Tag: China

China Was Prepared

Larry Johnson notes that China is the dog that isn’t barking about the oil shortages:

Outbound tanker traffic through Hormuz has fallen to almost nothing, and yet China — the world’s largest crude importer — is not the one panicking. It runs much of its supply through pipelines that no tanker rate can touch, and in August it pushed refined-fuel exports above pre-war levels, with jet fuel exports hitting an all-time high. The country that everyone predicted would be crippled by a Gulf shutdown is instead exporting fuel into the shortage, at its own discretion and on its own terms.

That is the shape of it. The world’s fuel crisis has three legs, not two: the crude that cannot leave the Gulf, the refineries that cannot run, and the ships that cannot get where they are needed at a price anyone can afford. The West is exposed on all three because it moves its energy over open water. China, having spent a decade laying pipe instead of chartering ships, is exposed on almost none of them.

Clown World’s strategy has been so wildly counterproductive that one is almost tempted to conclude that the White Hats really are in charge of the Trump administration. If we look at what has actually been accomplished, as opposed to the relentless rhetoric and the aggressive philosemitism, things actually look fairly positive for the complete collapse of Clown World.

Of course, we still have to survive the economic collapse, the political unrest, the regional wars, and the general instability, but that was always going to be necessary. But the economic and military might of Clown World have already been observably broken.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Usual End

Larry Johnson explains that Clown World has reached the exit stage with its failed 30-year Ukraine project.

The war in Ukraine was not a crisis that erupted in 2022. It was the payoff of a deliberate, decades-long Western project to turn Ukraine into an instrument for weakening Russia — carried out under the cover of “partnership” and “peacekeeping.” And having spent thirty years building that instrument, Washington and NATO will do with Ukraine exactly what they have done with every client before it: discard it the moment it stops paying…

Here is how it gets discarded. Any foreign government that trusts an American security promise should first study what happened to the South Vietnamese, the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Libyans, the Cambodians. When a war stops serving Washington’s purposes, the U.S. says adios.

The recriminations over the failed counteroffensive are the opening of exactly that. The West is lining up to blame Kyiv while its pledges of weapons turn out to be lip service. The maritime-drone strikes on Russian ships are pinpricks — militarily trivial, and dangerous mainly because the Western surveillance that guides them invites Russian retaliation against NATO reconnaissance over the Black Sea and stiffens Moscow’s resolve to strangle Ukraine’s ports. If you want an honest barometer of where this war is heading, forget the briefings from British intelligence and the Institute for the Study of War. Watch for the day the London bookmakers start taking bets on when Zelensky falls.

It’s not the USA proper, of course. It’s the Clown World imperialists who have hijacked the US military for its globalist satanic purposes. Fortunately, the nations that remained sovereign and independent now have the upper hand, which is why the Ukraine project failed, why the Gulf project is failing, and why BRICS is supplanting the G7 as the most important economic organization in the world.

While Mr. Johnson is watching for Zelensky’s fall, I’m more interested in seeing a) when Taiwan officially reunifies with the mainland, b) when Japan frees itself from the US military occupation, and c) how the Korean reunification plays out. Unlike the German reunification, which played into Clown World’s hands, these three events likely demonstrate the opposite.

DISCUSS ON SG

Why Russia Can’t Stop

The special military operation in Ukraine is not about Ukraine. It was never about Ukraine. The Russians have been telling everyone this from the start, but the media refuses to report the truth about the nature and scale of the conflict.

The world has entered an era of major transformation. In that sense, the narrow focus is – will they reach an agreement on Ukraine? No. Every time you think about that, you have to recall how it all started, why it is like this, how wrongly the world is structured, how important it is for Russia to insist on its interests, why the European bureaucracy itself cannot accept that, because otherwise that would mean the end of both it and the political class of many countries. Why can’t this conflict stop? Because it can’t be settled. Someone has to win. Just as with the US and Iran (which, incidentally, is a much more local conflict) – it is impossible to agree, there can be no deal. There can only be some movement in which one of the sides explicitly or implicitly recognizes its defeat. It may not be total defeat, but at least at some stage one side wins and the other side does not recognize it. Such a process will last a long time, but in the end there will still be some de facto consolidation of the results of this conflict. Not a negotiated one, unfortunately, but a factual one. Diplomats may formalize such a conclusion, or they may not. Frankly, that is no longer important.

When we talk about Russia-US negotiations on Ukraine, there are two extremes, and both miss the essence. Yes, we are negotiating, and we constantly demonstrate that Russia and the US have nothing to fight over. We are ready to coexist with the US on the same globe. That is exactly why Putin says: “Of course, Kushner and Witkoff are welcome guests, come. What else should we show you from Moscow’s kitchen?” You see, the US cannot conduct negotiations on Ukraine because it cannot force either Kiev, London, or Brussels to accept Russia’s reasonable demands. And how are they going to pressure Russia? I think the Trump administration more or less understands that it is pointless. So what kind of negotiations on Ukraine can there be?

As I said back in 2022, we’re already in WWIII. It’s not as dramatic as WWII or as violent on the battlefield as WWI, because the grounds being contested are more abstract than material. Right now, the most significant front is the Strait of Hormuz, which has serious ramifications for Venezuela and Canada due to the global importance of oil. But there is no violence on the second front, which is China, Taiwan, and Japan, and the real question is the destiny of the latter.

Taiwan island is already lost to China. Its fate, already obvious, was absolutely sealed with the defeat of the US Navy by Yemen and Iran. A navy that cannot impose its will on third- and fifth-rate coastal powers cannot hope to contest the will of a primary regional power in its own sphere of influence. Everyone understands this, even though the Chinese are too polite and the Americans are too embarrassed to admit it in public.

The real question is when Japan will throw off its occupation by the USA, which will probably require some sort of mutual assistance arrangement with China. The US military does not give up its bases easily, as the Philippines, the Europeans, and the Iraqis have learned, but it will give them up under pressure. And only the Chinese can provide the Japanese with the amount of pressure they will require to free themselves from the financial servitude under which they have labored, at great and increasing cost to their nation, for the last 70 years.

So that’s the big event that I think will make this global transformation undeniable even to those who still think nothing has changed and we are still living in the post-WWII era. An agreement of some sort between China and Japan, followed by a US withdrawal from its bases in the Home Islands and Okinawa.

On a related note, my guess about the recent visits to Moscow by the CIA Director and the senior negotiators is that Russia and the USA are in the process of reaching an agreement concerning what Russia will be permitted to do to defend itself against the UK and German logistical support for Ukrainian attacks without the USA agreeing to accept those states’ subsequent attempts to invoke NATO Article 5. Note that the USA has absolutely no obligation to take part in any so-called “collective self-defense,” only “such action as it deems necessary.”

The Russian embassy in Berlin has stated “From this point forward, facilities in Germany that house long-range (weapons) systems (being used by Ukraine to attack Russia) will be considered legitimate targets. This comes as German Chancellor Merz this week showcased factories in Germany that hope to produce 5,000 attack drones per month for Ukraine, to make long-range-strikes into Russia. As most people would probably guess, the very first time Russia hits a factory inside Germany, the country of Germany will attempt to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, “Collective Self Defense.”

DISCUSS ON SG

The Great Bifurcation Advances

The Chinese Supreme Court has made it clear that China is now forcing corporations to choose between respecting US sanctions or respecting their existing contracts with Chinese businesses:

China’s top court recently highlighted the first judicial ruling establishing the mandatory nature of its Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, which experts say could provide legal precedent and guide Chinese companies facing increasingly frequent overseas sanctions amid intensifying geopolitical tensions.

The case, heard by the Shanghai Maritime Court, centred on a dispute that involved US sanctions, a Singapore shipping company, a Hong Kong-based company and electronic goods shipped from Shanghai. In 2022, the Hong Kong-based company hired a Singaporean shipping firm to transport electronic goods from Shanghai to Panama, but the Singaporean firm later refused to deliver them and eventually returned the cargo to Shanghai, citing the Hong Kong company’s inclusion on a United States sanctions list. That caused losses for the Hong Kong company.

A court judgment unveiled last month showed the Shanghai court ruled against the Singaporean firm in February, ordering it to pay more than 4.99 million yuan (US$739,600) in damages plus interest and holding that it could not use a foreign country’s “discriminatory restrictions” as a defence under Article 12 of China’s Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law.

The case was included in a selection of illustrative maritime cases by the Supreme People’s Court that was released in June. In its commentary on the selection, the top court said the case was “the first judicial ruling to explicitly establish the mandatory application of the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law”. It added that the case carried “strong exemplary significance” in demonstrating how China’s maritime courts implement the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law – which took effect in 2021 – and safeguard the stability of supply and industrial chains.

Given the size of the Chinese market and the growing power of its economy, it’s pretty obvious which side most Asian corporations are going to take. What will be interesting is to see how many Japanese and European corporations also choose China.

Regardless, the failure of sanctions with regards to both Russia and Iran now demonstrate that it’s a weapon that harms the wielder more than it does the target.

DISCUSS ON SG

Fact Check

Pictures of former US presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush touching the Western Wall in Jerusalem were misrepresented online as taken in the Great Wall of China. Posts shared globally falsely claimed the pictures showed the former leaders “swearing allegiance” to the Chinese Communist Party

It’s good the fact-checkers got this sorted out. Obviously, US presidents swear allegiance to Israel, not to the Chinese Communist Party. We wouldn’t want Americans to think their leaders are working for the wrong foreign country!

DISCUSS ON SG

The China That Can Say No

China is the first Iranian trading partner, but will not be the only one, to reject the USA’s desperate attempt to win on the economic front what it lost on both the military and the economic fronts:

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting: Donald Trump has threatened to wage a full-fledged economic war on Iran. Many say the economic threat is aimed at making up for the failure of the war, in the military domain, that the U.S. and Israel waged against Iran. What’s your take on that?

Lin Jian: Sanctions and pressure tactics are not the solution. China calls on parties to act responsibly and stick to the political and diplomatic approach. 

Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting: Iran has endured years of sanctions imposed by the U.S. The Islamic Republic has either managed to bypass or find alternatives. And now it is said that Trump has no tangible card to enforce what he claims as “toughest sanctions.” What’s your viewpoint?

Lin Jian: China believes that military means, sanctions and pressure tactics are not the solution. On the contrary, they will only lead to escalation that serves no one’s interests. We call for efforts to solve disputes through dialogue and negotiation.

AFP: A follow-up on Iran, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged China to join Washington in putting strong economic pressure on Iran. This was in an interview yesterday. Bessent noted that China has historically imported much of its energy from the Gulf. Does the foreign ministry have a response to these comments by Bessent?

Lin Jian: I answered a similar question yesterday. Let me reiterate, China opposes illicit unilateral sanctions that lack basis in international law and UN Security Council mandate. We call on parties to act responsibly and stick to the political and diplomatic approach.

In other words, China will continue to ignore US demands and it will continue to support its ally and trading partner, Iran.

In not entirely unrelated news, I was rather impressed with the geopolitical analysis of US-China relations on the third episode of the fourth season of Lioness. I also found it amusing how assiduously the show avoided making any reference to Israel whatsoever in its discussion of intelligence operations in the United States.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Return to Militarism

It was always inevitable, but now it’s real, if not yet official:

Recently, Japanese vessels and aircraft have provoked and harassed a Chinese naval formation carrying out routine training missions. The Global Times obtained an exclusive audio recording in which Japan’s Self-Defense Forces referred to itself as the “Japan Navy.” In response, the Chinese navy task group has taken firm stance and corrected Japan’s mistaken rhetoric.

“Chinese Navy task group, this is ‘Japan Navy’. We are conducting lawful activities in the international airspace in accordance with the international law. Out.” according to the audio.

In response, the Chinese side made correction: “Japanese aircraft, this is China Navy task group. Your so-called ‘Japan Navy’ has violated your constitution. You can only keep Self-Defense forces. Pay attention to your words. Over.”

However, the Japanese side refused to correct the mistake, and claimed that “China Navy task group, this is ‘Japan Navy’. We are keeping safe distance in accordance with international law and practice. Out.”

The Chinese side then responded that “Japanese aircraft, this is China Navy task group. Warning: in case of misunderstanding and miscalculation, stop your action and leave immediately. Over.”

We all know it’s “the Japanese Navy”. And it’s about time. Of course, the official change probably won’t come until just before the Japanese throw off Clown World control and switch sides to become allies with China.

Which, of course, sounds far-fetched, but it’s something that I nevertheless anticipate.

DISCUSS ON SG

How to Stop Corruption

China has a less-corrupt government system than any government in the West these days.

A court in eastern China has sentenced a former city official to death for taking more than 2.2bn yuan ($325m; £243m) in bribes over 30 years.

Yang Youlin, who served in various positions in Nanjing city from 1993 to 2023, was also convicted of embezzlement, abuse of power and money laundering, with his ill-gotten gains amounting to one of the highest in recent years.

The 69-year-old exploited his roles to help others secure engineering contracts, land transfers and financing, in exchange for money and valuables, said state media.

Yang was investigated as part of President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption crackdown which has cut through military ranks and high-level banking, among other sectors.

Yang, who spent much of his career working on economic and technological development in Nanjing, had committed offences “of an extremely serious nature” and “caused exceptionally heavy losses to the interests of the state and the people”, a court in Changzhou city said on Monday.

Since coming to power, President Xi has launched waves of anti-corruption drives, which critics say have also been used as a tool to purge political rivals.

Death sentences for white collar crimes however remain rare, though they are meted out occasionally, typically if the cases involve large sums exceeding 1bn yuan.

For instance, former finance chief Lai Xiaomin was executed in 2021 for taking 1.8bn yuan in bribes over a 10-year period.

Li Jianping, a former Inner Mongolia official, was executed in 2024 for embezzling and taking bribes totaling more than 3bn yuan.

In many other cases, the courts handed out jail terms or suspended death sentences, which get commuted to life imprisonment after a specified duration.

If your political rivals are corrupt, then obviously an anti-corruption campaign will purge them. That’s a feature, not a bug. The difference between Xi and the ineffectual Trump could not be more obvious than the former’s massively successful war on corruption and Trump’s total failure to arrest or convict, let alone execute, a single traitorous and corrupt government pedophile.

There’s no excuse for that. Waging a stupid and disastrous war on Iran while failing to make peace with Russia is always going to be a major stain on his legacy. But that’s how things go for big-talking cowards. Sooner or later, the rhetoric has to become real, or it just looks ridiculous.

Trump isn’t a terrible president. But he had a real opportunity for greatness, and for one reason or another, he failed to seize his moment. Now, barring the possibility that there are things going on that we can’t presently see, it appears he’ll go down with his friends in Clown World.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Great Fiction of 1989

It’s not hard to understand why the Chinese have absolutely no trust of Clown World or its pet media once one learns the truth of Tiananmen Square. And it does tend to call other Western media reports of China into question.

The US reportedly contacted key leaders among the protesting students and made them an offer—don’t wind down, go harder on the protesting and we’ll give you US passports, CIA-run safe passage out of China, a new home in the richest country in the world, and enrolment in top US universities—Harvard, Princeton, Columbia. Now that was an offer hard to refuse.

In late May, student leader Chai Ling gave her infamously puzzling interview/ talk, where she seemed to predict a Tiananman Square massacre in which she would die. She said she was speaking her last words, as there would be “a massacre which would spill blood like a river through Tiananmen Square” – but she also included the information that she “would not be there” as her new plan was to move to the United States to study there! Years later, she wrote that her remarkable prediction of a coming violent crackdown which would lead to a Tiananmen Square massacre was something she had heard from Li Lu, not her own forecast.

Another person in the leading student group, Kong Qingdong, later recalled how he how he had come across undergraduates using a mimeograph machine to makes copies of personal documents, to give to the US Embassy in return for passports. Two of the top leaders, Chai Ling and Feng Congde, were getting them, he was told by fellow undergraduates.

Kong refused to join the rush to take US passports, saying that the protest was all about making China a better place.
Kong angrily declined to join them. He felt the protests were about standing up for China and enabling socialist modernization for the people—not grabbing passports handed out by a hostile foreign power.

Something else was troubling Kong, which he found hard to articulate. He later said: “I wasn’t fond of the way the forceful way the government spoke. But what they were actually saying was: ‘This is a complex situation. There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord.’ This was the truth.”

Think about that line of agreement between the students and the government: There are certain forces behind the scenes, sowing discord. In other words, some protesters as well as the government knew what was really happening under the surface. But if things were calming down, what changed? How did violence break out? Kong’s answer to that question was cryptic. “When we were little, we watched movies like Guerrillas Sweep The Plain,” he said.

That answer would have meant nothing to a western audience—but it was clear to many Chinese. This was a reference to a classic 1955 Chinese movie in which there are tensions between two groups. They have disagreements but don’t fight. Suddenly, a hidden third body, the Eighth Army, opens fire at both sides and then quickly hides, triggering bloodshed.

And that is what happened. Soldiers and students were sharing food. But on June 3, mysterious thugs, some of whom were said to be from ethnic minorities, triggered a fight in Mu Xi Di, in the west of the city, attacking army buses with petrol bombs and setting them alight, burning the occupants to death. The perpetrators were never found.

Soldiers who managed to escape the burning buses were beaten to death. Other military men arrived and chaotic fighting broke out, with scores of deaths.

This was five kilometers away from Tiananmen Square.

At the Square, in the early hours of June 4, soldiers arrived and called on students to leave. Student leader Feng Congde worked to gauge protesters’ opinions, and concluded that the majority wanted to vacate the space. “So I announced the decision to leave,” he said. Students left peacefully.

Violence did break out, not in the square, but in the streets around it.

One witness, Larry Wortzel, watched protesters attack a military vehicle and noted how well it was organized—someone had definitely trained them. “This was clearly a tactic rehearsed and even practiced among the demonstrators, since it was used in the same way in separate places around the city,” he wrote.

“All verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully,” said the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews.

Now this is where it gets strange. The next day, a very different story appeared from a few foreign embassies saying that 10,000 people had been killed. This tale said the students in the square had not left. They had stayed and been massacred with machine guns, their bodies pushed into piles with bulldozers, and then incinerated by troops with flamethrowers. This gruesome horror story, supported by no evidence at all, is now viewed by eastern and western historians as entirely fictional.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Turning Point

As I’ve been pointing out for the last few years now, the USA is no longer a global superpower. It’s now been demoted to major regional power, which is very far from nothing, but its pretensions at pursuing elite interests in the name of playing global policeman are observably over:

Last week’s Trump-Xi summit produced no dramatic declaration or historic treaty – yet its importance may prove far greater than any immediate deliverable. What happened in Beijing was not a breakthrough in policy but a breakthrough in recognition: the United States openly acknowledged China as an equal center of global power. That alone marks a historic turning point.

For decades, American administrations approached China from the assumption that Beijing was either a manageable challenger or a state that would eventually integrate into a US-led international order on American terms. The summit suggested something fundamentally different.

US President Donald Trump appeared compelled to recognize that China is no longer simply a rival great power but a central pillar of the emerging world order – one that Washington can neither isolate nor overpower. This was the true message of the summit.

Neither Washington nor Beijing expected immediate breakthroughs. The summit was never realistically supposed to solve structural tensions overnight. Its purpose was to stabilize relations between two powers which are increasingly aware that prolonged escalation has become prohibitively costly. The talks reflected the reality that the US now needs stable engagement with China as much as China needs stable engagement with the US. This mutual dependency is perhaps uncomfortable, but it is also unavoidable – neither full confrontation nor full separation is sustainable anymore.

For years, the Americans described China as a revisionist actor seeking to overturn the international order. But the Beijing summit demonstrated something more consequential: the international order itself is already changing. Many countries have begun treating China not merely as a competitor to the US, but as a parallel – and in some respects superior – center of global gravity.

The post-WWII international order is now over. Clown World is still scrambling to control what it can, but it is in disarray. Which means these will continue to be interesting and tumultuous times.

DISCUSS ON SG