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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The Fifth Communism

Asia Times considers the significance of the recent plenary assembly of the Chinese Communist Party that elevated Xi Jinping Thought to the highest ideological level:

Marx. Lenin. Mao. Deng. Xi.

Late last week in Beijing, the sixth plenum of the Chinese Communist Party adopted a historic resolution – only the third in its 100-year history – detailing major accomplishments and laying out a vision for the future.

Essentially, the resolution poses three questions. How did we get here? How come we were so successful? And what have we learned to make these successes long-lasting?

The importance of this resolution should not be underestimated. It imprints a major geopolitical fact: China is back. Big time. And doing it their way. No amount of fear and loathing deployed by the declining hegemon will alter this path….

Make Trade, Not War: that would be the motto of a Pax Sinica under Xi. The crucial aspect is that Beijing does not aim to replace Pax Americana, which always relied on the Pentagon’s variant of gunboat diplomacy.

The declaration subtly reinforced that Beijing is not interested in becoming a new hegemon. What matters above all is to remove any possible constraints that the outside world may impose over its own internal decisions, and especially over its unique political setup.

The West may embark on hysteria fits over anything – from Tibet and Hong Kong to Xinjiang and Taiwan. It won’t change a thing.

Concisely, this is how “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – a unique, always mutant economic system – arrived at the Covid-linked techno-feudalist era. But no one knows how long the system will last, and in which mutant form.

Corruption, debt – which tripled in ten years – political infighting – none of that has disappeared in China. To reach 5% annual growth, China would have to recover the growth in productivity comparable to those breakneck times in the 80s and 90s, but that will not happen because a decrease in growth is accompanied by a parallel decrease in productivity.

A final note on terminology. The CCP is always extremely precise. Xi’s two predecessors espoused “perspectives” or “visions.” Deng wrote “theory.” But only Mao was accredited with “thought.” The “new era” has now seen Xi, for all practical purposes, elevated to the status of “thought” – and part of the civilization-state’s constitution.

That’s why the party resolution last week in Beijing could be interpreted as the New Communist Manifesto. And its main author is, without a shadow of a doubt, Xi Jinping. Whether the manifesto will be the ideal road map for a wealthier, more educated and infinitely more complex society than in the times of Deng, all bets are off.

It is vital to accept that one can no more understand the current and future actions of the CPC – and therefore China – while ignoring Xi Jinping Thought than one could have comprehended the development of China since 1978 while attempting to ignore the Dengist revisionism that has completely transformed both China as well as the global order.

One cannot hope to grasp Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengist-Xism any better than one could have grasped Marxist-Leninism by reading nothing but Marx. Or than one can anticipate the actions of the fake Biden administration by referring to the US Constitution.

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China Claims the Moral High Ground

For more than 100 years, the neo-liberal world order has claimed the international moral high ground on the basis of being “democratic”. The Allies who fought Germany in WWII – France, Britain, and the USA – were often referred to as “the Western democracies”, and “spreading democracy” has been the primary justification for US military invasions for the last three decades.

But now, in the aftermath of the shocking 2020 revelation that US democracy is a massive and fraudulent sham, China has launched a direct rhetorical assault on the West’s primary claim to possess the moral high ground on the international scene. This is a form of unrestricted warfare that strongly suggests Chinese strategists are very familiar with William S. Lind’s concept of 4th Generation Warfare.

China’s democracy is more extensive, more genuine and more effective than the US democracy, as the US politicians represent the interest groups but in China the whole-process democracy ensures implementation of policies that change people’s lives, senior Chinese officials said on Saturday as China issued a white paper titled “China: Democracy That Works.”

Under the US democratic system, politicians are agents of interest groups, rather than representing the interests of the majority of voters and the interests of the country as a whole, Tian Peiyan, Deputy Director of the Policy Research Office of the CPC Central Committee, said at a press conference on the launch of the white paper on Saturday.

“Those politicians can make random promises for the sake of elections, but they seldom fulfill their promises after being elected. Superficially they accept voters’ supervision, but in fact as long as they are elected, the voters have no option but to wait for the next election. They are only awakened during voting but become dormant after voting,” Tian said.

US voters listen to those dazzling slogans only during the election, but they have no say after the election, the Chinese official said.

However, China’s democracy is whole process people’s democracy under the leadership of the CPC, the Chinese official continued. Party members and leaders at all levels must accept the whole process and all-round supervision of the Party and the people when performing their duties to ensure that the power granted by the people is always used for serving the people’s interest.

And they also maintain a close contact with the public, listening to people’s requests and striving to solve their problems.

The different behavior of US politicians before and after elections is due to the lack of a supervising mechanism for politicians including congressmen after they are elected, Guo Zhenhua, Deputy Secretary General of the Standing Committee of the NPC, told the press conference.

Don’t be surprised if the concept of “whole-process democracy” is successful in superseding the increasingly outmoded concept of “representative democracy” that is neither representative nor democratic, and which completely fails to represent the will of the people in any way, shape, or form. Because it is entirely obvious to any honest observer that the USA and the European Union are not only exhibiting democratic deficits, but now possess overtly anti-democratic regimes.

Chinese Foreign Ministry on Sunday released a report on US democracy, exposing the deficiencies and abuse of democracy in the US as well as the harm of it exporting such democracy…. Democracy is a common value shared by all humanity, said the report. It is a right for all nations, not a prerogative reserved for a few. Democracy takes different forms, and there is no one-size-fits-all model. It would be totally undemocratic to measure the diverse political systems of the world with a single yardstick or examine different political civilizations from a single perspective. The political system of a country should be independently decided by its own people, the report said.

And, of course, all the complaints about China’s social credit scores and violations of human rights sound very thin in light of the bannings, prison terms, deplatformings, lockdowns, disemployments, mandates, and even forced vaccinations presently being imposed throughout the West.

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A Very Dangerous Game

The Biden Fake Administration is playing with fire by inviting the representatives of Taiwan island to the Summit of Democracies in less than two weeks.

The Biden administration this week brazenly announced its intention to walk over China’s red line warning on Taiwan. The move by the US is a recklessly provocative step that dares an inevitable military response from Beijing. If that happens then all bets are off for a full-scale military confrontation between the United States, its allies, and China. It is not alarmist to say such a clash would escalate into World War III.

Australia and Britain are explicitly committed to a military alliance with the United States in the Asia-Pacific through the recently formed AUKUS pact. Russia will be obliged to defend China.

The date in question is December 9-10 when the Biden administration plays host to a so-called “Summit of Democracies”. This week the State Department announced a list of “participants” that include 110 countries. China and Russia are not invited, among other excluded nations.

Most provocatively, the separatist Chinese territory of Taiwan is invited to attend the video conference. The US is careful to refer to Taiwan as a “participant” not as a “nation”. Nevertheless, this semantical device aside, the invitation is a blatant violation of China’s sovereign claim of authority over Taiwan….

At a teleconference summit on November 16, China’s President Xi Jinping admonished US policy on Taiwan as “playing with fire”. Xi drew a red line that Washington must desist from inciting separatist ambitions of the Taiwanese government.

The announcement this week of the “Summit of Democracies” and specifically the invitation of Taiwan while excluding China is about as bold as it can get by the Biden administration in undermining China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. That it comes only days after a verbal commitment from Biden to Xi that the US adheres to One China Policy and is not seeking Taiwan’s independence makes the provocation all the more contemptuous.

I suppose we’ll find out soon enough if Xi is prone to posturing with regards to Taiwan or not. Based on his domestic record, I don’t have the impression that he is. And while I wouldn’t characterize a hot war over Taiwan as WWIII – I doubt it would last as long as the Falklands War – it strikes me as being as patently ludicrous as it is unnecessary.

But it is clear that the global imperialists will take war with China if they can’t get it with Russia or Iran. Although they might get a 3-for-1 bargain if they’re foolish enough.

The Russia-India-China (RIC) format has contributed to building a multipolar world order and rule of international law, and is a key global and regional policy factor, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reported on Friday at the online meeting of the RIC foreign ministers.

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The Four Clashing Civilizations

Even Francis Fukuyama now accepts that his End of History thesis was incorrect, and that Sam Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations model is much more descriptive of the real world. But this clash is not, as this article states, a coming clash, it is an ongoing one.

It is often argued, mainly by those in the West, that the current geopolitical rivalries can’t be compared to the Cold War, because there is no clash of ideologies. Communism has been vanquished and capitalist triumph is eternal.
Their view is one of the ‘end of history’, as proclaimed by the scholar Francis Fukuyama. The problem is, Fukuyama proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy more than three decades ago. It’s fair to say the world has moved on a little bit since then.

It is hard to deny that ideological competition is now making a comeback. And it looks as though in the coming decades the clash of ideologies will only become more intense. All three contemporary great powers – the United States, China, and Russia – are competing for more than material power. Representing distinct ideological faiths, they are also in competition for human souls. There is also a fourth competing ideology – radical Islamism – but it is now disembodied and lacks a ‘carrier state’ after the defeat of its most vociferous advocates.

The US now champions a liberal-progressivist ideology, which, in its most extreme version, is known as wokeness. In wokeness, the two main ideological strands of the modern West that have their origins in the European Enlightenment – liberalism and communism – finally reunite after a bitter internecine feud. When the opponents of wokeness compare it to radical Bolshevism, it is not without reason. In its fight against structural oppression, wokeness is ultimately about destroying social hierarchies for the sake of justice – and at the expense of order.

Taken to its extremes, this new Western ideological struggle for equity and equality leads to universal homogenization, inevitably destroying the diversity of social and even physical identities. In a novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, one of the characters, a fiery Bolshevik, was dreaming about a post-revolutionary world in which the borders come crashing down and people intermarry so there are no dominant and oppressed groups any more: “everyone’s appearance will be pleasantly brown – and everyone will be the same.” This Russian Bolshevik from the 1920s could join the woke squads in Seattle or Bristol in the 2020s.

China and Russia are often lumped together as ‘fellow autocracies’. But, in fact, Beijing and Moscow stand for very different ideological models. China’s is a synthesis of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist socialism blended with traditional Chinese ways, such as Confucianism and legalism, all boosted by advanced digital technology. The West increasingly fears China not only due to the growth in Beijing’s economic and military power, but also because modern China’s hugely successful record of development seems to validate the CCP’s ideology….

Putin’s Russia has its ideals mainly in the past. That’s a major reason why the ideology of modern Russia appeals to many right-wing conservatives in Europe and North America who see Russia as the last major state that adheres to the values of what used to be European Christian civilization. Putin’s Russia has another advantage. Among the competing ideologies, it is the most appealing aesthetically. This may be because for Putin’s state, order is prioritised over justice.

This is a useful, and generally accurate summary of the current state of the civilizational clash. But what it leaves out is the religious and ethnic angles which actually delineate the lines of grand strategic conflict. Although it is now based in the US, the Western power is neither American nor liberal-progressive; it is not even Western, but actually a satanic shadow power in which the dominant ethnicity is Jewish and the ambitions are global. Russia is the Christian nationalist power, and China, under Xi and his Wangist ideology, is the virtuous pagan nationalist power.

This is why the Promethean-ruled US is already engaged in a virtual war with both nationalist powers and the other globalist power. The Prometheans are at war with China because China broke its alliance with them in 2015. They are at war with Russia because Russia, as a Christian nation, rejects their satanism and because Russia escaped their influence in 2000. And they are at war with their fellow globalists in the Dar al-Islam over the territory of Palestine in general and Jerusalem in particular, even as they use them to suppress Christian nationalism in Europe.

The reason Trump is so furiously hated is because he represented – however well or poorly – the Christian West’s attempt to break free of Promethean rule. Whether he failed or whether he is still engaged in some sort of secretive Q-like battle is irrelevant to understanding the shape of the overall situation; he is the West’s equivalent of Putin and Xi, ergo he represents the fundamental danger to the shadow power.

And the fundamental weakness of the Prometheans is that, unlike the other three powers, they do not represent a true civilization. They are not, technically, even civilized, as they have never progressed beyond tribalism. This is why they so reliably fail once they achieve enough power in a society to become responsible for it, as they do not know how to maintain a civilization, let alone build one. It is always much easier to destroy than to create.

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