Tag: China

Dialogue 2022

The Sino-Russian alliance is observably stronger than ever. Contra the incessant mainstream media nonsense about both nations, this is clearly not a conversation between two leaders who are desperate or believe that their geostrategic positions have weakened in the last year:

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good afternoon, President Xi Jinping, my dear friend. I am delighted to see and greet you.

We are creating a very good tradition – to hold a videoconference at the end of the year to review our work and map out plans to build up Russia-China relations and strategic partnership and to exchange views on the most topical international issues.

But first of all, I would like to congratulate you and all our Chinese friends on the successful completion of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and you personally on being re-elected as General Secretary of the of CPC Central Committee. Your guiding role and the CPC’s leadership are essential for the sustainable socioeconomic development of the country and the strengthening of its positions on the global stage. I wholeheartedly wish every success to you and the friendly people of China.

In the context of growing geopolitical tensions, the importance of the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership as a stability factor is growing. Our relations have passed all the tests, demonstrating their maturity and stability, and they continue to grow dynamically. As both of us pointed out, our current relations are enjoying the best period in their history and can be regarded as a model of cooperation between major powers in the 21st century…

President of China Xi Jinping: President Putin, my dear friend.

I am delighted to see you again.

A videoconference with you ahead of New Year’s Eve has become our good tradition. This year, we had two in-person meetings and spoke over the phone multiple times. We maintain close strategic contacts. After the success of the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, you immediately sent me warm greetings. It was greatly appreciated.

Under our joint leadership, the overarching Russia-China partnership and strategic cooperation demonstrates maturity and ability to withstand challenges in this new age… In the face of the challenging and largely ambivalent international situation, we are ready to build up strategic cooperation with Russia, providing each other with development opportunities and remaining global partners for the benefit of our countries and in the interests of stability in the entire world.

The full transcript isn’t available at the link yet, so if anything interesting pops up in the sections added later, I’ll note them here.

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The Chinese Listened

I was reading an old Jerry Pournelle anthology from the 80’s – the first Imperial Stars book – one that could be characterized as There Will Be Government in Space, when I was struck by a remarkable passage, the significance of which had eluded me in previous readings, from the concluding essay by Dr. Pournelle entitled The Stars at War.

Military establishments, ours among them, have always been inefficient, and better organized for the last war than the next. If we wait for perfection, we may well wait forever.

Thus three facts stand out:

  1. The Soviets have an enormous military establishment, and we are not going to match it tank for tank and gun for gun.
  2. Our present course of buying some of this and some of that, more tanks here and more planes there, isn’t an adequate, or indeed reasonable, response to the threat, and “reform of the Pentagon” and other efforts to “trim the fat and reduce waste” aren’t likely to succeed very quickly, if at all.
  3. We have to do something and soon.

This reasoning was the starting point for Lt. General Daniel O. Graham’s strategic analysis. If what we’re doing isn’t going to work, and we have to do something, where can we go? Graham concluded that we needed a bold new approach, a strategic sidestep; that we had to stop competing with the Soviets in areas in which we can’t win, and begin to compete where we have the advantage.

The Stars at War, Jerry Pournelle, 1986

In other words, 13 years before the two Chinese colonels published Unrestricted Warfare, Jerry Pournelle was already writing about a US general’s strategic analysis that essentially laid the foundation for the Chinese defeat of the US military.

Because this is the essence of the asymetric strategy that underlies the decades-long Chinese implementation of unrestricted warfare: stop competing with the Soviets in areas in which we can’t win, and begin to compete where we have the advantage.

That’s exactly what the Chinese have been doing since 1999. This is perhaps the most important material difference between China and Clown World. China pays close attention to the best minds of the East and the best minds of the West. Clown World ignores the best of the East and attempts to silence the best of the West.

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Drawing Lines in the Sand

Xi makes it abundantly clear that China stands with Palestine.

Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed dissatisfaction Friday with the injustices suffered by Palestinians and affirmed China’s support for an independent Palestinian state. “It is not possible to continue the historical injustice suffered by the Palestinians,” the Chinese president said at the opening of the Riyadh-Gulf-Chinese Summit for Cooperation and Development in Saudi Arabia.

Xi emphasized the necessity for granting Palestine “full membership in the United Nations” and said Beijing “supports the two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

He said he considered the Chinese-Arab summit a “defining event in the history of Chinese-Arab relations.”

Relations between the two “are based on mutual interest in peace and harmony,” he said. “The Chinese and Arab sides should strengthen solidarity and cooperation and build a community for a closer future,” he said as he welcomed Arab participation in the global security initiative.

If Israel is the USA’s “greatest ally’, then it stands to reason that China, which has been engaged in unrestricted warfare against the United States for two decades, would eventually find common cause with that greatest ally’s greatest enemy.

It also explains why Soros and the other architects of Clown World fear Xi even more than they do Putin.

The intriguing question is when the Israelis will abandon the USA and the imperialist neocons in an attempt to appease the Chinese. Because that is probably the right strategic move in the long term; the Israelis are obviously aware that the Diaspora won’t hesitate to sell them out if necessary. And it’s not going to be possible to be the financial masters of both sides of The Great Bifurcation.

Beijing will work to make energy purchases in yuan instead of US dollar signalling another step towards shifting further away from the greenback, China’s President Xi Jinping told Gulf Arab leaders as cited by Reuters.

China’s leader highlighted the necessity of the move while speaking at a Chinese-Arab summit that was hosted by Saudi Arabia earlier this week. Xi had held separate talks with the heads of the Persian Gulf states at the summit that reportedly brought together 30 leaders from across the region.

The world’s biggest crude importer, China in November ramped up purchases of oil by 12% year-on-year, marking the 10-month high despite the severe pandemic-related restrictions.

As the world’s biggest buyer, China now has the ability to dictate how it pays for oil. And it has already begun paying for Arab goods in its own currency, as evidenced by this interview with a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry:

The Paper: We noted that the first RMB cross-border payment transaction between Saudi Arabia and China’s Yiwu city, known as “the world’s supermarket”, was completed ahead of the first China-Arab States Summit. Do you have any comment?

Mao Ning: I also noted this good news. The cross-border RMB payment has played an important role in boosting trade between China and Arab states. This is also a telling snapshot of trade and investment facilitation between both sides. Over the past decade, China-Arab states economic and trade cooperation has scaled new heights. China is Arab states’ biggest trading partner. In 2021, China’s FDI stock in Arab states hit $23 billion, a 2.6 times increase over 10 years. The trade volume topped $330.3 billion, 1.5 times more than 10 years ago. In the first three quarters of 2022, China-Arab states trade reached $319.295 billion, up 35.28 percent year on year and close to the total of the whole year of 2021.

This is precisely what the US invaded Iraq and Libya to prevent. But it’s not going to invade Saudi Arabia and it can’t invade China. It is safe to expect that other countries, particularly Russia and Venezuala, will follow suit in short order.

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Dr. Doom Confirms WWIII

It’s rather intriguing to observe that economist Nouriel Roubini, the man who most famously predicted the financial crisis of 2008 – as did Steve Keen and I – is now also in agreement with me that WWIII has already begun and that the global economy is going to bifurcate:

Last week, the New York University professor was interviewed by Der Spiegel and listed some of the world’s most acute problems.

Recalling a recent event hosted by the International Monetary Fund, he referred to historian Niall Ferguson who “said in a speech there that we would be lucky if we got an economic crisis like in the 1970s — and not a war like in the 1940s.”

When speaking about major global threats, Roubini mentioned the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, adding that Iran and Israel are “on a collision course” as well.

“I read that the Biden administration expects China to attack Taiwan sooner rather than later,” the economist said, summarizing that “World War III has already effectively begun.”

The rivalry between Washington and Beijing is driving tension to a large degree, Roubini noted, adding that the US has banned the export of certain semiconductors to China and is pressuring European nations into cutting trade ties with the country on national security grounds. He believes that a breakup of the globalized world is looming.

“Trade, finance, technology, internet: Everything will split in two,” he predicted.

It was not clear if non-allied nations would pick the US side in the confrontation, he said. “I asked the president of an African country why he gets 5G technology from China and not from the West. He told me, we are a small country, so someone will spy on us anyway. Then, I might as well take the Chinese technology, it’s cheaper,” the economist revealed to Der Spiegel.

There simply isn’t any reason for any self-interested third party to choose the side of what Vladimir Putin describes as the Second West. Unlike the USA, which has been attacking countries, undermining their currencies, and murdering their leaders for decades, the Chinese are mostly content to simply do business with other countries. And while that may change, and the massive Chinese diaspora is not exactly popular in countries such as Indonesia, Australia, and Canada, the fact is that the Chinese track record concerning foreign relations is considerably better than that of the USA or of its representative in Asia, Japan.

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Australia is the New Ukraine

The US appears hell-bent on making sure that the Chinese are incentivized to not only take Taiwan, but attack Australia as well.

The US military has devised a plan which would see nuclear-capable B-52 strategic bombers deployed in Australia on long-term rotational missions, and turn the country’s Northern Territory into a crucial military hub in Washington’s standoff with Beijing, the national broadcaster reported on Monday.

The Pentagon reportedly seeks to build a “squadron operations facility,” which would include a maintenance center and enough parking area for six B-52s at the Royal Australian Air Force military air base Tindal, according to ABC’s Four Corners investigative program.

The air base expansion could cost up to $100 million and is expected to be finished in late 2026. The new facilities are “required to support strategic operations and to run multiple 15-day training exercises during the Northern Territory dry season for deployed B-52 squadrons,” the report said, citing US documents.

An “enhanced air cooperation” between Australia and the US was discussed during last year’s AUSMIN ministerial meetings, but while the sides agreed on “rotational deployment of US aircraft of all types,” there was no official confirmation of plans to deploy B-52s at Tindal.

“The ability to deploy US Air Force bombers to Australia sends a strong message to adversaries about our ability to project lethal air power,” the US Air Force reportedly told the program.

To say that the US military is behaving in an overtly provocative manner would be an understatement. It’s not at all unreasonable to wonder if the predominantly foreign elite dictating the US military’s actions in Europe and Asia are pursuing this course of action, not because they are crazy or stupid, but in order to ensure the destruction of the US military.

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The Empire Flees China

You won’t be told what’s actually happening by the globalist media, and you definitely won’t be told why it is happening. But their coverage of events is usually sufficient to alert the informed observer as to what is actually going on.

As the FT writes, today, “thousands of wealthy people across China are headed for the exits as President Xi Jinping secures a third term, making him and the ruling Chinese Communist party even stronger than before.”

Recall that just hours after Xi not only was declared dictator for life but unceremoniously and in full view of the entire world had his centrist, globalist and pro-reform predecessor Hu Zintao escorted out of the building, guaranteeing that the rest of his rule will be a radical departure from heretofore accepted norms, and calling for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” based on revitalizing the CCP’s role as the economic, social, and cultural leader, Chinese stocks cratered to multi-decade lows and the yuan plunged to a record low as the growing realization of the horror that is coming swept across the land.

As a result, China’s wealthiest were met with market turmoil on Monday when Chinese stocks crashed the most since 2008. According to Bloomberg’s billionaire list, the 13 richest Chinese lost $12.7 billion in just one day after mounting fears about Xi’s consolidation of power. But of course, it wasn’t just them looking terrified at the glowing green color on their screens (as a reminder, in China stock colors are inverted as red means up and green means down): it was everyone.

In any case, as hundreds of millions of Chinese savers now scramble to move as much of their assets as far away off shore from the lunatic fringe in Beijing as possible, we have been flooded with reports that wealthy families across Hong Kong and China are at a “tipping point” about triggering so-called financial “fire escape plans” to avoid the wrath of Xi and CCP, according to David Lesperance, a Europe-based lawyer who works with elite Chinese businessmen and who spoke with Financial Times.

“Now that ‘the chairman’ is firmly in place . . . I have already received three ‘proceed’ instructions from various ultra-high net worth Chinese business families to execute their fire escape plans,” Lesperance said.

Ignore all the rhetoric and the neo-liberal economic assumptions and focus on what the various parties mentioned are doing. What’s actually taking place is that The Empire That Never Ended, which intended to transfer its global center of power from Washington DC to Beijing, has finally abandoned its attempts to do so.

Xi Xinping was seen as an impediment, not an implacable obstacle, but the confirmation of his continuing power in the CPC and his ongoing anti-corruption campaign means that the imperial plans for China have failed. Ukraine appears to be the backup plan, but that is failing too, thanks to the Russians and their stubborn refusal to submit to the imperial order.

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Xi is in Complete Control

You may recall a few weeks ago that the globalist media was excitedly reporting that mysterious events in China, particularly around Beijing, possibly indicated that a coup against President Xi was taking place. You may also recall that I told you the idea President Xi’s control over the Party and the government was slipping was complete nonsense; the Chinese leader is not only very smart and extremely effective, but is far more popular with his people than are any of the political leaders across the former West.

And now, it is obvious to everyone that Xi is not only going to continue calling the shots, but is strong enough to continue rooting out the remnants of the pro-globalist faction in China:

Former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Hu Jintao, was forcibly escorted out of the 20th Chinese Communist Party National Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing by Kong Shaoxun, the deputy director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee, moments before the de-facto Emperor of China, Xi Jingping, was re-elected to another five-year term on Saturday.
At the first plenary session of the CCP’s 20th Central Committee on Sunday, Xi hinted at his intraparty purges that have made him the most authoritarian leader of China since Mao Zedong.

“Driven by a strong sense of mission, we have resolved to offend a few thousand rather than fail 1.4 billion and to clear out the party of all its ills. We’ve used a combination of measures to take out tigers, swat flies, and hunt down foxes, punishing corrupt officials of all types,” Xi said.

A video shows that Jintao was involuntarily escorted from the auditorium during the last day of congress on Saturday.

He refused assistance from a CCP aid and attempted to pick up a document on the table, an action which the paramount leader of China stopped by when he placed his hand on the document.

Another high-ranking CCP member to the left of Jintao was seen almost getting up from his seat before his companion next to him tapped him on the back to sit back down.

It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of this public arrest of Hu Jintao. Hu has been one of the leaders of the pro-globalist faction in China for decades. He was supposed to be the architect of the transition of the seat of The Empire That Never Ended from Washington DC to Beijing.

This probably signifies some massive changes coming soon, although what they will be is hard to say. Regardless, expect to see the anti-Russian emphasis in the media to shift soon to an anti-Chinese one, as China is by far the more serious threat to the tottering globalist world order.

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Chinese Flee Ukraine

It would appear the Special Military Operation in Ukraine is about to transform into actual war between Russia and NATO:

Some Chinese nationals still in Ukraine have signed up for evacuation from the country, with most registering for organized evacuations, while others are preparing to leave Ukraine on their own, the Global Times learned on Sunday, after the Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Chinese citizens to leave Ukraine, citing the grave security situation.

The move, following the large-scale evacuation in March that safely returned some 6,000 Chinese nationals in Ukraine back to their motherland, represents the Chinese government’s greatest efforts to protect its citizens, as the Russia-Ukraine conflict further escalated, experts noted.

In a notice issued on Saturday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said that given the grave security situation in Ukraine, it calls upon Chinese nationals still in the country to strengthen security precautions and evacuate the country. The Chinese embassy will assist the organization of evacuation for those in need, the notice said, while urging them to register their personal information to the embassy as soon as possible.

Chinese nationals in Ukraine sign up for evacuation after call from FM, Global Times, 16 October 2022

One has to assume that the Russian leadership is keeping its Chinese allies well-informed. And Russia’s warning shots have been uniformly ignored. The only real question at this point is if the Russian forces will limit their attacks to Ukrainian territory or if they will be targeting the NATO forces with whom they are actually at war outside of Ukraine.

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Chinese Warning

People often forget that it is China which keeps North Korea on a short leash. I interpret this recent missile launch over Japan as a warning from China that if and when the Second Front of WWIII is opened, it will not only be the Chinese taking action.

North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan, for the first time in five years on Tuesday, prompting a warning for residents to take cover and a temporary suspension of train operations in the northern part of the country.

The Japanese government warned citizens to take cover as the missile appeared to have flown over and past its territory before falling into the Pacific ocean.

It said it did not use any defence measures to destroy the missile, which was the first to fly over or past Japan from North Korea since 2017.

Speaking to reporters shortly afterwards, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida condemned the launch and called North Korea’s actions ‘barbaric.’ He noted that the government would continue to gather and analyse information.

The launch is the latest weapons test by North Korea in an apparent response to military drills between South Korea and the United States.

In fact, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the North Koreans were the first to initiate action; the major players are seldom the first to get directly involved.

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