman John Kirby said Friday the Pentagon has seen no indication of a military threat [ because they weren't looking? ]. 

'We just don't have any concrete indications of something happening from a military perspective on the Chinese part,' Kirby said. 

'There's no reason for it to come to come to blows, to come to increased physical tension. There's no reason for that because there's been no change in American policy,' he added.  

The speaker has not confirmed whether she will visit the island democracy during an Asian tour that includes stops in Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore. In response to a question about the potential Taiwan trip on Friday, Pelosi only said: 'I don't talk about my travel because it's a security issue.'
UNQUOTE
American commentators like the idea of her getting shot down. Is she trying to start World War III? She might be that stupid, that vicious but no great loss.

 

Pelosi Tries To Start Third World War And Fails Pro Tempore  [ 2 August 2022 ]
QUOTE
Speaker Nancy Pelosi defied Beijing on Tuesday when she landed in Taiwan after repeated warnings from the Chinese not to visit the island nation, which they said marked a 'violation of the one-China principle.'

Her Air Force plane - with its distinctive blue and white colors and American flag on the tail - touched down in Taipei at 10:45 pm local time. She disembarked a few minutes later, wearing a pink pants suit and white face mask. A contingent of Taiwan officials, including Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, greeted her on the tarmac. 

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately blasted the move, calling it a 'serious disregard of China's strong opposition and violation of one-china principle.' 'It has a severe impact on the political foundations of China-U.S. relations and seriously infringes upon China's sovereignty and territorial integrity,' the ministry said.

Pelosi' visit makes her the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the island in 25 years. It enraged China, which sees the self-governing island nation as its own territory, despite never having governed it. Chinese President Xi Jinping has threatened to unite the two nations by force............

As the speaker's Air Force C40 approached Taipei, Chinese Air Force Su-35 fighter jets were crossing the Taiwan Straits, local media outlets reported................

Eight US F-15 fighter jet and five tanker aircraft took off from a U.S. base in Okinawa to provide protection for Pelosi's flight, NHK reported........

'Our visit is one of several Congressional delegations to Taiwan – and it in no way contradicts longstanding United States policy, guided by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, U.S.-China Joint Communiques and the Six Assurances. The United States continues to oppose unilateral efforts to change the status quo,' she noted [ stated/said/claimed/alleged  ].
UNQUOTE
The American State Department is run by Jews, the Zionist crazies who wormed their way in to screw Russia. They provoked the current war in the Ukraine. Now they are trying to do it with the Chinese.

 

China Responds To American Provocation  [ 18 August 2022 ]
QUOTE
As the US continued its provocation to China by sending a delegation of five lawmakers to China's Taiwan region, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) Eastern Theater Command organized multi-unit joint combat readiness patrols and real-combat drills in the sea areas and airspace around the Taiwan island on Monday, serving as a firm response and solemn deterrent to the provocation and collusion between the US and the Taiwan island..........

The reportedly two-day visit of US lawmakers, led by Ed Markey, member of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, came just 12 days after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island - a highly provocative and reckless move that seriously trampled on the one-China principle and undermined the fundamentals of China-US relations, leading to a series of countermeasures from Beijing including sanctioning Pelosi and her immediate family members, halting military and climate change talks between the two countries. 
UNQUOTE
The American State Department is provoking China with Malice Aforethought. It did the same to Russia, whence the war in the Ukraine. What are the motives? China is working, trading, succeeding, growing while America is dying. America Has Become A Puppet Of Israel. The head office is in Tel Aviv. The Biden administration has an election coming in November so distracting the voters makes some sort of sense. Argentina tried that idea. Invading the Falklands was the approach. It failed big time. Men died but Galtieri didn't care about them, nor does Biden.

 

White House Approves Weapon Sales To Taiwan   [ 4 September 2022 ]
QUOTE
The Biden administration sent formal notifications to the US Congress on Friday of the intent to sell radars, anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles to Taiwan. The total value of the equipment and maintenance contracts adds up to just over $1.1 billion.

This is the fifth – and the largest so far – weapons package for Taiwan approved by the current US government. Its most expensive component is a SRP surveillance radar system, valued at $665.4 million, followed by 60 Harpoon anti-ship missiles worth $355 million and 100 Sidewinder anti-aircraft missiles worth $85.6 million. The contracts also include related equipment, parts and maintenance.

The three contracts were green-lit by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency to Congress on Friday, as part of the formal notification process.

Earlier this week, after some US outlets published the leaked details of the sales, China warned the US against such a move. A spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said Beijing would respond with “decisive and firm measures” if the US continues to sell weapons to Taipei...............

Though President Joe Biden’s government has ramped up US weapons sales to Taiwan, none of the approved shipments have been delivered yet, according to the Washington Post..............

The White House’s senior director for Taiwan and China, Laura Rosenberger, told the Post there has been a “substantial effort” to accelerate the process, and that the Biden administration is “acutely aware of the need [ sic ] to expedite delivery.”

Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress are working on streamlining the sales process, looking at changes to rules requiring an assessment of whether such weapons can end up in the wrong hands or pose a threat to US national security interests.
UNQUOTE
Rosenberger, a Jew naturally enough is a sociologist with a big mouth and deeply ingrained ignorance of anything worthwhile. So her face fits. The American State Department, which is run by Zionist crazies is trying to start World War III against Russia and China at the same time. One might hope that China has Tel Aviv and Washington on its Preemptive Nuclear Strike List.

 

Chinese Delegation Warmly Received In Taiwan  [ 24 February 2023 ]
QUOTE
I think even some of my anti-US government readers think I’m exaggerating or trolling when I say that the opposition to reunification in Taiwan, is now a tiny astroturfed group of dumb whores and homosexual extremists. However, I am being perfectly straightforward with you.

The basic fact is this: Chinese people care about money and doing business. They don’t care about abstract Western ideals of “democracy.” In fact, they do not even grasp these concepts.

If they appeared to grasp them historically, it’s because the island of  under US occupation, was previously much better off economically than mainland China, and therefore it was financially advantageous for the people of Taiwan to oppose reunification. Now, the US government is asking the Taiwanese to go to war with China while also making massive financial sacrifices by not doing business with the now very rich mainland.

Insofar as there are nationalists in Taiwan, those people have flipped as well, because Beijing is now ultranationalist. Chiang Kai-shek’s party, the KMT, is now the party calling for reunification, because opposition to Beijing is looked at as anti-nationalist. Aside from that, nationalism is typically associated with traditional values, and the US occupation is pushing gay sex and vaginal dominance.

The US successfully created an extremist anti-Russian force in the Ukraine, but that has not been mirrored in Taiwan, and it won’t be. There is no serious resistance to reunification in Taiwan, at all, and there is very serious energy behind those resisting the US agenda for stupid, pointless war [ such as World War III ].
UNQUOTE
If you want good sense ignore the Mainstream Media; go to honest sources like Unz.com or the Irish Savant.

 

 

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
 
Email me at Mike Emery. All financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want