Tag: China

China is Unimpressed

The imperial US rhetoric attempting to paint Vladimir Putin as the Hitlerist of all the Hitlers that ever Hitlered does not appear to be impressing China. Just as it is failing to convince anyone outside of the Anglo-European globohomo-controlled government-media order:

Since dramatic changes took place in Ukraine, the US, which had repeatedly promised to protect Kiev at critical moments and continued to “add fuel to the fire” of the situation, has once again come into the spotlight. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a video speech complained that Western countries have abandoned Ukraine and left it to defend itself alone. Some Western netizens even asked: Where has the US been which provoked the war and said it “stands with Ukraine?”

However, has the US really disappeared? On the contrary, it is quite busy gaining more “strategic interests” from the flames of war in Ukraine. The latest remarks by the US on the Ukraine situation released by the White House have underlined two points: First, turning Russia into “a pariah on the international stage” through sanctions and other measures; second, NATO has been “more united and more determined than ever” and this is “good news.”

As for Ukraine, which Washington uses as a pawn, in addition to reiterating that the US wouldn’t send troops there, Washington only simply said it “will support the Ukrainian people as they defend their country,” and “will provide humanitarian relief to ease their suffering.” Washington has once again displayed its selfishness and hypocrisy to the world. People have seen that after the US pushed Ukraine into the fire, it stood aside, pretending to care about the country and saying “I support you, keep fighting!”

It is fair to say the evolution of the situation in Ukraine until today is a geopolitical tragedy. From the very beginning, it’s a bitter result of the US’ strategic selfishness and shortsightedness. As early as 1998 when the US Senate approved NATO’s eastward expansion plan, the late senior US diplomat George Kennan had foreseen today’s tragedy. He said then, “This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

The US often talks about humanity, justice and morality, but what it really does is calculating interests. Washington’s strategic selfishness and hypocrisy have been laid bare again and again in international political practices. Reports indicate that at least 37 million people have been displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya and Syria as a direct result of the wars fought by the US since September 11, 2001. There is even a saying that wherever the US “intervenes,” conflicts, chaos and terrorism will appear.

US’ real strategic color of selfishness, hypocrisy revealed in Ukraine crisis, Global Times, 25 February 2022

The Chinese leadership knows perfectly well precisely who, and what, is responsible for the current Russo-Ukrainian war. Notice how the official Chinese English-language mouthpiece for the CCP is very careful not to attack the American people, but focuses entirely on “the US” and “Washington”. They clearly understand the difference between the nation and The Empire That Never Ended which rules over it.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Strategic Virtues of Racism

A detailed 254-page study of Chinese racism, entitled THE STRATEGIC CONSEQUENCES OF CHINESE RACISM: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States (PDF), leads to the inescapable conclusion that China will surpass the imperial USA as a global power in the 21st Century due to its unity as a homogeneous nation even if the USA does not collapse as a political entity in the anticipated 2033 timeframe.

Chinese racism helps to make the Chinese a formidable adversary. There are three critical consequences that result from this. The first is the sense of unity the Chinese possess. Second, it allows the Chinese to have a strong sense of identity, which in turn permits them to weather adversity, and to be focused and secure confidence that the rest of the nation is with them. Third, China is not plagued by self-doubt or guilt about its past.

The Chinese are never going to go through a civil rights movement like the United States. This is because, first, they have no freedom of the press, freedom to petition their government, freedom to assemble, all of which are necessary to support a civil rights movement. Second, there is no political drive or consciousness for equality in Chinese thought. Equality is associated with Maoism and rejected in today’s China, where inequality is accepted and celebrated. In addition, there is no notion of civil rights in Chinese political thought or, practically, in jurisprudence…

United States defense decision-makers must recognize that racism is a cohesive force for the Chinese. Racism does benefit the Chinese in four major ways. First, the Han Chinese possess a strong in-group identity with a polarized and tightly defined out-group. This allows the Chinese government to expect sacrifice as well as support from a considerable majority of the Chinese people.

Second, based in this identity, the government has the ability to focus with great willpower on the demands of the state. All governments make patriotic appeals, but the Chinese government is able to do so effectively because any entreaty is based on patriotism as well as nationalism. When we reflect on the tools the Chinese government has to extract support and resources from the population, only one conclusion is possible, they are formidable.

Third, they have strong societal unity and purpose, which supports Chinese power. The Chinese do not have a culture that is self-critical or one that ponders its fundamental faults. Fourth, China’s racism and ethnocentrism serves China’s teleological worldview. History, in the Hegelian sense, is moving in China’s direction and the future belongs to it, China’s political beliefs, civilizational culture, and economic might triumphed over the West.

The truth always forces its way through the lies and deceit that cloak it over time. All of the lies that Americans have been told by their immigrant invaders, from “the proposition nation” to the “huddled masses”, the “melting pot”, “we are the world”, and “diversity is our strength” are going to be disproven in a conclusive, and possibly cataclysmic manner by the geopolitical rivalry with a unified and confident nation.

Both Russia and China have learned from their histories of subjugation as well as the massive series of unnecessary mistakes that led to the subjugation of the American nation.

Racism is nothing more, and nothing less, than the defense of one’s own people. It has nothing to do with skin color, hate, or any of the other globalist lies. To be anti-racist, to smugly declare that “you don’t see color”, is to literally and materially accede to the conquest and destruction of your self, your family, and your nation.

The Chinese have seen through the lies. The Russians have seen through the lies. Far too few Americans have, and that is why America is a broken, demoralized nation that literally doesn’t even know who or what it is. A nation can no more be an idea, or a piece of paper, or a claimed opinion, than a bird or a herd of cows can be. And both history and the observation of current events makes it perfectly clear that the nation that rejects racism and/or embraces equality and inclusivity will not survive.

DISCUSS ON SG

Fears for the Imperial Order

It’s not your imagination. The elite pedocrats of the New World Neoliberal Rules-Based World Order who have ruled the world since the end of World War II are genuinely fearful of the challenge posed to their satanic order by the Sino-Russian Alliance.

Russia and China are two “revisionist” powers attempting to change the current world order, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs has claimed, three weeks after Moscow and Beijing made a joint statement denouncing many aspects of Washington’s foreign policy, calling for an end to “interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states.”

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference on Sunday, Josep Borell warned the current liberal multilateral world order is at stake, because the friendship between the “authoritarian” Russian-Chinese governments are defying the norms of the existing global architecture.

“30 years after the end of the Cold War, we are facing a determined effort to redefine the multilateral order,” the EU foreign policy chief said. “This statement is the culmination of a long-standing campaign. It’s an act of defiance. It’s a revisionist manifesto, the manifesto to review the world order.”

On February 4, after a three-hour-long meeting in Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping signed a joint statement, in which the two leaders expressed agreement on multiple issues of global sustainable development and international relations.

Among other things, Putin and Xi agreed to oppose the “abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights, and any attempts to incite divisions and confrontation in the world.” They also called on the international community “to respect cultural and civilizational diversity” and “the rights of peoples of different countries to self-determination.”

Beijing also supported Russia’s demand to stop the eastward expansion of the US-led NATO bloc, while Moscow reiterated its stance on the indivisibility of China, denying Taiwan’s independence claims.

According to Borrell, the joint statement is in contravention of the UN Charter’s definition of human rights and democracy. The official claimed that the agreement of Beijing and Moscow to oppose “color revolutions” is illegal, because it would violate the rights of individuals to self-determination.

China and Russia aren’t doing it for our sake. They’re doing it for themselves. But in doing so, they are demonstrating the way for nationalists of every nation to resist the evil Empire that has inverted everything from “the will of the people” to “national sovereignty”, and which regards every form of resistance to its rule as “illegal”.

If I am reading the signs correctly, the wild magic is gathering power and it will soon be time for Herne to ride and for his hounds to harry The Empire That Never Ended to the ends of the Earth and drive it back into the shadows again. And while Christians pray for crusade and inquisition, they should not forget that God often makes use of pagan nations to chastise the wicked. Deus vult.

DISCUSS ON SG

Conservatives Discover Wang Hunin

However, they are taking the Promethean line by portraying him as some sort of dark Chinese threat rather than a positive example of a nationalist who seeks to serve his own nation:

Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.

But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.

“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”

Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”

Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.

Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.

He began to argue that China had to resist global liberal influence and become a culturally unified and self-confident nation governed by a strong, centralized party-state. He would develop these ideas into what has become known as China’s “Neo-Authoritarian” movement—though Wang never used the term, identifying himself with China’s “Neo-Conservatives.” This reflected his desire to blend Marxist socialism with traditional Chinese Confucian values and Legalist political thought, maximalist Western ideas of state sovereignty and power, and nationalism in order to synthesize a new basis for long-term stability and growth immune to Western liberalism.

“He was most concerned with the question of how to manage China,” one former Fudan student recalls. “He was suggesting that a strong, centralized state is necessary to hold this society together. He spent every night in his office and didn’t do anything else.”

Wang’s timing couldn’t have been more auspicious. Only months after his return, China’s own emerging contradictions exploded into view in the form of student protests in Tiananmen Square. After PLA tanks crushed the dreams of liberal democracy sprouting in China, CCP leadership began searching desperately for a new political model on which to secure the regime. They soon turned to Wang Huning.

When Wang won national acclaim by leading a university debate team to victory in an international competition in Singapore in 1993, he caught the attention of Jiang Zemin, who had become party leader after Tiananmen. Wang, having defeated National Taiwan University by arguing that human nature is inherently evil, foreshadowed that, “While Western modern civilization can bring material prosperity, it doesn’t necessarily lead to improvement in character.” Jiang plucked him from the university and, at the age of 40, he was granted a leadership position in the CCP’s secretive Central Policy Research Office, putting him on an inside track into the highest echelons of power.

I wouldn’t bet against Wang and Xi. To the contrary, the fact that the Prometheans and satanists are so violently opposed to them despite their lack of Christianity testifies to the likelihood of their practical success.

DISCUSS ON SG

Satan’s Servant Attacks Xi

Globalist figurehead George Soros explains the difference between a society dedicated to serving Satan and a society that is dedicated to the betterment of the nation that comprises it.

Climate change will remain a paramount policy challenge for the world, but the dominant geopolitical feature of today’s world is the escalating conflict between two systems of governance that are diametrically opposed to each other. Let me therefore, define the difference as simply as I can.

In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual. In a closed society the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state.

As the founder of the Open Society Foundations, obviously I am on the side of open societies. But the most important question now is, which system is going to prevail?

Each has strengths and weaknesses. Open societies unleash the creative and innovative energies of people, closed societies concentrate power in the hands of the one-party state. Those are the strengths. The weaknesses are more specific to local and regional conditions. For instance the relationship between the European Union and its member states is still evolving. The EU ought to protect Lithuania, which recognized Taiwan, from an unofficial blockade by China, but will it?The victory of open societies can’t be taken for granted, in a world teetering at the edge of military aggression, both in Ukraine and in Taiwan.

The Open Society is a satanic society ruled by consent-based contracts. This is what passes for freedom among the forked tongues. And the reason Soros is attacking Xi is because the Chinese leader has rejected the devil and all his pomps and promises and chosen nationalism over Babelism.

DISCUSS ON SG

“A Rare and Direct Warning”

It would be difficult for China to make it any more clear what will happen if the USA continues encouraging the Taiwan island authorities to seek independence from China:

In a recent interview with US media, Chinese Ambassador to the US Qin Gang said that if the Taiwan island authority, emboldened by the US, keeps going down the road for independence, it would most likely involve China and the US “in a military conflict.” He also compared the Taiwan question to “the biggest tinderbox” between China and the US.

The ambassador’s words sent shockwaves to the US. US media believe this is a rare and direct warning from Chinese mainland to the US and Taiwan.

This was the first one-on-one interview of Qin as China’s ambassador to the US, and the audience was the Americans. The views he expressed were not only a clear signal to US political elites – he warned them not to continue to play with fire on the Taiwan question or they will face dire consequences – he also intended to let more Americans realize the seriousness of the consequences of “using Taiwan to contain the Chinese mainland” and who the real destroyer of peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits is.

The US government can appeal to democracy, the new neo-liberal rules-based world order, or Mighty Cthulhu all it likes, but there are certain geopolitical realities it is going to accept, one way or another. First, Russia is not going to permit NATO expansion or US missiles near its borders. Second, Taiwan is part of China.

Whether it has to accept those realities the hard way or not is the only question. If the neocons remain in control and remain hell-bent on war, Russia and China will give it to them. But the war is very unlikely to proceed along the nice little controlled path that the neocons have in mind.

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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

DISCUSS ON SG

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.

DISCUSS ON SG

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

DISCUSS ON SG