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

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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.


First They Shut Down Big Tech

Now China is gunning for the Hellmouth:

In a dramatic turn for the major studios, Hollywood’s share of China’s box office is in free fall, reportedly collapsing to less than 10 percent as Beijing aims to bolster its domestic movie industry while continuing to block major Hollywood releases from playing in Chinese cinemas.

The result is a potential existential crisis for Hollywood, which has bent over backwards to please China’s Communist dictators in the hopes of maintaining access to the lucrative Chinese market.

But the reverse has happened. Hollywood’s share of the China box office market has plummeted to just 9.5 percent so far this year, according to data from consultancy Artisan Gateway, as reported by Variety.

The stark decline comes as Hollywood imports are being edged out by domestic releases.

Last year, only two Hollywood releases cracked China’s top-ten grossing movies — Tenet and The Croods: A New Age. For 2019, only Avengers: Endgame and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw made the top-ten list. A decade ago, Hollywood accounted for eight of China’s top-ten grossing movies.

Chinese audiences are instead gravitating toward home-grown movies in larger numbers, lifting the time-traveling comedy Hi, Mom and the buddy-cop adventure Detective Chinatown 3 to blockbuster status. Meanwhile, recent Hollywood titles like Disney-Pixar’s Luca and Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon have failed to resonate with local audiences.

Even Universal’s dependable Fast & Furious franchise, which has been enormously popular in China, is showing signs of fatigue. The latest installment, F9, saw its China grosses plummet in the second week by a stunning 85 percent.

Hollywood’s decline in China comes as the Communist country has overtaken the United States to become the world’s largest movie market.

If you think it’s an accident that China increasingly appears to be targeting the neoclown strongholds in the USA, well, you’re not paying attention. It’s obvious that China is not so much focusing its “unrestricted warfare” on the USA per se anymore as on a specific and influential foreign demographic. My guess is that the media will be next, followed by Wall Street.

Believe it or not, there is not only considerably more freedom in the Chinese media than in the US media – by which I mean there are far fewer no-go zones – the rules are considerably more coherent and stable. Remember, I’ve not only been interviewed on Chinese state TV about trade and cryptocurrencies, I was asked more than once to return, most likely because both my predictions – contra the other experts – were correct. Do you think that would ever happen on Fox, CBS, ESPN, or even the Disney Channel?

Remember, China’s primary goal is to be left to their own devices. And their increasing engagement with the West appears to have taught them that unlike China, the USA is not a nation.

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Rumors of Invasion

Things appear to be quietly heating up around the Taiwan Straits:

China’s growing assertiveness toward Taiwan has triggered a public push by Japanese leaders to plan for a possible conflict, a shift that could lead to closer cooperation with the U.S. military.

Tokyo officials, normally wary of upsetting Beijing, are speaking openly about preparing for a crisis and supporting Taiwan, a self-ruled island claimed by China, despite Japan’s pacifist constitution.

Like the U.S., Japan doesn’t have formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But on Friday, lawmakers in Tokyo and Taipei held a rare meeting by videoconference to discuss ways to boost ties, including possible cooperation in maritime rescue.

Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said recently in a speech to supporters that Japan and the U.S. should plan together to defend the island in the event of hostilities.

In its annual regional security review, Japan said there a “greater sense of crisis than ever before” regarding Taiwan, after China stepped up maneuvers by its ships and aircraft nearby.

I’ve heard multiple rumors of an incipient invasion of Taiwan – incipient meaning sometime in September or October – from various sources. Some of them are flying around the chans, as AC notes:

There was an anon on 4Chan who claimed to be an insider at State, and he said China offered Biden a deal – they would tell him when the Taiwan invasion would begin, and in return he would not tell Taiwan, and he would promise to not get involved. Supposedly Biden took the deal, and the date is Sept 25th. Supposedly it will be two weeks of aerial bombardment, followed by a land invasion.

I’m very skeptical of that particular rumor, because I expect Taiwan to submit within 24 hours of the mainland launching an attack of any kind. Unless the Red Army begins with an invasion, there shouldn’t be any need for anything more than a relatively peaceful occupation.