Tag: China

No, They Can Roll

China denies asking Russia to delay an invasion of Ukraine:

Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday refuted a Bloomberg report which claimed that the Chinese leader allegedly asked Russian President Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games. The ministry said that the news is fake, noting it’s not only a slander and provocation to China-Russia relations but also interference with and sabotage against the Olympics.

Zhao Lijian, spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry, said at a routine press conference on Monday that such a despicable trick will not deceive the international community.

“I want to stress that today’s China-Russia relations are mature, stable and resilient. The two sides have maintained close communication at all levels. Any attempt to drive a wedge between the two countries or challenge mutual trust is futile,” Zhao said.

I don’t think that quite played out the way the US media was expecting.

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Communists vs Globohomo

The times are making for some alliances that would have looked very strange back in the 1980s. The recent address by Xi Xinping to the sixth plenary session of the 19th CPC Central Commission for Discipline Inspection is absolutely fascinating and more than a little informative.

The Communist Party of China’s (CPC) top disciplinary agency pledged to maintain a strong and persistent crackdown on corruption in a communiqué released Thursday, and the document also said the Party will actively handle “the new challenges and new situations” of the anti-corruption campaign, including strengthening investigations and punishment behind the “disorderly expansion of capital” and monopoly of some online platforms, vowing to cut off the collusion between capital and power….

Xi noted several daunting tasks in the battle, including “guarding against the unwarranted influence of interests groups, preventing officials from falling prey to erosion behavior, identifying and dealing with furtive forms of corruption that employ upgraded methods, eliminating the breeding grounds for corruption, being free of systemic corruption, and defusing risks and hidden dangers.”

If any Western politician were to make comments like these, the ADL would absolutely lose their minds. So, it’s pretty clear that the global Sino-Jewish conflict that has been percolating for the last decade or so is on the verge of going to the next level, because what Xi and the CPC define as “corruption” is virtually identical to what in the USA is described as “success because 115 average IQ”.

It’s clear that the Chinese have seen how America was defeated by “the collusion between capital and power” and have no intention of permitting the same thing to happen to their nation. I very much doubt that Thomas Friedman is going to write any more columns praising China’s autocratic ability to get things done like his take on the 2010 World Economic Forum. To the contrary, I expect we’re going to see a lot more “Xi is the New Hitler” ink being spilled in 2022.

Some of my Chinese friends chide me for overidealizing China. I tell them: “Guilty as charged.” But have no illusions. I am not praising China because I want to emulate their system. I am praising it because I am worried about my system. In deliberately spotlighting China’s impressive growth engine, I am hoping to light a spark under America.

Studying China’s ability to invest for the future doesn’t make me feel we have the wrong system. It makes me feel that we are abusing our right system. There is absolutely no reason our democracy should not be able to generate the kind of focus, legitimacy, unity and stick-to-it-iveness to do big things – democratically – that China does autocratically. We’ve done it before. But we’re not doing it now because too many of our poll-driven, toxically partisan, cable-TV-addicted, money-corrupted political class are more interested in what keeps them in power than what would again make America powerful, more interested in defeating each other than saving the country.

Too Many Hamburgers, Thomas Friedman, 22 September 2010

Interesting times indeed. The Russians are already on board with the Chinese, which is why NATO has been threatening war for the last three months.

The only thing that I want to say now is their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs, and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that too)…

Crimes Against Humanity, Vladimir Putin

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Transcending 18th-Century Chains

Dan Wang’s annual letter indicates that China is transcending the 18th Century conceptual framework that has resulted in the enslavement of the formerly Christian West to Satanic post-Christian torpor. While the West finds itself trapped in the outdated chains of self-serving Jewish interpretations of the Enlightenment philosophies, China is forging a more practical path forward by rejecting the most foundational assumptions of the failing neo-liberal world order.

An important factor in China’s reform program includes not only a willingness to reshape the strategic landscape—like promoting manufacturing over the internet—but also a discernment of which foreign trends to resist. These include excessive globalization and financialization. Beijing diagnosed the problems with financialization earlier than the US, where the problem is now endemic. The leadership is targeting a high level of manufacturing output, rejecting the notion of comparative advantage. That static model constructed by economists with the aim of seducing undergrads has leaked out of the lecture hall and morphed into a political justification for only watching as American communities of engineering practice dissolved. And Beijing today looks prescient for having kept out the US social media companies that continuously infuriate their home government.

It’s interesting, is it not, to see how three years after I appeared on CGNT’s Dialogue and explained some of the fundamental flaws of Ricardian free trade on Chinese state television, and pointed out how the USA literally could not lose a trade war against China, that the CPC has explicitly rejected the orthodox classical concept of comparative advantage. I’m not saying that the case I explicated was the reason for that rejection, but it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that it was a contributing element, however minor.

It’s also clear that China is very likely to dominate the global economy going forward, as the USA sinks into a morass of meaningless conversations about conversations, and technology designed to enforce a rigid monoculture of SJW-approved goodthink.

Beijing recognizes that internet platforms make not only a great deal of money, but also many social problems. Consider online tutoring. The Ministry of Education claims to have surveyed 700,000 parents before it declared that the sector can no longer make profit. What was the industry profiting from? In the government’s view, education companies have become adept at monetizing the status anxieties of parents: the Zhang family keeps feeling outspent by the Li family, and vice versa. In a similar theme, the leadership considers the peer-to-peer lending industry as well as Ant Financial to be sources of financial risks; and video games to be a source of social harm. These companies may be profitable, but entrepreneurial dynamism here is not a good thing.

Where does Beijing prefer dynamism? Science-based industries that serve strategic needs. Beijing, in other words, is trying to make semiconductors sexy again. One might reasonably question how dealing pain to users of chips (like consumer internet firms) might help the industry. I think that the focus should instead be on talent and capital allocation. If venture capitalists are mostly funding social networking companies, then they would be able to hire the best talent while denying them to chipmakers. That has arguably been the story in Silicon Valley over the last decade: Intel and Cisco were not quite able to compete for the best engineering talent with Facebook and Google. Beijing wants to change this calculation among domestic investors and students at Peking and Tsinghua.

Internet platforms aren’t the only industries under suspicion. Beijing is also falling out of love with finance. It looks unwilling to let the vagaries of the financial markets dictate the pace of technological investment, which in the US has favored the internet over chips. Beijing has regularly denounced the “disorderly expansion of capital,” and sometimes its “barbaric growth.” The attitude of business-school types is to arbitrage everything that can be arbitraged no matter whether it serves social goals. That was directly Chen Yun’s fear that opportunists care only about money. High profits therefore are not the right metric to assess online education, because the industry is preying on anxious parents while immiserating their children.

Beijing’s attitude marks a difference with capitalism as it’s practiced in the US. Over the last two decades, the major American growth stories have been Silicon Valley (consumer internet and software) on one coast and Wall Street (financialization) on the other. For good measure, I’ll throw in a rejection of capitalism as it is practiced in the UK as well. My line last year triggered so many Brits that I’ll use it again: “With its emphasis on manufacturing, (China) cannot be like the UK, which is so successful in the sounding-clever industries—television, journalism, finance, and universities—while seeing a falling share of R&D intensity and a global loss of standing among its largest firms.”

As Michael Hudson has repeatedly demonstrated, financialization is fatal for both an economy and a society. It is fundamentally parasitical; it does not fertilize the growth of healthy productive companies, but rather, preys ruthlessly upon them and prevents them from growing to maturity.

The fact that the Chinese have consciously rejected the false promises of financialization and free trade is potentially one of the most important historic developments of the past 100 years.

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Our Fingers Were Crossed!

The US Secretary of State is attempting to play revisionist talmudics in order to justify the NATO expansion that has both Russia and China on a war footing:

NATO has never promised not to admit new members, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken claimed on Friday, labelling Russia’s demands of the bloc inadmissible. However, long-declassified Western documents suggest otherwise.

“NATO never promised not to admit new members,” the top American diplomat told journalists during Friday’s press briefing, as he commented on Moscow’s proposals to the bloc on security guarantees, ahead of upcoming NATO-Russia meetings next week.

“It could not and would not – the ‘open door policy’ was a core provision of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that founded NATO,” Blinken added. He then pointed to the fact that both Mikhail Gorbachev – the Soviet leader who’d allegedly received the guarantees of non-expansion from the Western leaders – and the former US Secretary of State James Baker, who allegedly provided them, among others – denied anything like that ever happened.

“There was no promise that NATO wouldn’t expand,” Blinken concluded, adding that, instead, Moscow had itself recognized every European nation’s right to choose its own path in the field of security by joining the Istanbul Charter for European Security in 1999.

Such a position has apparently become commonplace in the bloc after Moscow came up with a set of proposals that it said would alleviate current tensions between Russia and the collective West. The proposals would see the Brussels-based organisation agree to curb its territorial growth as a form of a security guarantee for Russia.

After the proposals were presented to NATO in December 2021, its Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg also stated that the bloc had never promised not to expand. Yet, a trove of documents, made public as early as in 2017, suggests that it did.

Russia Today

This is a remarkably stupid game the Fake Biden administration is playing. The neocons are attempting to utilize juvenile narrative-shaping tactics in a world of hardened diplomats and generals who couldn’t care less what a few lawyers assumed back in 1949. It appears the neocons are about to discover that their lawyerly verbal tactics don’t work on people who, unlike Americans and Europeans, are not high-trusting children.

It’s the usual bait-and-switch offered by a deceiver. Even if NATO never made any formal promises not to expand, the leaders of every major Western country at the time promised that NATO would not expand to the EAST, i.e. in the direction of Russia. Which NATO subsequently did after 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that was the raison d’etre for its existence. If Vladimir Putin were to reassure the world that Russia will not attack NATO, just all of the countries that violated their past assurances to Russia, would anyone find that comforting?

The neocons would do very well to recall that the Russians have never promised not to nuke New York or Jerusalem. The Chinese have never promised not to genocide Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Neither the wisdom nor the rightness of an action relies upon the fact that one has never promised not to do it. The balance of power rests upon capabilities, not contracts. And Russia has promised that it will never permit NATO to reach its borders.

In addition to never promising not to invade Taiwan, China has repeatedly vowed to unify the island with the mainland. Would the US Secretary of State argue that China therefore has a right to do so? Because under his own logic, China has a stronger argument than the one he is presenting in favor of NATO expansion.

UPDATE: Yes, China knows exactly what’s happening in Kazakhstan and who is responsible.

China can offer support in the fields of economic cooperation and assistance, as well as counter-terrorism, to help neighboring Kazakhstan restore stability and realize effective reforms and long-term economic development, according to Chinese analysts, as Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev and the government thanked Russia and China, as well as other leaders worldwide and heads of international organizations for support offered to the country amid domestic unrest. The situation in Kazakhstan has the clear characteristics of a “color revolution” and the involvement of foreign forces and the “Three Devils” (terrorism, religious extremism and separatism), said Chinese analysts.

China, Xi said, firmly opposes any force undermining Kazakhstan’s stability, threatening the country’s security, and sabotaging the peaceful lives of the Kazakh people. China also strongly rejects any attempt by external forces to provoke unrest and instigate “color revolution” in Kazakhstan, as well as any attempt to harm the friendship between China and Kazakhstan and disrupt the two countries’ cooperation. And, China is ready to provide necessary support to help Kazakhstan overcome the difficulties.

Global Times

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Uninvestable or Uninfestable?

Somehow, I don’t think the CPC strategists are overly concerned about the global financial community’s sudden addition of China to the uninvestable zone that includes Russia and Iran:

Investors may want to think twice about putting their money to work in China, contends DoubleLine founder Jeffrey Gundlach.

“China is uninvestible, in my opinion, at this point,” the bond king told Yahoo Finance in an interview at his California estate. “I’ve never invested in China long or short. Why is that? I don’t trust the data. I don’t trust the relationship between the United States and China anymore. I think that investments in China could be confiscated. I think there’s a risk of that.”

The ongoing crackdown on the operations of big Chinese internet companies such as Didi by the government has rocked investors in the space. The clamping down on the country’s biggest tech names has now led to a tightening of listing requirements by the Chinese government

The Chinese have long understood the corollary to the Golden Rule: the only way to prevent those with the gold from making the rules is to refuse to accept it.

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China Isn’t Fooled

The Chinese are paying very close attention to how the USA has created color revolutions around the world, and how it is laying the groundwork for military conflict with Russia over Ukraine:

Washington has painted its geopolitical competition between great powers with a thick layer of ideology. It has tried to portray what is happening on the Russian-Ukrainian border as a tragic story about “aggression” and “counter-aggression,” as well as making Ukraine a pawn on the European chessboard as it pushes eastward. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, many countries, including Ukraine, have experienced “color revolutions” supported by the US. But most of these countries ended up in tragedy, as the US has neither the will nor the ability to provide them with substantial assistance. The US has been providing huge military aid to Ukraine over the years, weaponizing it from top to toe. However, it has explicitly excluded any possibility of fighting for Ukraine. Washington’s policy of creating crises is likely to turn Ukraine into a regional powder keg.

The US is unreliable. This is true when it comes to not only Ukraine, but also Russia. The essence of the issue is not that Washington is “seeking justice” for Ukraine or Europe, but that it is using NATO as a tool to cannibalize and squeeze Russia’s strategic space. Since the end of the Cold War, Russia had also tried to win acceptance from the US and the West through making political changes. But what it gained is the US’ abandonment of its promise that NATO would not expand eastward if a reunified Germany remained in the bloc. The US has led NATO to engage in five rounds of eastward expansion over the past more than two decades. Moscow sees Ukraine as a red line for security. But now even Ukraine is said to be absorbed into NATO. Russian President Vladmir Putin on December 23 accused NATO of cheating Russia at his annual press conference.

To secure its advantageous position by creating disputes, divisions, conflicts and confrontations is what Washington has always pursued in international affairs. Be it deploying missiles on Russia’s doorstep, conducting “close-in reconnaissance” on China’s coastal areas, or sending warships to sail through the Taiwan Straits, all these actions were taken by Washington to test its two biggest “rivals” and the US is waiting and looking for opportunities to drive a wedge. The US may not plan to start a war with Russia or China, but it hopes to maintain a certain degree of tension and chaos in the surrounding areas of the two opponents. As such, it has kept propagating the “China threat theory” and “Russia threat theory” and at the same time tries to rally allies to exert pressure together in an attempt to force Russia and China to retreat from their core interests.

What is happening in Eastern Europe today has taught the Chinese people a good lesson.

The most important thing to note here is that China is following Russia’s lead in determining that “the US is unreliable”. The significance of this seemingly mild statement is that it means neither major regional power believes there is any point in attempting to negotiate with the USA or attempt to reach mutual understandings because they both know that the USA will break any treaty that they sign with it.

Which really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, as the USA has been a historically treacherous organization from the very start, as it broke its promises to nearly every single counterparty it encountered, from the scores of American Indian tribes with which it signed treaties to the formerly sovereign states of the Confederacy. It’s really rather remarkable that so many Americans genuinely believe that it is Russia and China that are the aggressors today when it is the USA that currently has 173,000 troops in 750 bases occupying 159 countries around the world.

Just to put things in historical perspective, that is more troops than Imperial Rome possessed with its 28 legions during the period of the Principate from 31 BC to 284 AD, which includes the time of the empire’s greatest extent under Trajan in 117 AD.

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The Anti-Globalist Alliance

Knowingly or not, it appears Vladimir Putin and Xi Xinping have responded to Archbishop Vigano’s call for an anti-globalist alliance:

Despite having had tense relations in the past, Moscow and Beijing are now working together on an unprecedented number of issues, including trade, technology, and defense, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday.

Speaking to journalists as part of his annual press conference, the Russian leader said that he and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping address each other as “friends.”

“We have very trusting relations and it helps us build good business ties as well,” Putin added, noting that Beijing is an “obvious leader” in the global economy and Asia, meaning that it is only natural that Russia develops relations with China in this field.

Putin stated that Russia is “China’s number one partner,” stressing that they work in a lot of areas, including the energy sector, space exploration, and on humanitarian issues. He said that this “brings us closer together.”

“We are cooperating in the field of security. The Chinese Army is equipped to a significant extent with the world’s most advanced weapons systems. We are even developing certain high-tech weapons together,” the Russian leader went on.

He said that there has been nothing like Russia and China’s current relations in history before, and remarked that this serves as a “stabilizing factor” on the world stage.

Putin’s remarks come after a video conference with Xi last week amid worsening relations between East and West. Yuri Ushakov, the Russian leader’s foreign policy advisor, said after the talks that Moscow and Beijing vowed to develop shared financial structures to enable the two nations to deepen their economic ties, without the interference of third countries.

This is good news, as the evil Empire That Never Ended is presently based in the United States. The fact that the two strongest free nations are joining forces to oppose it is a positive development, regardless what their motivations might be.

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CIPS+SPFS

The alternative financial system linking the Chinese and Russian economies takes shape:

In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value.

Financial transactions
The SWIFT system for financial transactions between banks worldwide was previously the only system for international payments. This central role for SWIFT began to erode when the US used it as a political weapon. The Americans first expelled Iran and North Korea, and in 2014, Washington began threatening to expel Russia from the system as well. Over the past few weeks, the threat of using SWIFT as a weapon against Russia has intensified.

China has responded by creating CIPS and Russia developed SPFS, both being alternatives to SWIFT. Even several other European countries have banded together with an alternative to SWIFT to curb Washington’s extra-territorial jurisdiction and thus continue trading with Iran. A new China-Russia financial architecture should integrate CIPS and SPFS, and make them more available to third parties. If the US expels Russia, then the decoupling from SWIFT would intensify further.

Development banks
The US-led IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank are renowned instruments of US economic statecraft. The launch of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2015 became a watershed moment in the global financial architecture, as all the major allies of the US (except Japan) signed up in defiance of American warnings. The New Development Bank, formerly referred to as the BRICS Development Bank, was a further step towards decoupling from the US-led development banks. The Eurasian Development Bank and future SCO Development Bank are more nails in the coffin of US-controlled development banks.

Synergy effects
China and Russia have also developed their own rating agencies and replaced the dominant position of Visa and Mastercard in their respective countries. This new financial architecture is complemented with an energy partnership and a technological partnership as neither China nor Russia wants to be reliant on American high-tech industries as they move into the fourth industrial revolution.

For those who live outside the USA, it will be wise to find a bank that is utilizing both systems, which will limit one’s exposure to either deplatforming or a collapse of the self-styled “rules-based order” that is, in fact, neither rules-based nor orderly.

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We’re Not Locked Out, You’re Locked Out

As I anticipated on a recent Darkstream, China and Russia are collaborating to provide the world with an alternative payment infrastructure that will compete, most likely favorably, with SWIFT and the US dollar.

Russia and China will develop shared financial structures to enable them to deepen economic ties in a way that foreign states will be unable to influence, the Kremlin has announced following talks between the countries’ leaders. The move appears to be a response to a series of warnings that Western nations could push to disconnect Russia from the Brussels-based SWIFT financial system as a form of sanctions.

The payment platform underpins the vast majority of international transactions. During the talks on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping called for increasing the share of national currencies in mutual settlements and expanding cooperation to provide Russian and Chinese investors with access to stock markets, said Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor.

Ushakov said “particular attention was paid to the need to intensify efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure to service trade operations between Russia and China.”

“We mean creating an infrastructure that cannot be influenced by third countries,” the Kremlin aide added.

Ahead of the video summit, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov hinted that economic discussions were likely to be on the agenda for the two heads of state.

Both Russia and China are said to be increasingly looking to move away from using the US dollar as the main currency of international trade, instead using their own denominations to underpin the booming volume of Moscow-Beijing trade.

It’s probably not a bad time to get an Alipay account, if you don’t have one already.

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The Easy Way or the Hard Way

China makes it clear that the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland is going to happen, one way or the other, and there is nothing the US can do to prevent it:

Recently, US senior officials have repeatedly shown their tough yet empty attitude on the situation in the Taiwan Straits. On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also accused China of attempting to “reshape not only its own territory but also the global system to its benefit.” Again, Blinken threatened that “if Beijing were to decide to try to change the status quo unilaterally by force, it would be a very serious mistake.”

Sullivan blustered to ensure that China’s reunification by force “never happens,” which is particularly alarming. This is the biggest boast made by a senior US official so far. Almost no one would believe Sullivan’s impromptu to a reporter would become a manifesto of US policy. This is because the US simply cannot build a deterrent to prevent the Chinese mainland from carrying out reunification by force when necessary. No one would believe the US has the true will to defend Taiwan at all costs, which goes against China’s military growth and its resolution in reunification.

So far, the official attitude of Washington is to encourage the Taiwan authority to build up self-defense capabilities. The US mainly provides military support to Taiwan by selling weapons. Those weapons are generally destined to be destroyed by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as soon as the reunification by force takes place. It is credible that the PLA will heavily attack US troops who come to Taiwan’s rescue. Such credibility is increasingly overwhelming the deterrence that US troops may have.

Indeed, the US does have a way of ensuring that reunification by force “never happens.” That is to blow the ambitions of the Taiwan authority to promote the “Taiwan independence,” to force them to return to the 1992 Consensus and meet half way with the Chinese mainland on the path of peaceful reunification and to accept the principle of “one country, two systems.” If Washington supports the Taiwan authority’s path of seeking secession and encourages the Taiwan authority to rely on it, then reunification by force will definitely happen. The more the US and the island of Taiwan collude, the sooner reunification by force will come.

All of this nonsensical blustering by the increasingly fangless US political leadership is making me wonder what it is they are trying to conceal and what it is that they are actually trying to prevent, because we know they can’t stop China from taking Taiwan and they can’t stop Russia from taking Ukraine. The only thing that is preventing the regional powers from taking successful military action is a) China would prefer a peaceful reunification process ala Hong Kong, and b) Russia wants nothing to do with being responsible for Ukraine and its inhabitants.

It shouldn’t escape your attention that while the Fake Biden Fake Administration is actively threatening a) China, b) Russia, c) Iran, and d) India, all four of those countries are calmly refusing to respond in kind. This makes me suspect that some sort of serious unrestricted – by which I mean economic – global assault is being prepared by the New and Improved Whole-Process Democracies, and the USA is desperately casting about for a way to shut it down before it starts with the military superiority it no longer possesses.

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