Tag: China

China’s New Nevsky Film

From Infogalactic:

Alexander Nevsky is a 1938 Soviet historical drama film directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It depicts the attempted invasion of Novgorod in the 13th century by the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire and their defeat by Prince Alexander, known popularly as Alexander Nevsky (1220–1263).

The picture was released in December 1938, and became a great success with audiences: on 15 April 1939, Semen Dukelsky – the chairman of the State Committee for Cinematography – reported that it had already been viewed by 23,000,000 people and was the most popular of the films made in recent times.

After 23 August 1939, when the USSR signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which provided for non-aggression and collusion between Germany and the Soviet Union, Alexander Nevsky was removed from circulation. But the situation reversed dramatically on 22 June 1941 after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the film rapidly returned to Soviet and western screens.

From Global Times:

Korean War film breaks records, has implications for today’s China-US competition

One day after the Chinese war epic film The Battle at Lake Changjin about the Korean War (1950-53) debuted on Thursday, its box office surpassed 516 million and broke 10 film records as of press time. Observers said the movie’s success shows the national feeling displayed in the film echoes the rising public sentiment in safeguarding national interests in front of provocations, which has great implications for today’s China-US competition.

The overall box office for the movie has surpassed 516 million yuan as of press time, one day after it debuted around the country on Thursday, according to data compiled by Lighthouse, a box office tracker and film big data platform owned by Alibaba Pictures.

The film leads the box office as it smashed ten box office records on Friday, including “the premiere day box office record,” “single day box office record,” and “cumulative box office record in the National Day holiday” as a historical film.

The film also reports a record in “the premiere day box office record” and “single day box office record in the past three years,” “the single day box office record during National Day holiday,” and “single day box office record,” as a war film.

Besides that, the film also reported a record in the number of screenings on the premiere day in the National Day holiday.

The film tells the story about how Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) soldiers held their ground amid fierce cold and the enemy’s more advanced weapons during the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53).

A movie-goer who watched the film on premier day commented on Chinese social media Sina Weibo that after watching the film, they indeed had the feeling that Chinese people are not, and have never been, afraid of the US.

The CPC is clearly preparing the Chinese people for direct conflict with the US military. And it’s not a great mystery as to the proximate cause, in light of this breathtakingly hypocritical statement by the US State Department:

In a threatening statement on Beijing’s “destabilizing” military moves that was published on Sunday, the US State Department warned China against even diplomatically and economically pressuring Taiwan in its own interests. In the statement, United States spokesperson and former CIA intelligence officer Ned Price warned China that the US was “very concerned” by its “provocative military activity near Taiwan, which is destabilizing, risks miscalculations, and undermines regional peace and stability.”

“We urge Beijing to cease its military, diplomatic, and economic pressure and coercion against Taiwan,” Price wrote.

Claiming the US had “an abiding interest in peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” Price said it would “continue to assist Taiwan in maintaining a sufficient self-defense capability” and affirmed that its commitment to Taiwan was “rock solid.” “We will continue to stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values, and deepen our ties with democratic Taiwan,” the statement concluded.

And just in case you’re still not capable of connecting the dots, Global Times was kind enough to explain the purpose of the PLA’s now-daily flights over the island of Taiwan.

The PLA has done an excellent job! This can be seen as a form of the National Day military parade in the Taiwan Straits, which used to be held at the Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It is a clear and unmistakable declaration of China’s sovereignty over the island. This is apt given the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, greatly encouraging people nationwide, and highlighted and emphasized to a new height the special significance of the National Day.

The 38 and 39 warplanes dispatched in two consecutive days to the exercise during the day and night near the island of Taiwan were not a guard of honor. They are fighting forces aimed at actual combat. The increase in the number of aircraft showed the PLA Air Force’s operational capabilities. The warplanes that gathered over the Straits were possibly dispatched from different airports, showing the strong ability of the PLA to form a wartime air attack.

According to statistics from Taiwan island, the PLA has sent warplanes into the island’s “airspace” in 198 days so far this year. Such a number reflects that the PLA has carried out wide-ranged and profound operations to familiarize itself with battlefield conditions, with a large number of PLA Air Force units having experience flying close to the island. Once the order to attack is given, the PLA’s pilots will fight as “experienced veterans.”

At this point, it would be surprising if China didn’t publicly demand Taiwan’s submission before the end of the year. While it could all be for show, the time it has taken to prepare for this massive, multi-stage propaganda campaign tends to indicate otherwise. Unfortunately, the fact that the US refuses to back down and stay out of what is an internal Chinese matter makes it much more likely that there will be at least a few unnecessary shots fired before the inevitable plays out.

UPDATE: The PLA upped the ante again today.

China has flown 52 aircraft into Taiwan’s airspace in its single largest mission to date – marking a dramatic escalation of tensions around the South China Sea island. Taipei said 34 J-16 fighters accompanied 12 H-6 nuclear-capable bombers, two Su-30 jets and other military planes into its ‘air defence identification zone’ on Monday.

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Kneecapping the Tech Giants

The Prometheans are furious with Xi and the CCP for refusing to permit the financialization of the Chinese economy. Because, um, they’re afraid of losing power to Alibaba, Huawei, and TenCent or something:

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China, is currently kneecapping his country’s most successful private companies.

Until very recently, the CPC permitted the growth of domestic tech giants, including Alibaba , a Chinese analog of Amazon ; Tencent , a massive tech conglomerate; Xiaomi, an artificial intelligence company tied to the military but better known for its smartphones; Huawei, a controversial global leader in 5G networks; and Baidu, one of the world’s largest AI companies. Leaders watched these firms create massive numbers of jobs and improve consumers’ lives, and challenge their American and European competitors.

But now, the CPC fears them. In late 2020, Beijing’s regulators abruptly scuttled the initial public offering of Ant, an internet payments company that spun out of Alibaba. The stock offering was poised to be the largest IPO in history, giving China the sort of bragging rights you would have expected party bosses to relish.

This wasn’t a one-off. In spring 2021, Chinese regulators issued a $2.8 billion antitrust fine to Alibaba. And regulators have cracked down on the ability of Chinese firms to list their shares in the United States—once a rite of passage for Chinese companies that signaled international legitimacy.

That very legitimacy has become a problem for the CPC, which is cracking down on China’s Big Tech precisely because they present an alternative governance structure in Chinese society—one that knows the people of China better than the CCP itself. The Communist Party of China has always insisted on a paramount rule—the party’s own absolute hegemony—and these Big Tech companies threaten that.

For years, China-watchers in the West clung to the conviction that the CPC needed strong economic growth from the private sector to survive in power. Growth meant increasing prosperity, and prosperity bought domestic peace: It implied proof that the Party provided for the people. Now, the Party fears that that legitimacy will rest with its true source—the technology companies that have become billboards for Chinese pride and the governance structures that made them so.

This is a bizarre and self-serving interpretation of why the CCP is preventing China’s biggest companies from growing in paper terms rather than industrial terms. It’s not the tech companies they fear, but rather, the banks behind them. Michael Hudson, one of the few economists in the world who actually understands the significance of debt, explains the real reason China is preventing its business interests from expanding freely in an interview:

Michael Hudson: Well, George Soros’ dream is that China would do what Yeltsin did to Russia – that it would privatise the economy, really carve it up and let US investors buy control of the most profitable heights. In that way, the foreign investors would be able to sort of get the profits of Chinese industry, Chinese labour, and it would become the darling stock market of the world, just like Russia’s stock market was the leading booming stock market of 1994-96. China would be run to benefit US investment bankers. Soros is furious that China is not following the neoliberal policy that the United States is following. It’s following a socialist policy wanting to keep its economic surplus at home to benefit its own citizens, not American financial investors. For Soros, this is a clash of civilisations. His proposed strategy is to stifle the Chinese economy by putting sanctions against it, to stop investing in it so as to force it to do to itself what Yeltsin did to Russia.

Ross: Let’s hear it in his words. He says: ‘The BlackRock initiative imperils the national security interests of the US and other democracies because the money invested in China will help prop up President Xi’s regime, which is repressive at home and aggressive abroad. Congress should pass legislation empowering the Securities and Exchange Commission to limit the flow of funds to China. The effort ought to enjoy bipartisan support’. He’s not mincing his words, is he?

Michael Hudson: He thinks that China actually needs American dollars to build its factories and invest. He thinks that somehow China’s balance of payments is going to fall apart without the US market, without US investors telling President Xi what to do. The Chinese government won’t have a clue as to what to invest in and how to let the ‘free market’, meaning George Soros and BlackRock and other companies, operate. So he’s living in a dream world where other people need us. It’s like a guy who doesn’t realise his girlfriend doesn’t need him anymore….

The United States is driving Europe, Asia and now Africa as well, into a unified, consolidated unit outside of itself. It’s very self-destructive. It thinks like George Soros, that if we stop investing in Asia and other countries, that will force them to knuckle under to the US. But what it’s doing is it’s driving them altogether into the Belt and Road Initiative.

What China’s doing is creating a precondition for a profitable industrial economy over a large area to benefit from. It’s participants are going to need transportation. You’re going to need ports. You’re going to need roads. You’re going to need pipelines and is focusing on the interconnections, on the infrastructure.

America doesn’t build infrastructure these days unless it’s monopolised. This is the political fight going on in the United States now. President Biden has a infrastructure plan that he’s scaled down from six and a half trillion to three and a half trillion. And essentially the bulk of the Democratic and Republican Party said if we can’t privatise infrastructure and make it a rent-extracting monopoly, we’re not going to do it, and we’re going to block the government from doing it. So in the United States, they’re going to have high priced infrastructure, high-priced health care and high-priced education while China is going to have low-priced transportation, low-cost infrastructure, free education, public health care. And you’re going to have a very high-cost United States unable to compete with the rest of the world. All it can do is make military threats or financial threats. If it tries to impose sanctions as it’s imposed on Russia, China and other countries, these are going to serve as protective tariffs for foreign countries.

When President Trump put sanctions on agricultural exports to Russia, it was a windfall for Russia. They developed their own agriculture and Russia is now the largest grain exporter in the world. Senator McCain characterised Russia as a gas station of atom bombs, but it’s a gas station with the largest farm sector in the world, and is developing an industrial integration with China and the rest of Asia. It’s a Eurasian world island as Mackinder called it a century ago, and it is becoming the economic focus of the world, leaving the United States as the high cost economy with no visible means of support, because we’re not doing our own industry anymore. We’re not competing with China. We’re letting China do all of the industry, and all of a sudden we’re dependent on it. This does not bode good for prosperity in the United States or Europe and other areas that are satellites of the US economy.

There isn’t any conflict between the USA, Russia, and China. The real conflict, the real war that is probably the true cause of the Covid plandemic and the vaccine regimes, is a global one between the One World Prometheans and the nationalists. But whereas the nationalists were successfully suppressed in North America and Europe by 70 years of relentless propaganda and immigration, they have the upper hand in China and Russia. And they have learned from what was done to the American people. Taking economic advice from globalists is about as good an idea as taking candy from a creepy middle-aged man driving a van with no windows in the back.

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The End of Avoidance

I think we can safely conclude that the Chinese military is no longer being guided by the philosophy of Tao Guang Yang Hui, or “to hide one’s capabilities and bide one’s time.”

The Chinese-made historical war epic The Battle at Lake Changjin, which focuses on a major battle in the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea (1950-53), will debut in Chinese theaters on Thursday. The film is expected to be China’s highest grossing film of the year.

As the most expensive film in Chinese film history with a budget of over 1.3 billion yuan ($201 million), the film was filmed through the joint effort of four Chinese heavyweight filmmakers, directors Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine), Lam Chiu-Yin (Operation Red Sea) and Tsui Hark (The Taking of Tiger Mountain) and executive producer Huang Jianxin (The Founding of a Republic).

As the two directors from Hong Kong, Lam and Tsui pointed out that as Chinese, they needed to understand why “we fought this war and how we won.”

“We put a lot of shots of the US military in the film because this was a battle between China and the US. The US military is not an abstract symbol, but the army of a country. After World War II, the US military was very strong, making them believe they could control the world situation. However, when the war began, they did not expect that the power of China would be so great, and that Chinese power was what they had to learn. In order to maintain the authenticity of the war, we needed to feature the US military’s response,” Tsui told the Global Times.

Subtle. As a general rule, it’s a reliably ominous sign when your potential enemy begins making propagandistic war films that feature you as the bad guy. There is a reason that for decades, every Hollywood movie has featured white Europeans, preferably with English accents, as the bad guys, to the point that they’re still trying to cram Nazis into every film 76 years after the end of National Socialism.

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真善美

Those who are mystified as to why I have a very high opinion of Xi Jinping tend to amuse me, mostly because they are some of the same people who bought into the previous “Putin is Hitler” theme between 2007 and 2014. As for the Boomer-tier “don’t you know they is CHICOMS” nonsense, I would merely point out that the Chinese Communist Party is presently less communist than the Democratic Party is democratic or the Republican Party is republican. Things tend to change over the course of 100 years; the CCP of Xi is not the CCP of Deng, let alone the CCP of Mao.

Anyhow, Xi and Putin are the two great nationalist leaders who successfully stand against Babel, the failing neoliberal world order also known as globohomo. Xi and Putin had the courage to succeed that Donald Trump lacked; it’s worth noting that none of the three leaders were supposed to succeed their predecessors.

And just as it’s finally beginning to be known that Putin has been methodically rebuilding the Russian Orthodox churches, Xi’s nine-year campaign to improve Chinese culture through literature and entertainment is gradually starting to bear fruit. The three Chinese ideographs above are zhen shan mei, which means True, Good, and Beautiful, and they are the conceptual centerpiece of Xi’s cultural revolution.

Xi Jinping stressed that pursuing the true, the good and the beautiful is the eternal value of literature and art. The highest boundary of literature and art is moving people, letting the spirits of people experience baptisms, letting the people discover the beauty of nature, the beauty of life and the beauty of the spirit. We must, through literature and art works, spread the true, the good and the beautiful, spread upward and charitable value views, guide the people in strengthening their powers of moral judgment and their sense of moral honour, yearn for and pursue a life of stressing morals, respecting morals and abiding morals. As long as the Chinese nation pursues the moral plane of the true, the good and the beautiful generation by generation, our nation will be eternally healthy and upward, and will for always be full of hope.

Xi Jinping pointed out that China’s excellent traditional culture is the spiritual lifeline of the Chinese nation, is an important source nourishing the Socialist core value system, and is a firm basis for us to get a firm foothold within the global cultural surge. We must integrate the conditions of new times with inheriting and carrying forward China’s excellent traditional culture, and inheriting and carrying forward a Chinese aesthetic spirit. For our Socialist literature and art to flourish and develop, we must earnestly study and learn from the excellent literature and art created by people in all countries worldwide. Only if we persist in using the foreign to serve the Chinese, exploration and innovation, ensuring combinations of the Chinese and the Western, and mastery through comprehensive study, will our country’s literature and art be able to flourish and develop better.

Xi Jinping’s Talks at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art, 16 October 2014

Compare the Chinese program with the unmitigated filth and appalling celebration of the False, the Wicked, and the Ugly of the last 100 years of Western art and literature. When is the last time any Western leader dared to stand firmly against the degradation of Western culture, or to even lift a finger in an attempt to raise the cultural standards of the West? And Xi’s culture campaign is not a communist program, it is an intrinsically Chinese nationalist one, one that has its roots in the consciousness of the consequences of past decadence and was almost certainly inspired by the cultural campaign instituted by the great Lee Kuan Yew when he first came to power in Singapore in 1959.

There were, in addition, several easy, popular points to be scored that required no planning, including a series of “anti-yellow culture” prohibitions imposed by Pang Boon as minister for home affairs. “Yellow culture” was a literal translation of the Mandarin phrase for the decadent and degenerate behaviour that had brought China to its knees in the 19th century: gambling, opium-smoking, pornography, multiple wives and concubines, the selling of daughters into prostitution, corruption and nepotism. This aversion to “yellow culture” had been imported by schoolteachers from China, who infused into our students and their parents the spirit of national revival that was evident in every chapter of the textbooks they brought with them, whether on literature, history or geography.

The Singapore Story, Lee Kuan Yew, 1998

We are not the Chinese and they are not us. But the enemy of our mutual enemy is our friend, and there is a long and positive history of Christians showing respect for the noble and virtuous pagans.

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SJWs Do NOT Approve

Apparently they are unhappy with Joe Bennett’s decision to join forces with The Legend Chuck Dixon and me at Arkhaven:

Renfamous⭐️@renfamous
So Joe Bennett gets canned by Marvel and less than two weeks later he’s already signed on to draw books for Vox Day?

Dude really took that mask off and flung it across the room, lol

Joe Bennett is going from working on the Hulk to making comic book b-movies for a guy who believes in phrenology

It’s all the usual Wikipedia-based nonsense. It will be fascinating to see how they react once they realize that I have closer ties to the Chinese Communist Party than to the Republican Party, much less any Nazi-related party.

Not that I’m a Communist or a communist. I’m not even left-wing. I am simply a Christian Nationalist who pays attention to the trends and vagaries of history. That being said, it is certainly fascinating to observe some of the elements of the CCP’s recent campaign against the Hellmouth and its forms of entertainment that target children, is it not?

The National Radio and Television Administration said in a notice posted late on Friday that children and young people were the main audience for cartoons, and qualified agencies need to broadcast content that “upholds truth, goodness and beauty”.

Now, why does that sound so familiar? It’s a beautiful mystery.

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The Devil’s Children Fear Xi

For the benefit of all the Boomers, retards, and civnats who don’t understand that China is not simply RED CHINER full of damn commies who jes’ wanna invade the USA because they hate us for our freedoms, it might be helpful to observe how the wrath of globohomo and its servitors is particularly reserved for the very powerful Xi Jinping, who unexpectedly succeeded Hu Jintao as China’s leader, after which he proceeded to kick Silicon Valley out of his country while jailing over 100,000 party officials, from the highest level to the lowest, in the largest anti-corruption campaign ever waged in the history of Man.

That is why the global media has waged an unstinting personal campaign against him that is now growing to a fever pitch courtesy of Rupert Murdoch in the aftermath of the recent submarine deal between the USA and Australia.

Under the headline ‘China’s the main game. Removing Xi is how to play it’ commentator Paul Monk, writing in The Australian, speculated that the only way to avoid a devastating conflict with China is to facilitate a coup and suggested it should be on the agenda at the upcoming Quad conference between Australia, the US, India and Japan – described as Asia’s NATO.

“Xi needs to be removed from power and a broad path to democratic reform opened up at long last in China,” says Monk. “The Communist Party must make the shift to democratic rule that Taiwan and South Korea made from the late 1980s. The Quad should openly call for such a transition.”

In support of his suggestion, he cites a recent article from former Aussie PM Kevin Rudd in which he suggested the Quad could “provide a rallying point for all those concerned about Xi’s jingoism and arrogance”.

Warming to his topic, Monk declares, “Xi must go, and with him the reactionary dictatorship and hubris he espouses. This must be our stance. It must be the stance of the Quad. It must be the mantra of all those seeking a peaceful, prosperous future for Asia and the world.”

This is total nonsense. There is no way to avoid conflict with China. China’s entire military strategy has been aimed squarely and specifically at undermining US military hegemony, even at the expense of its ability to wage regional war against its neighbors, since 1991, but China’s leaders have considered the USA’s encouragement of “a shift to democratic rule” to be war even before Deng Xioaping officially declared it to have replaced the Soviet Union as China’s primary threat.

Despite the Bush administration’s efforts, Deng’s comments about the United States changed dramatically beginning in 1989. Throughout most of the 1980s, as a review of his Selected Works makes clear, Deng would occasionally chide the United States for democratic arrogance or for interference in Taiwan, yet he did not refer to the United States as a threat. After 1989, he frequently denounced the United States in ideological terms. For example, in a private talk with several members of the CCP Central Committee just two months after his meeting with Scowcroft, Deng said there was now “no doubt that the imperialists want socialist countries to change their nature. The problem now is not whether the banner of the Soviet Union will fall—there is bound to be unrest there—but whether the banner of China will fall.”

The sentiment became a common feature of Deng’s remarks, even his public ones. “The West really wants unrest in China,” Deng declared later that same month, “it wants turmoil not only in China but also in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. The United States and some other Western countries are trying to bring about a peaceful evolution towards capitalism in socialist countries.”

In Deng’s mind, this threat to China was a form of warfare. “The United States has coined an expression: waging a world war without gunsmoke,” he argued. “We should be on guard against this. Capitalists want to defeat socialists in the long run. In the past they used weapons, atomic bombs and hydrogen bombs, but they were opposed by the peoples of the world. So now they are trying peaceful evolution.” In a meeting with Richard Nixon after Tiananmen, Deng declared that the “United States was deeply involved” in “the recent disturbances and the counter-revolutionary rebellion” of the students and that “some Westerners” were “trying to overthrow the socialist system in China.

In a November 1989 address, he warned, “Western countries are staging a third world war without gunsmoke.” Then, in a talk with a visiting Japanese delegation, Deng elaborated on Western responsibility for the Tiananmen incident. “Western countries, particularly the United States,” he argued, “set all their propaganda machines in motion to fan the flames, to encourage and support the so-called democrats or opposition in China, who were in fact the scum of the Chinese nation. That is how the turmoil came about.”

Not only was the United States responsible, in Deng’s view, but its objectives were hostile: “In inciting unrest in many countries, they are actually playing power politics and seeking hegemony. They are trying to bring into their sphere of influence countries that heretofore they have not been able to control. Once this point is made clear, it will help us understand the nature of the problem.”

THE LONG GAME: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Rush Doshi

The reason globohomo fears Xi, and the reason a petty third-rate power is talking utter nonsense that provides China with a legitimate cause of war against it, is because Xi is, like Putin, a nationalist whose objectives are completely opposed to the satanic globalists who presently rule the United States, Britain, Australia, and Israel. Unlike Putin, Xi may not yet be viewed as a good guy in conventional Western terms, but he is appears to be the most bitter and formidable enemy of Mankind’s true enemy.

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China’s Lehman Bros

China has discovered the concept of “too big to fail” with the Evergrande disaster:

As of the end of June, Evergrande had nearly 2 trillion yuan ($309 billion) of debts on its books, plus an unknown amount of off-books debt. The property giant is on the verge of a dramatic debt restructuring or even bankruptcy, many institutions believe.

A bankruptcy would amount to a financial tsunami, or as some analysts put it, “China’s Lehman Brothers.” The venerable American investment bank’s 2008 collapse helped trigger a global financial crisis.

Evergrande, one of China’s three biggest developers, has a giant footprint in China. Its liabilities are equivalent to about 2% of China’s GDP. It has more than 200,000 employees, who themselves and many of their families have invested billions of yuan in the company’s WMPs. The company has more than 800 projects under construction, more than half of them halted due to its cash crunch. There are thousands of upstream and downstream companies that rely on Evergrande for business, creating more than 3.8 million jobs every year.

Like many of China’s “too big to fail” conglomerates, Evergrande’s crisis has fueled speculation over whether the government will step in for a rescue. Several state-owned enterprises, including Shenzhen Talents Housing Group Co. Ltd. and Shenzhen Investment Ltd., both controlled by the Shenzhen State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), are in talks with Evergrande on its Shenzhen projects, according to people close to the talks. But so far, no deals have been reached.

A potential default by Evergrande could spread to markets outside China as it has huge, high-interest offshore bonds. Some of its offshore bonds carry interest rates as high as 15%, a person close to the Hong Kong capital market said. UBS estimates that $19 billion of Evergrande’s liabilities are made up of outstanding offshore bonds.

Evergrande has been frantically selling properties at discounts this year. In late May, it offered certain homebuyers 30% to 40% off if they paid entirely in cash. In the first half, the company reported 356 billion yuan of contracted sales, slightly higher than 349 billion yuan for the same period last year. Average selling prices in the first six months declined 11.2%. Meanwhile, payables increased 14.7% to 951 billion yuan, and sales and marketing expenses increased 30% to 17.8 billion yuan. In response to the market environment, the company increased sales commissions and marketing expenses, the company said.

Compared with its competitors, Evergrande has higher capital and human costs but lower selling prices, an industry participant said. “How can it make money?” the person said.

The developer reported a 29% slide in profit for the first half. Its 10.5 billion yuan of profit mainly reflected an 18.5 billion yuan gain from the sale of some shares and marked-to-market holding in internet unit Henten Networks. It reported a loss in its core property business of 4 billion yuan.

Evergrande’s extremely high debt ratio, high financing cost and repeated delays in payments to suppliers, partners and local government show that its liquidity has always been tight, but on the other hand, the fact that it has survived years under this model indicates that it has always been able to generate money, a veteran investor said.

Now everyone is watching whether it can dodge the bullet once again.

I would not assume that the Chinese government will follow the lead of the US government and bail out Evergrande and the banks whose failure it threatens. First, Xi Jinping hates corruption with a passion and he is not likely to care one little bit about saving the wealth and careers of all the bankers and businessmen at risk. Second, China has seen how the 2008 financial crisis weakened the USA, and how the US failing to burn the dead wood in the financial sector had terrible consequences for its real economy.

We know the Chinese were paying very close attention to the 2008 situation and its aftermath, because the strategic guideline of Tao Guang Yang Hui established under the Deng regime was officially revised for the first time after the global financial crisis, which the Chinese interpreted as marking the end of the USA as the singular superpower.

So my guess is that unlike the US government, the Chinese government will protect the common people at the expense of the financial sector.

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Why the Smart Money is on China

In England, an Appeals Court ruled that parental consent is not required by children under 16 who wish to pretend that they are of the opposite sex and interfere with their physical development. In the USA, the Hellmouth is rabidly gnawing away at the foundations of Western civilization. Meanwhile, in China, the state-run media is hailing the state-run entertainment system that is encouraging families to have more children.

Two TV series based on families with several children have been launched recently and both of them have had stunning performance in terms of word of mouth and viewing numbers, and this could help Chinese audiences see the happiness of multiple-kid families and give them courage to have more children.

The TV dramas, Dear Parents and The Bond, were released online almost at the same time. Both focus on family relations in large-size families with at least five children and they have been viewed more than 2 billion times on Tencent Video in total.

The 43-episode series Dear Parents follows Liu Biyun and Jiang Tianhuai who became husband and wife in their second marriage. Liu had two children with her ex-husband and Jiang had three children with his ex-wife. The seven-member family lives under the same roof and they finally get closer after dealing with many problems.

The Bond focuses on a family surnamed Qiao that has five children. The mother of the family died when giving birth to the fifth son and the father, who should be the backbone of the family, reveals his true colors.

Selfish and unfeeling, the man turns all of his focus inward, leaving his children to fend for themselves. Realizing his father would never be the man he ought to be, the eldest son voluntarily steps into the role of caretaker. All Qiao siblings gradually become aware of the fact that they are on their own with their big brother, but are willing to do whatever is necessary to keep their family together.

I give it 18-24 months before Xi is declared the new Hitler by the media. He’s already advocating the Kinder and Kuche, all that is left is for him to embrace the Kirche.

China Contemplates Confrontation

This sort of blustery rhetoric tends to be dismissed by Americans in the aftermath of the wars against Arabs in the Middle East, but it shouldn’t be when it comes from China in response to various diplomatic provocations by the US State Department using European proxies.

Diplomatic measures alone are obviously not enough. If the US and the Taiwan island change the names, they are suspected of touching the red line of China’s Anti-Secession Law, and the Chinese mainland will have to take severe economic and military measures to combat the arrogance of the US and the island of Taiwan. At that time, the mainland should impose severe economic sanctions on the island and even carry out an economic blockade on the island, depending on the circumstances.

Militarily, Chinese mainland’s fighter jets should fly over the island of Taiwan and place the island’s airspace into the patrol area of the PLA. This is a step that the mainland must take sooner or later. The name change provides the Chinese mainland with sufficient reason to strengthen our sovereign claim over the island of Taiwan. It is anticipated that the Taiwan army will not dare to stop the PLA fighter jets from flying over the island. If the Taiwan side dares open fire, the Chinese mainland will not hesitate to give “Taiwan independence” forces a decisive and destructive blow….

Will peace come if the Chinese mainland puts up with all this and swallows its anger for the sake of peace? If the mainland doesn’t strike back decisively, US warships will dock at the island of Taiwan, its fighter aircraft will land on the island and its troops may be stationed in the island again. At that time, where will be China’s prestige as a great power? How can the country maintain its system of defending its interests on the international stage?

The fact is that a contest of will has been formed regarding the Taiwan question. Since China has declared that the Taiwan question is a matter of our core interests, we must take resolute actions to protect the bottom line of this exact national interest at any cost. If the Democratic Progress Party authority really dares to take the risk of triggering a war to push for a name change, and the US, which just suffered a debacle in Afghanistan, is not afraid of being involved in a new war, then what is there for the mainland to be scared of?

It seems that sooner or later, the Taiwan Straits will be plunged into a storm that will change the situation there drastically. And judging from the current actions of the US and the island of Taiwan, we can be sure that even if they will have to take this step back, they will step forth again soon. Thus, right now we need to be fully prepared to blow them out of the water in the Taiwan Straits.

Global Times, 12 September 2021

There is a rational argument for the US military provoking a confrontation with China sooner rather than later, as the technological and production trends are clearly working in China’s favor. The Chinese are fully aware of these trends, which is why they have resolutely avoided military confrontation with the USA for decades. And that’s why it is so significant that at least some parties in China believe, and are willing to publicly declare, that the right time for resolving “the Taiwan question” is right now.

UPDATE: The provocations aren’t only diplomatic.

US Guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold trespassed in waters near the Meiji Reef in the South China Sea Wednesday without permission from China. The Chinese side mobilized aircraft and ships to warn off and expel the ship from the waters. In a 7th Fleet news release, the US side acknowledged that USS Benfold sailed within 12 nautical miles of Meiji Reef. But it said the warship was asserting navigational rights and freedoms. It claimed the Meiji reef “is not entitled to a territorial sea under international law,” and “the land reclamation efforts, installations, and structures” built on the reef “do not change this characterization under international law.”

China and the US don’t agree on the nature of the 12 nautical miles of Meiji Reef. Other different views exist worldwide. But international law doesn’t empower any country to challenge others’ sovereign claim with an intrusion by a warship. The US in particular has no right to do so given the fact that it has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Global Times, 13 September 2021

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of Free Trade

What is being described as “the heist of the century” is striking fear into every banker and parasite bloating himself on the financial flows of the failing neoliberal world order and the so-called global economy:

Arm is widely regarded as the most important semiconductor IP firm. Their IP ships in billions of new chips every year from phones, cars, microcontrollers, Amazon servers, and even Intel’s latest IPU. Originally it was a British owned and headquartered company, but SoftBank acquired the firm in 2016. They proceeded to plow money into Arm Limited to develop deep pushes into the internet of things, automotive, and server. Part of their push was also to go hard into China and become the dominant CPU supplier in all segments of the market.

As part of the emphasis on the Chinese market, SoftBank succumbed to pressure and formed a joint venture. In the new joint venture, Arm Limited, the SoftBank subsidiary sold a 51% stake of the company to a consortium of Chinese investors for paltry $775M. This venture has the exclusive right to distribute Arm’s IP within China. Within 2 years, the venture went rogue. Technically it has always been legally independent, but Arm still maintained control. Recently, Arm China gave a presentation to the industry about rebranding their own IP, extending it by developing more, and emphasizing that they are striking their own independently operated path.

This firm is called “安谋科技”, but it is not part of Arm Limited.

This is the tech heist of the century….

Despite formally being fired, Allen Wu has remained in power. He ousted executives that were loyal to Arm. He has even hired security paid for by Arm China that reports to him. This security has kept Arm out of the Arm China offices. Allen Wu has aggressively taken over the firm and is operating it how he sees fit. One interesting tidbit is that Allen Wu sued Arm China in order to declare his dismissal illegal. He essentially sued himself as he represented both sides in that specific court case.

Arm has halted the transfer of any IP to entities on export control list. According to Arm, no IP has been stolen. Simultaneously, Arm has also tried to appeal to the government stating that this is bad for the Chinese semiconductor industry.

This leads us to the present day, where Arm China held an event at which they formally declared their independence. They proclaimed that 安谋科技 is China’s largest CPU IP supplier. It was born from Arm, but is an independently operate, Chinese owned company.

This is a fascinating situation, because the gunboat diplomacy to which the multinational corporations have appealed for the last 120 years is simply not an option in this case. There is absolutely nothing that the ARM investors or Softbank or its bankers can do if China decides that it wants to keep ARM China in the hands of the Chinese individuals who presently control it.

Demonstrating, once more, the profound difference between influence and power.