Tag: China

If the Dollar is Their Superpower

Then their global hegemony is rapidly coming to an end:

The dollar is America’s superpower. It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy. And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt, usually in the form of T-bills, will be bought up by the rest of the world.

Sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine combined with Washington’s increasingly confrontational approach to China have created a perfect storm in which both Russia and China are accelerating efforts to diversify away from the dollar. Their central banks are keeping less of their reserves in dollars, and most trade between them is being settled in the yuan. They are also, as Putin noted, making efforts to get other countries to follow suit…

America’s politicians have gotten used to spending seemingly without any concerns about deficits — public debt has risen almost fivefold from roughly $6.5 trillion 20 years ago to $31.5 trillion today. The Fed has solved a series of financial crashes by massively expanding its balance sheet twelvefold, from around $730 billion 20 years ago to about $8.7 trillion today. All of this only works because of the dollar’s unique status. If that wanes, America will face a reckoning like none before.

The decline of the US financial superweapon will be exacerbated by the emergence of China as a financial safe harbor, at least for those who have not spent the last decade attacking it or attempting to subvert it.

The unfolding banking crisis in the US and Europe could highlight China as a “relative safe haven,” economists at Citi said in a note seen by CNBC. The Chinese economy could see accelerated expansion this year, giving the country a “hedge” for growth while economies in the US and Europe face heightened risk of financial disruption, according to the note.

It’s going to be interesting. That’s the only thing we can know for certain. And both one’s investment and consumption should be directed toward hard assets that will hold their value regardless of price levels.

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Russia Backs Chinese Reunification

It’s clear that Taiwan is the next major front in the global declownization program. I still anticipate it will be peaceful, despite the best efforts of the neoclowns to start another war there.

Vladimir Dzhabarov, the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council’s International Relations Committee, said on Monday’s episode of Rossiya-24 television that Russia hopes Taiwan will peacefully rejoin China, according to Russian news agency TASS.

“This is a single territory. We are not talking about Taiwan’s sovereignty: It’s the territory of the People’s Republic of China. We hope that Taiwan’s reunification with China will take place peacefully sooner or later,” Dzhabarov said.

The lawmaker asserted that Russia will always support mainland China and agrees with every position Beijing takes toward Taipei.

Clown World is crumbling fast.

Antisemitism, Han-style

Only a few years after rejecting the planned “leap to China”, Tablet laments the way the Chinese are now actively turning against the Jewish people for reasons that appear to be based on nothing more than a straightforward observation of the decline and incipient fall of the United States over the 20th century.

According to Lu’s videos and commentary, Jews are manipulators, penny-pinchers, loan sharks, and drug dealers. More than an ethnic group bound by blood and history, they operate like a private club, an elitist cabal whose members are linked by a web of common interests, “especially the American Jews.” It is through these social connections that Jews have infiltrated key global positions and “took control of the three cornerstones of American society, namely finance, media, and culture.” The Jewish penetration of American power is so far advanced that the Bush, Obama, and Biden families and administrations have all fallen prey to Jewish influence. Because Jews control the anti-China U.S. media and hold key positions in Biden’s anti-China cabinet, they are the “ideological voice” of the United States, the spearhead of the West’s accelerating crusade against the Chinese government and people.

How perfectly outrageous! This Chinese criticism of an innocent and saintly people who have never harmed anyone and never done nothing wrong to nobody is hateful, antisemitic, and, unfortunately, appears to be 100-percent accurate.

The thing is, you can fool all the people some of the time, but if you’re an ethnic cabal of wicked pedophiles who believe you’re destined to rule the world on behalf of your master, Satan, eventually some of the people are going to notice this and take exception to both you and your objectives, no matter how many names you manage to call them.

And if you attack those who are doing nothing more than observably telling the readily-confirmable truth, eventually everyone is going to figure out that you’re a community of shameless liars and literally nothing that any of you say can be taken at face value.

Xi Xinping is the most intelligent world leader on the scene today. The great Chinese strategist Wang Hunin was 20 years ahead of me in his geostrategic observations. So, I very much doubt that anyone is going to be successful in gaslighting either of them, no matter how many Western institutions they happen to have at their disposal.

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The Decline of Europe

One very small example of how the decision to ostracize Russia is going to diminish Europe on the world stage:

The Russian chess body, which started the application process for the transfer in April 2022, joined the Asian Chess Federation (ACF) in a general-assembly vote which saw 29 delegates vote for the move, one delegate vote against, and six delegates abstain. The final transition is scheduled to take place officially on May 1.

This is the first time in history that a chess superpower has switched to another continent. Currently, Russia has 190 grandmasters listed by the FIDE, the most of any country in the world. Geographically, around 77 percent of Russia’s landmass is in Asia.

The influx of those highly rated Russian grandmasters to the Asian region may affect the chances of Asian players, such as those from China and India, to qualify for the World Championship cycle. However, this influx will also increase the quality of Asian chess competitions, which will benefit Asian players in the long run.

Such a change also means the 2023 World Chess Championship has become an intra-continental event rather than inter-continental one. China’s world No.3 Ding Liren will face Russian chess grandmaster Ian Nepomniachtchi, who is now sitting at second place in the world ratings by the FIDE, in the 2023 World Chess Championship after incumbent champion and world No.1 Magnus Carlsen decided not to defend his title.

Sure, it’s just chess, for now. But how long will it be before other sports follow suit? Quantity has a quality of its own. How long will it be before the big money begins to flow to Asia rather than to Europe? My expectation is that within 10 years, it will be the next Haaland, rather than the next Ronaldo, who will be signing for an Asian football club.

And based on the fact that this article is from Global Times, it is clear that the Chinese are very well aware of the long-term implications of this change of chess federations on the part of the Russian authority.

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The Folly of Ukraine

Karl Denninger explains how the imperial USA’s interventionist foreign policy is leading up to a Syracuse moment for the US empire:

It was only a matter of time before our so-called foreign policy turned into a serious problem with someone who can punch back.

For decades the United States has arrogated to itself the capacity to tell other nations who they should have as leaders. Who must run said nation, and who may not. The alliances that are to be coddled, and those that are forbidden. This is preposterous, of course, in that national sovereignty is precisely that, yet we have for decades believed we have the “righteous authority” to issue such diktat.

The CIA has toppled some 50 governments over time. Some more-or-less openly, some on the down low. Iran is an infamous one that ultimately blew up in our face. Deciding that the Iranian government was unacceptable because it expropriated the property of a British company, not even a US concern, we interfered, toppled the government and installed the Shah. This ultimately led to the Iranian revolution and the seizure of hostages at our Embassy, never mind a whole bunch of other terrorism.

We are very anti-narcotic and anti-serious drug — except, of course, when the use of the money generated suits us. Then its “oh well” or “oh, that’s sad”, even if the people that die from said drugs are in the United States, and they often are. Oliver North and the cocaine trade that was at the center of Iran-Contra anyone?

The United States was the initiator of events that led to the war in Ukraine. We were fully behind the overthrow of the government there back at the time of Maidan less than a decade ago. Said government was incorrigible, but that’s none of our business, right up until it apparently is and someone gets a wild hair in their backside about where someone’s using the money — or really, really likes the idea of being able to launder some as a US interest. Anything that gets in the way of that is, of course, unacceptable.

But for Maidan there would be no war in Ukraine. But for our continued attempts to do what we did with Turkey and missiles right near Russia there would have been no Cuban missile incident either. Yes, that was a crisis, but it was our making — not the USSR’s. Would you sit back and let some foreign nation put nuclear missiles in Mexico within a few minutes flight time of LA?

Didn’t think so.

Fundamentally the Ukraine problem lies there.

His analysis is correct, although I consider it to be partial and historically incomplete. Here is my not-unrelated perspective: the US empire, like most late-stage empires, is currently run by foreigners who have obtained power and influence through words, money, and the naivete of the native people. Those foreign rulers are now in the process of discovering the massive difference of being a parasite on another people and actually being responsible for all the various challenges of governing a major world power.

Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

It should be no surprise that the endeavor is going about as well as it did for the adopted gamma child who is suddenly given responsibility to provide for and protect the entire neighborhood. The challenge is not just beyond his abilities, it is beyond his imagination. And now the people who have never successfully managed a single state the size of Delaware are intentionally seeking direct conflict with the oldest and most successful civilization on Earth as well as with the second-greatest military power in human history.

The odds are not good.

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Restoring the Mandate of Heaven

Some observers believe the Chinese have already declared war on the United States – or to be more precise, the imperial rulers of Clown World – on the basis of their recent proposal for peace in Ukraine and a recently published essay concerning the Chinese position on US imperialism.

All these vectors are evolving as ramifications of the bombing of the Nord Streams, the only military attack – cum industrial terrorism – ever perpetrated against the EU, leave the Collective West paralyzed, dazed and confused.

Perfectly in tandem with Putin’s address, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs chose the geopolitical/existential moment to finally take the gloves off, with a flourish: enter the US Hegemony and its Perils essay cum report, which became an instant massive hit across Chinese media, examined with relish all across East Asia.

This blistering enumeration of all the Hegemon’s lethal follies, for decades, constitutes a point of no return for trademark Chinese diplomacy, so far characterized by passivity, ambivalence, actual restraint and extreme politeness. So such turnaround is yet another proud “achievement” of the outright Sinophobia and mendacious hostility exhibited by American neocons and neoliberal-cons.

Scholar Quan Le notes that this document may be regarded as the traditional form – but now filled with contemporary wording – the Chinese Sovereigns used in their millenary past before going to war. It is in fact an axio-epistemo-political proclamation justifying a serious war, which in the Chinese universe means a war ordained by a Higher Power capable of restoring Justice & Harmony in a troubled Universe.

After the proclamation the warriors are equipped to strike mercilessly at the entity judged to be troubling the Harmony of the Universe: in our case, the psycho Straussian neo-cons and neoliberal-cons commanded as rabid dogs by the real American elites.

Of course in the Chinese universe there’s no place for “God” – much less a Christian version; “God” for the Chinese means the Beauty-Goodness-Truth trinity, Timeless Heavenly Universal Principles. The closest concept for a non-Chinese to understand is Dao: the Way. So the Way to the Beauty-Goodness-Truth trinity represents symbolically Beauty-Goodness-Truth.

So what Beijing did – and the Collective West is completely clueless about it – was to issue an axio-epistemo-political proclamation explaining the legitimacy of their quest to restore Timeless Heavenly Universal Principles. They will be fulfilling the Mandate of Heaven – nothing less. The West won’t know what it hit them until it’s too late.

It was predictable that sooner or later the heirs of Chinese civilization would have had enough – and formally identify, mirroring Putin’s analysis, the upstart Hegemon as the premier source of chaos, inequality and war across the planet. Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder, in a nutshell.

To put it bluntly, in streetwise language, the hell with this Americana crap of hegemony being justified by “manifest destiny”.

So here we are. You want Hybrid War? We will return the favor.

This is distinct from the Unrestricted Warfare policy declared and successfully pursued by the Chinese military in 1999. The focus of that policy was to enable China to prevent US hegemony in Southeast Asia and gradually allow China to become a dominant regional power capable of defeating any enemy that dared to enter its zone of influence. It was essentially a defensive doctrine.

The new policy is a warning: mend your ways or else.

While a just cause wins its champion wide support, an unjust one condemns its pursuer to be an outcast. The hegemonic, domineering, and bullying practices of using strength to intimidate the weak, taking from others by force and subterfuge, and playing zero-sum games are exerting grave harm. The historical trends of peace, development, cooperation, and mutual benefit are unstoppable. The United States has been overriding truth with its power and trampling justice to serve self-interest. These unilateral, egoistic and regressive hegemonic practices have drawn growing, intense criticism and opposition from the international community.

Countries need to respect each other and treat each other as equals. Big countries should behave in a manner befitting their status and take the lead in pursuing a new model of state-to-state relations featuring dialogue and partnership, not confrontation or alliance. China opposes all forms of hegemonism and power politics, and rejects interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The United States must conduct serious soul-searching. It must critically examine what it has done, let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices.

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Red Lines

The USA consistently refused to respect Russia’s red lines. Why on Earth would China pay any attention whatsoever to whatever the USA claims its red lines to be?

Any nation providing lethal support to Moscow in its ongoing conflict with Kiev would cross Washington’s “red line,” the US envoy to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told CNN on Sunday. Earlier the same day, US State Secretary Antony Blinken directly warned a top Chinese diplomat, Wang Yi, against considering such an option.

“We … have to be clear that if there are any thoughts and efforts by the Chinese and others to provide lethal support to the Russians in their brutal attack against Ukraine, that that is unacceptable,” Thomas-Greenfield told CNN’s ‘State of the Union,’ adding that it “would be a red line.”

Her words came as Blinken was meeting Wang Yi on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference in Germany. There, the US diplomat told his Chinese counterpart that the US was “very concerned that China is considering providing lethal support to Russia,” Blinken told NBC’s Chuck Todd in the wake of the meeting.

This is what happens when you have a bunch of very special boys in charge of things. The neocons genuinely believe that they have the right to do whatever they see as in their own interest, but no one else has the same right.

Of course China is going to provide “lethal support to Russia”. It’s in their interest, because the same special boys who are threatening them if they do have already announced their intention to go to war with China just as soon as they’re done defeating Russia.

All I can conclude is that because the neocons hate literally everyone, including themselves, they’re playing a suicidal game of Samson burning down the temple using the US military as a match. I mean, it’s impossible to believe that they’re literally this stupid and totally unable to see the obvious consequences of their actions.

On the other hand, the possibility of stupidity should not be entirely dismissed. China is already allied with Russia, and World War III started with the Special Military Operation in February 2022.

“If China allies itself with Russia, there will be a world war.”

—Volodymyr Zelenskyy, 20 February 2023

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China Attacks USD

The largest foreign holder of the US dollar openly calls for other nations to stop enabling the USA’s debt-speding:

The world’s two largest foreign holders of US treasuries, Japan and China, continued to pare down their holdings of US debt in December, data from the US Treasury Department showed on Wednesday. Foreign holdings of US treasuries declined in 2022. Japan’s holdings also dropped by $224.5 billion specifically, while China’s holdings were down by $173.2 billion to $867.1 billion, the lowest since May 2010.

For a long time, changes in China’s holdings of US debt have been a topic of great concern, which is seen by some as a measure of the state of China-US relations. Yet, there is no need to complicate China-US relations with China’s reduced holdings of US treasuries. The reasons behind China’s recent reduction of its holdings of US debt are mainly economic considerations, as the problems in the US economy and the changes in bilateral economic and trade relations have increased the need for China to pursue diversification of its foreign exchange reserves.

To be clear, while China has reduced its holdings of US debt, it doesn’t change the fact that US treasuries remain an important part of China’s foreign exchange reserves. China is still the world’s second-largest non-US holder of US treasuries, because the US dollar remains the world’s most important currency for trade settlement and a safe-haven for investors seeking security amid the changeable markets. Besides, US sovereign debt has the highest and the most stable credit rating.

But nowadays these factors are changing.

US economy, debt mean other nations must diversify reserves, Global Times, 17 February 2023

Make no mistake. This public call to the BRICSIA nations to reduce their dollar reserves is a form of unrestricted warfare in action. China is in the process of doing to the US economy what the IMF has repeatedly done to third world governments since the 1960s, which is encourage them to enter a debt trap, become dependent on the IMF, and then seize the national assets used as collateral.

(NB: Before the smart boys jump in to make an erroneous “correction”, note that while Japan holds more US treasuries than China, China’s total dollar holdings are nearly four times greater than Japan’s. The former is a subset of the latter.)

While there is no actual collateral at risk here, what China has done is made the US economy dependent upon the Chinese willingness to subsidize it. This is why the USA can’t afford to financially sanction China the way it has sanctioned Russia, and why China has a financial gun to the US federal government’s head that is distinct from whatever control it directly exerts over politicians it has managed to buy or otherwise corrupt in various ways.

Live by the debt-dollar, die by the debt-dollar. Once an empire loses its reserve currency status, imperial decline tends to come swiftly. Consider the examples of the Venetian ducato, the Dutch guilder and the British pound if you want to contemplate likely timeframes and outcomes.

This appears to be another sign that China is getting closer to opening the Asian front of World War III.

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Drafting Europe

The USA is attempting to expand NATO responsibilities in order to force the European nations to fight China.

NATO is set to adopt a guidance that lays out plans for a scenario in which member states find themselves fighting on the home front and beyond the borders of the alliance at the same time, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. This comes as the US increasingly shifts its priorities to confronting China.

The classified document is to be discussed and signed off on by NATO defense ministers during a two-day summit in Brussels that starts on Tuesday, the news outlet reported. Members will be asked to prepare national plans for future military engagements.

The guidance will map out ways for NATO to engage in a “high-intensity so-called Article 5 conflict” – defending a NATO nation attacked by a foreign party under the treaty’s mutual defense provision – and “an out-of-area, non-Article 5 event.” The contents of the guideline were revealed to Bloomberg by “people familiar with the matter.”

I think we are going to witness the end of NATO sooner rather than later. The Europeans are already on the verge of surrender and they haven’t even started fighting Russia yet. What on Earth is Estonia or Austria going to do with regards to China, except possibly get wiped off the map?

Meanwhile, India appears to be aligning itself with the Sino-Russian alliance.

Moscow is ready to provide technology for India’s new tanks, Vladimir Drozhzhov, the deputy director of the Russian Federal Service of Military-Technical Cooperation (FSVTS), said on Tuesday. According to Drozhzhov, Russia can share its advanced Armata modular tracked platform with India.

China Calls Out Surveillance

Wait, what’s that sound. It sounds like they’re playing… that’s AC’s music! This unusually direct accusation by the Chinese Foreign Ministry is ostensibly in response to the US Air Force shooting down the rogue Chinese weather balloon, and perhaps that is all it is, but the repeated references to “No. 1 spy empire” and “absolute No. 1 country in terms of spying and surveillance” make it appear to also be shot across the bow concerning the massive domestic Stalkerstasi spy program.

As a matter of fact, it is the US who is the No.1 surveillance country and has the largest spy network in the world.

The US National Security Agency spied on calls and chat messages to and from the phones of leaders of Germany, France, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and other European countries. The US has been operating a highly secretive signals intelligence collection program through almost a hundred US embassies and consulates worldwide. Anzer, a cybersecurity information platform, revealed last year that the NSA stole more than 97 billion pieces of global internet data and 124 billion phone records in 30 days, compromising the privacy of citizens across the world. Namibia recently found in its waters a US saildrone used to gather data underwater, and local media generally believe it to be an American spy drone. The US knows how many surveillance balloons it has sent into the skies in the world. It’s quite clear to the global community which country is the No.1 spy empire in the world…

Over the years, the US has been engaged in massive, non-discriminate wiretapping and secret theft operations globally, including against its allies, by abusing its tech advantage. These operations violate the sovereignty and interests of countries around the world, the international law and basic norms governing international relations, which makes the US the absolute No.1 country in terms of spying and surveillance.

Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s Regular Press Conference on February 13, 2023

Once WWIII goes hot, by which I mean it ceases to be presented as a proxy conflict between “Ukraine” and Vladimir Putin’s ego, but becomes a direct war between the USA and the Sino-Russian alliance, I expect we are going to learn an awful lot about the historical and ongoing misdeeds of the US government and its agencies, as well as of the Clown World individuals and organizations that control them.

Remember, the Russians know all about “the Holocaust”. It was their Red Army that liberated all of the so-called death camps. They know all about the surveillance and spy programs, both international and domestic. They know everything about NASA and the space programs. They know who killed JFK and why. They know why Watergate happened and they know at whose behest Nixon was removed.

And now it appears the Chinese do too. It’s somewhat amusing that while US figures such as Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Donald Trump, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Jordan Peterson, Ron DeSantis and pretty much every other figure of the neoconservative media and movement keep their mouths resolutely shut about something they definitely know about, the Chinese are openly throwing it out there to the entire world.

Jesus Christ said “the truth will set you free.” If you cannot speak the truth, then you obviously are not free.

Just in case anyone happened to miss the significance of this statement by the Foreign Ministry, the Global Times made sure to highlight it. Any revelatory information releases by China or Russia will obviously be dismissed as “wartime rhetoric.” Indeed, it will actually be wartime rhetoric, but dialectic is a form of rhetoric and I have no doubt that both the Russians and the Chinese will find it to be highly beneficial to inform Americans just how genuinely evil the rulers of Clown World are.

It may be worth noting that even as it calls out US surveillance, China is also very publicly embracing Iran, with a specific message to anyone who feels “targeted” by the new developmetns.

The development of China-Iran relations has a strong endogenous driving force. It can be said that President Raisi’s visit to China is very natural. However, as Iran is still under severe sanctions by the US, and China is the main target of US’ strategic suppression. With a narrow-minded mindset, some US and Western public opinion appeared rather odd in viewing the relationship between China and Iran, hyping that both China and Iran are “opposed” to the US and claiming that cooperation between the two sides will “weaken US efforts to isolate Iran.” Such zero-sum thinking is arrogant, unreasonable and overbearing. China and Iran do not need to act according to their attitude, and it is even less likely that the two sides will reduce exchanges because some people are unhappy.

In fact, many of the achievements of China-Iran cooperation in recent years have been realized by overcoming interference and sabotage by the US side. It may be difficult to improve this situation in a short period of time, but outside the US-West bloc and its influence circle, there is huge space and potential for win-win cooperation between countries, including China and Iran, which cannot be blocked by the political forces of the US and the West.

In this sense, China’s deepening cooperation with Iran also has anti-hegemony and anti-bullying feature. Both China and Iran uphold independent foreign policies, firmly defend the principle of non-interference in internal affairs on international occasions, and safeguard the common interests of developing countries. This is conducive to promoting the multi-polarization and diversified development of the world, and conforms to the general trend of the times. If anyone feels “targeted” in this process, then they should first reflect on whether they are too selfish.

Welcome President Raisi. China, Iran no need to watch attitude of US, West, Global Times, 14 February 2023

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