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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 21, 2022 3:37 pm

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Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein: Socialism is alive in China
This article by Sergio Rodriguez Gelfestein, former director of international relations in Venezuela’s presidential office and former ambassador to Nicaragua, discusses the recent 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, situating it within the broader process of socialist construction in both China and the world.

The author connects Socialism with Chinese Characteristics to the overall Marxist tradition stretching back to the first works of scientific socialism of the 1840s. Although the global socialist movement suffered a terrible blow with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European people’s democracies, the CPC has now “shouldered the responsibility and has the confidence and ability to contribute to the development of scientific socialism.”

As such, the emerging US-led New Cold War is not simply a matter of economic competition, or even “inter-imperialist rivalry” as some in the Western left believe; rather it occurs “within a framework of systemic confrontation between development models that emerge from antagonistic ideological proposals.”

The English translation of this article was published by Workers World.
Many important issues were discussed at the recently concluded 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Chinese and foreign analysts have written extensively on the subject. As almost always when giving an opinion about China, the analyses mostly deal with state issues that — in this case — were discussed at the event.

But if I were asked what was the highlight of this event, I would have no hesitation in affirming that the great event of the Chinese Communist Party had a keen orientation toward the internal strengthening of the organization, so that it can play its role as leader of the Chinese society on its way to socialism.

CPC part of a long process

In this context, it seems necessary to highlight the strong ideological content of the debates in this Congress. It continued discussions held in the past and in previous similar events, and has presented a solid vindication of Marxism-Leninism as part of the support that has allowed the Communist Party of China “to comprehensively dominate the great struggle, the great work, the great cause and the great dream” . . . that “has culminated in the historic task of completing the comprehensive construction of a society modestly well-off and the consequent fulfillment of the objective of struggle established for the first centenary (year 2021) and has undertaken the new expedition of the comprehensive construction of a modern socialist country toward the objective of struggle set for the second.” (2049)

According to the documents debated in the Congress, the Chinese Communist Party occupies at this time a place understood as within a continuous process, based on the 5,000 years of existence of Chinese civilization, the almost 170 years since the end of foreign occupation, the little more than 100 years since the founding of the CCP, the 73 years since the creation of the People’s Republic of China and the 44 years since the implementation of the reform and opening policy.

With that last step, the party also began the construction of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which is considered part of the evolution of socialism in the world. After the enunciation of scientific socialism by Marx and Engels 170 years ago, and its fusion with the labor movement that made possible the triumph of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917, other nations in Europe and Asia, including China (at the end of the Second World War) also undertook the construction of socialism, creating a socialist camp that came together with the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century to achieve a general balance in the world.

But after the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the socialist camp in the last decade of the last century, many countries of the South were forced to follow the Western political and economic model, which meant a great defeat for socialism.

Lenin: ‘Struggle has only begun’

However, it must be understood that, as Lenin said when referring to the epic of October 1917 on the commemoration of its fourth anniversary, “The first victory is not the final victory. The struggle has only just begun.” China has understood that it does not matter when, on what date and at what time the proletarians will complete this process, but there is full certainty that they will reach the last victorious stage.

At this time, more and more, the Chinese model is viewed with admiration by many countries of the South, since socialism with Chinese characteristics is a banner of development of scientific socialism in the 21st century. China has proposed a plan to revitalize its socialism, so the CPC has shouldered the responsibility and has the confidence and ability to contribute to the development of scientific socialism.

For this, it is necessary to remain faithful to the aspirations that gave rise to the Party, as well as to its founding mission. In his speech, Xi Jinping stated that: “We are communists and revolutionaries, therefore we must not lose our revolutionary spirit.”

The CPC has refuted those views that it has gone from being a revolutionary party to becoming a ruling party. In this sense, Xi Jinping has emphasized the continuity of the struggle has led the Party to lead the Chinese people in the revolutionary war, in the construction of the first stage of socialism and in the reform and opening-up policy. And in this process, it has gone from being a party that led the people to take power to being a party that leads the people to hold power and govern permanently. It is, in short, a ruling Marxist party, as well as a revolutionary Marxist party.

Marxism fundamental

The 20th CPC Congress has highlighted that Marxism “is the fundamental guiding thought on which our Party and our country are based and [the] one that invigorates them. Practice has told us that the reason why the CPC is competent and socialism with Chinese characteristics is good is, in the last analysis, that Marxism is valid, and so is Marxism Chinese-ized and adapted to our times.”

In this sense, the great partisan event has reached the conclusion that in the face of the different vicissitudes and difficulties that the world is going through at this time, China will only be able to respond successfully if it preserves “the exuberant vigor and thriving vitality of Marxism,” integrated to the concrete reality of China and its culture, under the visions of dialectical materialism and historical materialism.

‘Theoretical innovation based on practice’

To achieve this objective, the incessant promotion of “theoretical innovation based on practice” is necessary, which demands in the first instance “to correctly understand the conception of the world and the methodology of Xi Jinping’s thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics of the new era.” Likewise, the fundamental principles must be preserved and a systemic view must be maintained, accepting the multiverse nature of the planet in order to open up to a broader world based on the “Chinese-ization of Marxism and its adaptation to our times.”

Ideological struggle at the center
These definitions are extremely important because, without going back to the Cold War, they place the ideological struggle at the center of the global strategic confrontation. The struggles of the future, in particular those that the United States has unleashed against China, must necessarily be faced within a framework of systemic confrontation between development models that emerge from antagonistic ideological proposals.

Despite the fact that the West sang praises to the death of socialism after the disappearance of the Soviet Union, announcing that “history had ended,” the People’s Republic of China, its party and its people, in this Congress, have made it clear that “the people you killed seem to be in excellent health,” recalling that famous phrase from the Spanish translation of the French comedy, “The Liar,” written by Pierre Corneille.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/11/11/s ... -in-china/

Arnold August: China’s rise is the West’s main fear
We are pleased to reproduce extracts of the November 13, 2022, edition of Press TV’s show Spotlight on the current South China Sea tensions, with Canadian author/journalist Arnold August and Teheran-based anchor/producer Kaveh Taghvai. August focused on China, the BRICS alternative non-US dollar currency as a very significant challenge to US hegemony, and the US vision for leveraging Taiwan against the People’s Republic of China, much as Ukraine is today being used as a pawn in the US/NATO war against the Russian Federation.


https://socialistchina.org/2022/11/15/a ... main-fear/

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‘Managed competition’ with China or real peace?
This valuable editorial from the Party for Socialism and Liberation assesses the bilateral meeting that took place between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden on 14 November 2022. Whilst welcoming the possibility of a lessening of hostilities between the world’s two biggest economies, and celebrating the return to dialogue on the key issues facing humanity, the authors point out that US administrations – both Democrat and Republican – have been building up a new Cold War against China over the course of more than a decade. “A new Cold War has already been set in motion through the actions of successive US administrations that have identified China as their number one target and taken aggressive measures to deepen confrontation.”

The editorial observes that several major capitalist powers and US allies such as France and Germany do not consider a full-scale “decoupling” to be in their interests, and that Biden may well be “at least rhetorically softening the US position in a nod to other nations that are uncomfortable with the pace of escalation.”

Lasting peace and wide-ranging cooperation between US and China would be of tremendous benefit to the people of the US, China and indeed the world, but it will require the US to give up on its strategy of hybrid warfare, of containment and encirclement. Most immediately, the US will need to respect China’s territorial integrity, stop supporting Taiwanese separatism, and ends its undermining of the One China principle.
President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held their first meeting since Biden took office today, a high-profile summit meant to set the tone for U.S.-China relations in the coming period. Outwardly, the two leaders remained cordial and affirmed their willingness to maintain dialogue with one another, with Biden going so far as to say “there need not be a new Cold War” between the two powers. The two sides agreed to restart regular talks relating to cooperation in the fight against climate change, and Secretary of State Blinken is set to travel to China for follow up discussions in the near future.

But in fact, a new Cold War has already been set in motion through the actions of successive U.S. administrations that have identified China as their number one target and taken aggressive measures to deepen confrontation. Real peace would require a complete reorientation of U.S. policy — one that is desperately needed if the world is to avoid catastrophic conflict on a global scale.

The Biden administration presented today’s meeting in the framework of what they call “managed competition.” This is a reference to the overarching U.S. imperial doctrine of “great power competition,” essentially a euphemism for the new Cold War. For instance, Biden said in a press conference following the summit, “We’re going to compete vigorously. But I’m not looking for conflict, I’m looking to manage this competition responsibly.”

Biden is signaling his desire to maintain the United States’ posture of fundamental hostility to China, but at least rhetorically softening the U.S. position in a nod to other nations that are uncomfortable with the pace of escalation. China’s economy remains deeply integrated in the world market, and even major capitalist powers like France and Germany do not desire a complete breakdown in relations despite their underlying hostility to China’s socialist system. Given the existing balance of forces in world politics, the United States may calculate that a momentary easing of pressure could reduce the likelihood that the alliance between China and Russia will deepen.

For there to truly be lasting peace between the United States and China, the first thing the United States would need to do is unequivocally respect the territorial integrity of China. Any country views their sovereign territory as inviolable, and this is especially true for a country like China that fought for so long to be free from colonial rule. The U.S. government needs to stop provocative military sales and high-profile political visits to Taiwan and cease providing any support to those who wish to permanently separate the island from mainland China. The same is true in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet — all parts of China that the United States has long hoped to carve away in an effort to dismember and weaken the country.

The United States would likewise need to end its economic campaign to damage strategic industries in China. Earlier this year, Congress passed the CHIPS Act which restricts U.S. businesses’ ability to trade with China in the crucial microchip sector while subsidizing these same corporations to the tune of $52 billion. A range of tariffs and other measures stemming from Trump’s trade war with China remain in place under Biden.

Real peace, not “managed competition,” with China would be of enormous benefit to the vast majority of people in the United States. That the number one and number two economies in the world are unable to meaningfully cooperate on shared challenges because of a policy of permanent hostility is absurd. Think about how much more effectively the COVID-19 pandemic could have been managed on a world scale if this were the case, or any number of other health and scientific issues facing the world. While the two sides will at least be talking to each other now on climate change, the degree of cooperation necessary to truly tackle this enormous global emergency is unthinkable so long as the U.S. government officially considers China its number one enemy. A true end to anti-China hostility would also help stem the rising tide of anti-Asian racism and violence in the United States, a phenomenon rooted in the Cold War-style hysteria targeting the country.

But perhaps the most important benefits that would come with a policy of real peace with China would be in the reduction of military tensions. The entire globe would benefit from the United States stepping back from the brink and putting to rest fears of a direct military confrontation between the two nuclear-armed powers. The ever-growing Pentagon budget, now set to total over $800 billion, is premised in large part on the new Cold War with China. This enormous sum of money could be put to use solving any number of dire social crises — poverty, homelessness, broken down infrastructure, hunger, and much more.

In the long run, the ambitions of the U.S. empire cannot actually be “managed.” The big banks and corporations that dominate the economy of the United States also dominate the entire world, and their profits depend on them maintaining this global preeminence. No alternative center in world politics, especially one like China that is led by a communist party, can be allowed to exist. This drive to expand and control is inherent in the capitalist system itself. True peace ultimately hinges on the elimination of the profit-driven system that plunges the world into intractable conflict.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/11/17/m ... eal-peace/

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Asia is Rising and China is Leading the Way
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on NOVEMBER 20, 2022
Danny Haiphong

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China’s leadership shines bright in Asia’s moment

Asia possesses many of the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies. In this era of growing discord and crisis in the West, the majority of nations around the world are looking to Asia to set different example. The region took center stage in the week of November 11th to 18th as the emerging economies of Cambodia, Indonesia, and Thailand hosted the Association of East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit, the G20, and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ Meeting respectively. These important exchanges provided numerous opportunities for major countries to assert their leadership on the world stage. And in this regard, it was China’s leadership that shined the brightest.

The biggest highlight was Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in Bali, Indonesia ahead of the convening of the G20. Xi and Biden spoke for more than three hours and made positive inroads toward reopening channels of cooperation between the two largest economies in the world. Perhaps more significantly, the readouts of the meeting between the two heads of state revealed the superiority of China’s global leadership approach. While the White House readout attempted to balance language of cooperation with its continued interference in China’s internal affairs, China emphasized that the many ways that stronger China-U.S. relations benefit both sides and the world. However, China remained firm in its position that strong bilateral ties depend on a mutual respect for sovereignty and expressed hope that the U.S. would follow its words with actions.

And it here where the U.S. and China diverge in their approach to global leadership. At the G20 summit, for example, China highlighted the benefits of its concrete cooperation with Indonesia. The Jakarta-Bandung High-Speed Railway is set to debut in June 2023 with the help of Chinese technology under the Belt and Road Initiative. During the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida agreed to build stable and constructive bilateral relations. The meeting was yet another example of the deep limitations of the U.S. attempt to contain China through regional alliances.

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U.S. President Joe Biden listens to Chinese President Xi Jinping during their meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit meeting in Bali, Indonesia, November 14, 2022. /CFPU.S. President Joe Biden listens to Chinese President Xi Jinping during their meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit meeting in Bali, Indonesia, November 14, 2022 Credit: CFP

Outside of positive talks with China, the Biden administration used much of its time during the meetings in Asia to reinforce the problematic hegemonism and imperialistic leadership that has characterized U.S. foreign policy for many decades. Biden lectured ASEAN members on the importance of standing with the U.S.’s militarist stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The U.S. offered little assurance that the U.S. would follow the G20 or ASEAN meetings with concrete action on the pressing problems facing humanity. Biden failed to dismiss media reports that the U.S. plans to move forward on building relationships with nations in Asia that are specifically meant to weaken China. Of course, none of this serves nations in Asia or the world at large seeking solutions for poverty, war, and climate change.

In just a week, China showed how its leadership approach is a stabilizing force in the world. China does not use opportunities for diplomacy to push a self-interested agenda. Zero-sum politics are rejected in favor of win-win cooperation. While detractors in the U.S.-led West claim that China is not sincere in its principle, this assertion is not backed up by facts. Global South countries continue to express interest in China-led economic arrangements such as the Belt and Road Initiative and BRICS because of the concrete benefits they bring to their development.

Furthermore, China does not wage wars of aggression. When disputes emerge with other nations, China takes great care to establish channels of diplomacy and good will in resolving them.

This is a major reason why much of the world is relieved that China has emerged as a different kind of world leader to the United States. Hegemony and domination no longer have a role to play in advancing human progress. China takes part in neither.

China has also achieved enormous feats under difficult circumstances in the last two years alone. Such feats include the eradication of absolute poverty, the successful containment of COVID-19, and the rapid development of high-technology and infrastructure. Both have given emerging economies much inspiration in their own battles with poverty and underdevelopment. Perhaps China’s most important accomplishment, however, is its consistent advancement of peace and self-determination as outlined in the UN Charter. The 21st century is Asia’s moment of ascendance, and both China and the region’s future is dependent on a stable world environment conducive to meeting the needs of the people and the planet.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/11/ ... g-the-way/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 26, 2022 4:05 pm

Sino-US talks renew climate hopes
By HOU LIQIANG | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-11-25 07:13

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Chinese and US flags flutter outside the building of an American company in Beijing, Jan 21, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

Soon after the meeting of the heads of state of China and the United States ahead of the recent G20 Summit, the two countries' special envoys on climate change held formal consultations on the sidelines of the COP27 United Nations climate change conference.

The consultations, which occurred more than three months after China suspended climate talks with the US to protest US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August, were seen by experts as a boon to the world's climate process, as the window to avoid catastrophic damage from global warming is closing fast.

The experts said they look forward to seeing exponential progress in the two sides' coming consultations. These are expected to continue after the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP27, which concluded on Nov 18, so that the two countries can help galvanize global efforts to cope with the climate crisis, as they did years ago.

While meeting with US President Joe Biden on Nov 14 in Bali, Indonesia, President Xi Jinping said it is in the two countries' interest to promote global recovery from the pandemic, tackle climate change and resolve regional issues through China-US coordination and cooperation.

Biden said the US is committed to keeping the channels of communication open between the two presidents and at all levels of government, in order to strengthen necessary cooperation and play a key role in addressing climate change, food security and other important global challenges.

Following instructions from the heads of state, the special envoys of the two countries met in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, where COP27 was held, to discuss promoting the success of the UN climate gathering, said Xie Zhenhua, China's special envoy for climate change, on Saturday.

The conversations with the US were "very candid, friendly, positive, active and very constructive", he told reporters in Egypt. "Today, we decided through discussions that we will continue formal consultations after the UN conference concluded."

As one of its eight countermeasures in response to the visit of the US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan on Aug 2, China decided to suspend climate talks with the US.

Under the administration of Barack Obama, China and US laid the foundations for international support for the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. As Obama's vice-president then, Biden witnessed the work done on the agreement. Now, as US president, he has made it clear that climate change will be an urgent priority for his administration.

The meeting between Xi and Biden has ignited a beacon of hope that China and the US will once again inject strong momentum into the global fight against climate change, experts said.

Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the meeting of Xi and Biden has sent an "unequivocal" signal from the two largest economies to work together to address the climate crisis.

Such a signal is "more than welcome", he said, "it's essential."

The world needs every country at the table, striving to deliver solutions that curtail the use of fossil fuels and sharply accelerate investment in clean energy, he said.

"The window to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees (Celsius) and avoid the worst damage from climate change is closing fast," he said. "We urge the world's two major economies to act with speed and conviction to meet the challenge of the moment."

Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, said the global community is "breathing a sigh of relief" that Biden and Xi are restarting joint efforts to tackle climate change.

Coming back to the table is just the first step required for leadership on climate change from these two super economies, he said in a statement.

Tang Xinhua, an expert from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said that the resumption of Sino-US climate talks is favorable for Biden's Democratic Party in the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election.

"Biden has held aloft the banner of tackling climate change. If China even doesn't talk with the US on the issue, that is unfavorable for the Democratic Party," said Tang.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... a0f23.html

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On the development of China’s environmental policies towards an ecological civilization
We are very pleased to republish this important article by Efe Can Gürcan, Associate Professor at Türkiye’s Istinye University, which originally appeared in Volume 3 Issue 3 of the BRIQ (Belt & Road Initiative Quarterly).

The author argues that China has already developed a firm understanding of its environmental problems and their severity to the extent that it now frames them as a “matter of survival” and has brought these issues to the center of its revised national security strategy. China’s strategy is predicated on an alternative proposal for “ecological civilization”, which may potentially lead to the reversal of “ecological imperialism”. China is in the early stages of building an ecological civilization and requires a lot of work to reach a high level of ecological development.

China’s key achievements on the path towards ecological civilization involve a series of three unfolding and mutually conditioning revolutionary processes that also lead the way in international environmental cooperation. They include a clean energy revolution, a sustainable agricultural revolution, and a green urban revolution.

China has already become a global leader in green finance. It leads the eco-city movement, with over 43 percent of the world’s eco-cities being Chinese, and is the second leader in sustainable architecture, next to Canada. Many Chinese cities have dropped down or out of the list of the most polluted cities, leaving India and Pakistan at the top. China’s cities have also joined the ranks of those with the strongest sewage treatment capacity in the world. In addition, China has the most electric vehicles, bikes, and efficient public transportation. China is considered to be not only the world’s centre of electric bus production and consumption but also as having cities with the world’s longest subway systems.

From 2013 onwards, the share of coal in China’s total energy consumption has seen a noticeable decline, accompanied by the increasing share of renewable resources in total energy consumption as a result of conscious efforts at a clean energy revolution.

Key to this revolution in the making is China’s strong reputation as the world’s top investor in clean energy. As such, it has succeeded in creating the world’s largest wind, solar, and hydroelectric systems for power generation.

Finally, concerning China’s unfolding revolution in sustainable agriculture, one should acknowledge, not only its adoption of green food standards and the expansion of its agricultural area under certified organic farming, but especially the fact that, as a world leader in green agriculture, it now ranks third in the list of countries with the largest agricultural area under organic farming.
China is the world’s largest country by population size and fourth largest by surface area. Combined with its excessive demographic and geographic size is the continued legacy of Western imperialism in China as a former semi-colony, whose negative effects are amplified by current Western efforts in geopolitical and geo-economic containment. This adds to China’s resource scarcity which acts as another structural adversity constraining its development potential. China possesses only 7% of the world’s arable land and freshwater resources and 8% of the world’s natural resources, even though its population represents 22% of the world’s population. Furthermore, only 19% of its surface area is suitable for human habitation and 65% of its surface area is rugged, which severely cripples China’s farming capabilities and facilitates ethnic heterogeneity as a potential impediment to political cohesion (Morton, 2006; Naughton, 2018).

Despite such adversities, China has come to develop an exemplary model of economic development that inspires much of the developing world. The 1979-2018 period testified to an average growth rate of 9.4% in the lead of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which made China the world’s second-largest economy, top producer, and the leading exporter of technological goods (Hu, 2020). By 2015, China came to assume the global production of 40% of washing machines, 50% of textiles, 60% of buttons, 70% of shoes, 80% of televisions, and 90% of toys. Recently, China has made significant progress in the production of added higher-value products in computer, aviation, and medical technology sectors, among others. Besides its historic success in economic growth, industrial production and technological development, the Chinese economic miracle is credited for 70% of global poverty eradication between 1990 and 2015 (Gardner, 2018).

The huge ecological cost of such a fast-paced and dramatic development –unprecedented in the history of human civilization– is nothing but expected. According to 2009 estimates, the annual economic cost of environmental pollution amounts to 3.8% of China’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (Zhang, 2014:32-48). Over 80% of China’s underground and river water resources are no longer fit for human use due to pollution (Jie, 2016). Land pollution and soil erosion are also part of China’s major environmental problems. It is common knowledge that excessive use of pesticides and industrial pollution constitute a major source of land pollution, prompting the loss of organic matter and soil erosion. 2013 estimates suggest that close to 20% of China’s cultivated farmland suffers from contamination and 38% of the soil is subjected to erosion-related loss of nutrients and organic matter (Scott et al., 2018:26; Gardner, 2018:9). Indeed, the contraction of arable land is a natural result of soil contamination and erosion. This also explains China’s over 4% loss of arable land between 1990 and 2018, from 124,481,000 to 119,488,700 hectares (FAO, 2021; Figure 1).

China being the world’s largest pesticide producer and consumer exacerbates this tendency. In the 1990- 2018 period alone, China’s pesticide use rose by 129% (FAO, 2021; see Figure 2). Furthermore, 70% of the world’s electronic waste is recycled in China at the expense of environmental and public health. Industrial pollution, environmentally detrimental recycling practices, and industrial agriculture combined to create China’s “cancer villages” (Gardner, 2018). Map 1 provides a more detailed outline of China’s major environmental problems (Sanjuan, 2018).

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Global environmental indicators provide a general picture of the environmental question’s severity in China. To elaborate, the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) is a popular indicator to assess the impact of national policies on the environment. EPI is made up of two major components: environmental health and ecosystem vitality. Environmental health looks at the negative impact of environmental pollution on human health as well as air and water quality and sanitation. In turn, ecosystem vitality focuses on variables such as carbon intensity, biodiversity, fish stocks, forest cover, wastewater treatment, and nitrogen balance (Environmental Performance Index, 2020a).

China’s EPI can be compared to other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) countries, representative of the leading developing countries, and the United States (US), as the hegemonic leader of the capitalist-imperialist system. A comparison for the period 2010-2020 shows that China has achieved the second-largest increase in EPI scores (8.4 EPI points) after South Africa (8.5 EPI points), which testifies to China’s successful efforts at improving its environmental standing (Table 1). In the same 10-year period, India has recorded no visible improvements, while the increase in EPI scores for Brazil, Russia, and the US are 4.9, 3.9 and 2.9, respectively. In the meantime, one should note that China’s 2020 standing is 120 out of all the 180 countries included in EPI. China’s 2020 score is 37.3, which outranks India with an EPI score of 27.6. However, China is outranked by Brazil, Russia, South Africa, and the US, whose annual scores are 51.2, 50.5, 43.1, and 69.3, respectively (Table 1). Overall, this comparison reveals that China has exhibited a strong environmental will and achieved policy success between 2010 and 2020, even though it continues to struggle with severe environmental problems (Environmental Performance Index, 2020b).

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Ecological footprint is another global environmental indicator. It is popularly used to assess the human impact on an environment by reference to changing natural resource demands for countries across the world. With ecological footprint, the use of ecological resources is compared with the size of biologically productive land and sea area to estimate the earth’s capacity to renew the natural resources and absorb waste (Robbins, 2007:509-10). Not surprisingly, the ecological footprint of China –as a rapidly developing country– has known a constant increase, particularly in the 2000s (Figure 3).

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Air pollution stands out, perhaps, as the most visible environmental strain in China, which is why it is worth supplementing our analysis of EPI and ecological footprint with what is popularly known as fine particles, or particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5). Available data allow us to comparatively assess the performance of the BRICS countries and the US concerning the percentage of the national population exposed to PM2.5 levels exceeding the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline value. One striking fact that emerges from this comparison is the successful performance of the US and Brazil, unlike China and other countries in our sample. The US and Brazil’s PM2.5 performance in the period 2011-2017 declined from 46.69% and 91.93% to 3.34% and 68.14%, respectively (World Bank, 2021, Figure 4). Even though China failed to exhibit a successful performance by 2017, its post-2017 performance offers promising prospects. Recently, for example, Chinese cities used to occupy the forefront of the list of the world’s most polluted cities. Looking at the 2020 list of the fifteen most polluted cities, however, it is now being occupied by Indian and Pakistani cities. The only Chinese city that is ranked among the top fifteen polluted cities is Hotan (Earth.Org, 2021, IQAir, 2021; Zhang, 2014).

China has been undergoing a sustainable urban revolution, which extends beyond the fight against air pollution. It is striking to notice how China’s daily capacity for urban sewage treatment rose from 125 million tons to 182 million tons in the period 2010-2015. This elevates China to be among the world’s strongest capacity for urban sewage treatment (China-ASEAN Environmental Cooperation, 2018). Moreover, China has greatly improved its performance in urban sustainability by prioritising green architecture and transportation. According to the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system prepared by the US Green Building Council, China is the world’s second leader in sustainable architecture after Canada (Long, 2015). China’s strong leadership in sustainable urbanisation can also be observed in its emergence as the world’s largest market for electric vehicles and bikes (Statista 2021; INSG 2014). As far as public transportation is concerned, China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of electric buses (Technavio, 2019; Sustainable Bus, 2020; MarketsandMarkets, 2021). Furthermore, China has turned itself into the world leader in green transportation, with Beijing and Shanghai having developed the world’s longest subway systems (Nedopil Wang, 2019).

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Evidently, China’s world-leading environmental achievements go unnoticed due to the prevailing discourse of “ecological imperialism” in environmental politics. Ecological imperialism describes the shift of axis in global labour and natural resource exploitation to the developing world at the expense of grave human and ecological suffering. The economic and ecological burden of this axis shift is placed on the shoulders of the developing world by Western metropoles, which essentially seek to externalise the cost of production and resource extraction (Gürcan, Kahraman, & Yanmaz, 2021). Indeed, this phenomenon has been a defining feature in the entire history of capitalism. However, the dominance of neoliberalism as a global policy paradigm since the 1970s gave a new impetus to ecological imperialism, where China emerged as the main target. This being said, China has refused to be victimised by such policies and actively took advantage of the changing policy environment without fully abandoning its socialist system, albeit at grave ecological and socioeconomic costs in the medium term. In this period, China relied on the state’s strong guidance on reform and opening-up to build the “Chinese dream” of socialist welfare through gradual technology transfers and joint ventures in the longer term.

It is common knowledge that Western capitalism globalised through exploration and colonisation at the expense of grave human and ecological costs. These globalising efforts were amplified by the Industrial Revolutions, which eventually evolved into imperialist rivalries for spheres of influence and world wars. A subsequent wave of globalisation began in the 1970s as the world’s axis of production shifted to Asia, based on neoliberal policies that sought to take advantage of Asia’s cheap labour supply and other resources in the absence of strict political and environmental regulations. For some time, Western metropoles remained content with China’s accommodating policies, only until it succeeded in using the “privilege of backwardness” to consolidate its national economy rather than become a mere US colony governed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Upon China’s historic economic success and the continuation of the rule of the Communist Party of China (CPC), it seems that Western metropoles ended up developing a false sense of threat against their global hegemony, which prompted them to launch a global campaign of imperialist propaganda framing China as an environmentally irresponsible villain versus the West as the virtuous watchdog of environmental values.

This article seeks to transcend Western-centric ecological-imperialist biases toward China’s environmental policies and provide a more balanced perspective. What environmental issues occupy China’s main development agenda? How does China address these crucial issues? In what direction are China’s environmental policies evolving? The present article uses process tracing to answer these questions and argue that China has already developed a firm understanding of its environmental problems and their severity to the extent that it now frames them as a “matter of survival” and has brought these issues to the centre of its revised national security strategy, particularly under the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping administrations. China’s strategy is predicated on an alternative proposal for “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming, 生态文明), which may lead to the reversal of “ecological imperialism”. Particularly noticeable in this regard is China’s ongoing clean energy revolution as well as its strong leadership in green agriculture, urbanisation, and multilateral environmental cooperation. Accordingly, the present article is structured into three sections. The first focuses on the political and ideological background of China’s “ecological civilization” project and the second sheds light on China’s clean energy revolution. The article concludes with the third section on China’s achievements in green agriculture and ecological urbanisation, explaining how they are reflected in multilateral environmental cooperation.

The Political and Ideological Background of Ecological Civilization
The first uses of the term “ecological civilization” can be found in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. This term was later adopted by Qianji Ye, a Chinese agricultural economist, and brought into official use by the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA). In China, ecological civilization gained popularity thanks to the efforts of the Hu Jintao administration (2003-2013) (Greene, n.d.; Pan, 2016:35). In his report to the 17th National Congress of the CPC, Hu put forth the notion of “harmonious society” by reference to China’s traditional philosophical conception of harmony between humans and nature (天人合一思想) (Hu, 2007; Kitagawa, 2016a; Pan, 2016).

Hu’s (2007) conceptualisation of “harmonious society” goes beyond social equality and justice to embrace the “balance between urban and rural development, development among regions, economic and social development, relations between man and nature, and domestic development and opening to the outside world”. Worthy of note is the degree to which this notion resonates with Mao Zedong’s ideas of “balanced development” and “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, as were described in his speech “On Ten Great Relationships” (Mao, 1974).

Hu (2007) proposed a “Scientific Outlook on Development”, where harmonious society can be achieved with a sustainable development model that puts people and the environment first by mobilising science, technology, and education. According to Hu, energy conservation and sustainable development are central to improving the Chinese population’s quality of life. In this framework, Hu developed a “five-in-one” strategy (五位一体) that combines the task of economic, political, cultural, and social construction with that of ecological civilization. This strategy emphasises how ecological sustainability and other tasks complement each other. To elaborate, ecological sustainability is an essential requisite for long-term economic growth for, without it, the higher goals of social welfare and life quality cannot be attained (Kitagawa, 2016b; Pan, 2016).

Xi Jinping’s ascendancy to power furthered the strength of Hu’s emphasis on harmonious society and ecological civilization (Xi, 2018:233). In Xi’s thought, the task of building an ecological civilization constitutes the building block of the Chinese dream, i.e. “a dream of building China into a well-off society in an all-round way and… a dream to show the world China’s commitment to making a greater contribution to the peace and development of mankind” (Xi, 2018:179). As such, the CPC adopted the task of building an ecological civilization as a priority task in 2012, added it to the CPC constitution, and imported it into the Chinese constitution in 2018 (Goron, 2018:39).

Xi Jinping’s rise led to the creation of the first CCP organ specialised in sustainability: the “Task Force for the Promotion of Economic Development and Ecological Civilization”. In 2015, the CPC Politburo adopted the “Central Opinion Document on Ecological Civilization Construction” in March 2015. As part of China’s new centralised environmental inspections, over 29,000 companies were penalised with fines totalling 1.43 billion RMB (US$216 million), 1,527 individuals were detained, and 18,199 officials were subjected to disciplinary action (Goron, 2018:41). Ultimately, the 19th National Congress of the CPC held in 2017 set the goal of greening and beautifying China based on the principles of green development and ecological-civilization building (China Daily, 2017; Yang, 2018).

China started to frame the environmental question as a matter of “state survival” in the Xi Jinping era, which explains why this question occupies such a strategic place in China’s revised national security strategy. In his speech during the first meeting of the Central National Security Commission of the CPC in 2013, Xi Jinping announced China’s new “Holistic National Security Outlook”, which constitutes the backbone of China’s current national security and identifies 11 areas of priority in national security. This sustainability included: political security, homeland security, military security, economic security, cultural security, societal security, science and technology security, information security, ecological security, resource security, and nuclear security. Subsequently, China published its “Blue Book on National Security” in 2014, designated as the country’s first blue book on national security. A landmark feature of this book is how it extends the scope of national security to include environmental issues as a defining theme (Corff, 2018; Raik et al., 2018).

“Made in China 2025”, China’s new techno-industrial strategy announced in 2015, is shaped by Xi’s holistic conceptualisation of national security and identifies nine areas of priority for economic development. These include enforcing green manufacturing, improving manufacturing innovation, integration between information technology and industry, strengthening the industrial base, fostering Chinese brands, advancing restructuring of the manufacturing sector, promoting service-oriented manufacturing and manufacturing-related service industries, and internationalising manufacturing. According to the Made in China 2025 strategy, the key to success in these tasks is in strategic sectors such as “new information technology, numerical control tools and robotics, aerospace equipment, ocean engineering equipment and high-tech ships, railway equipment, energy-saving and new energy vehicles, power equipment, new materials, biological medicine and medical devices, and agricultural machinery” (Ma, et al., 2018; U.S. Department of Defense, 2020).

China’s Clean Energy Revolution in the Making
In 2009, China outranked the US as the world’s largest energy consumer (Guo & Marinova 2014). Chinese energy consumption greatly contributes to environmental degradation and climate change. In fact, 2016 estimates suggest that China exhibits a better performance in constraining per capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in comparison with the US, Russia, and South Africa (World Bank, 2021; Figure 5). This being said, China recorded the highest rise in per capita CO2 emissions (around 380%) in our sample for the 1980-2016 period. The US and Russia are the only countries that recorded a successful decrease in per capita CO2 emissions (Figure 5). Moreover, China’s 2018 performance reveals that coal consumption accounts for the greatest share of its CO2 emissions (79.44%) as compared to the 43.7% share of coal consumption in the world’s total CO2 emissions (EIA, 2021). The second-largest share of China’s CO2 goes to oil and other liquid fuels (EIA, 2021). The remaining share concerns natural gas.

Energy intensity is an indicator that reflects per capita energy consumption. One could observe that China’s energy intensity has been rapidly increasing, particularly since 1997. The 1997-2018 period alone testified to an over 250% rise (EIA, 2021; Figure 6). Indeed, coal represents the main source of China’s energy consumption, though China’s coal production and consumption have been visibly decreasing since 2013. Between 2013-2019, China’s coal production and consumption have decreased from 4.4 and 4.7 billion short tonnes to 4.1 and 4.3 billion short tonnes, respectively. This corresponds to a 7% decline in coal production and an 8.5% decline in coal consumption (EIA, 2021; Figure 7). However, China’s oil consumption has been rising since 2013. The 2013-2019 period alone recorded a 29.5% increase (EIA, 2021; Figure 8). According to 2019 estimates, coal consumption makes up 58% of China’s energy consumption and remains its largest source. In China’s electricity production, the share of coal consumption is more than 65.3%. Oil and other liquids account for the second-largest share of China’s total energy consumption with a share of 20%. Finally, the share of hydroelectric energy and other sustainable sources of energy has reached 13% (EIA, 2021; Figure 9).

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2015 estimates for the BRICS countries and the US suggest that Brazil, India, and South Africa led the share of sustainable energy consumption in overall national energy consumption. Since 2011, China has increased the share of sustainable energy consumption from 11.7% to 12.4% (World Bank, 2021; Figure 10). Importantly, China is going through a clean energy revolution since adopting the 2005 Sustainable Energy Law as well as the 12th and 13th Five-Year Plans covering the period 2011-2020 (Gardner 2018; Guo & Marinova, 2014; Mathews & Tan, 2015; Su & Thom- son, 2016). In as early as 2009, China became the world’s leading investor in sustainable energy technology (Guo & Marinova, 2014). In 2013, China was the top investor in clean energy with a total investment of 61.3 billion (Campbell, 2014). 2015 marked the rise of China to the status of the world’s largest producer of solar, wind, and hydroelectric power (Gardner, 2018). In the 2008-2018 period, furthermore, China’s wind and solar energy consumption rose from 3 and 0 Mtoe to 83 and 40 Mtoe, respectively. Therefore, one could deduce that the share of China’s wind and solar power in national energy consumption rose from 0.1% in 2008 to 3.7% in 2018 (BP, 2019).

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China’s Green Agriculture, Eco-Cities, and Multilateral Environmental Cooperation: An Unfolding Revolution

As mentioned in the introduction, agricultural pollution constitutes a major environmental problem in contemporary China. The country suffers from a scarcity of arable land being the world’s largest pesticide producer and consumer (China-ASEAN Environmental Cooperation 2018:158; Scott et. al. 2018:26). With this in mind, China is currently increasing its focus on green agriculture to fight against agricultural pollution and other environmental strains. China’s agriculture area under organic agriculture rose by over 36% in the 2005-2018 period, from 2,301,300 to 3,135,000 hectares. China’s 2018 performance has even surpassed that of the other BRICS countries and the US in this area (FAO, 2021; Figure 11). That being said, China has a long way to go given that its agriculture area under organic agriculture accounts for only 2.31% of its total agriculture area (FAO, 2021). However, it is worth noting that China possesses the world’s largest agriculture area under organic farming after Australia and Argentina. It is possible to argue that China has also set an example for other countries in the expansion of its certified organic agricultural land use. China’s agriculture area under certified organic agriculture soared from 10 hectares to 2,558,100 hectares from 2004-2018. Due to this, China has become the world’s largest consumer of organic food (FAO 2021; Willer, Lernoud, & Kemper, 2018).

China’s green revolution in agriculture owes much to the efforts of central and local governments at prioritising green agriculture in their overall development strategy (Scott et al., 2018:46). This also accounts for the rise of the eco-village movement in China since the late 1980s. By 1990, China created a total of 1200 “pilot eco-villages” (Liu et al., 2021; Scott et al., 2018:38-39). This number rose to 2000 by the year 2011 (Liu & Wang, 2010:107). The eco-village movement was complemented by strong policy efforts emphasising the widespread adoption of green labelling standards such as green food (lüse shipin), pollution-free food (wugonghai shipin) and organic food (youji shipin) throughout the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Agriculture launched a green food programme in 1990 and the China Green Food Development Centre in 1992, which assumed the task of providing the necessary technical support and quality control services to further this process (Scott et al., 2018:39-41).

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By 2011, China had created 42 certification offices, 38 quality control terminals, and 71 environmental monitoring centres. Moreover, China’s green food programme was complemented by the Risk-Free Food Action Plan in 2001, which sought to fight chemical pollution, improve food security, and accelerate organic certification (Scott et al., 2018:39-41). Ultimately, the National Sustainable Agriculture Development Plan (2015-2030) provided a more systematic and holistic blueprint for China’s efforts in green agriculture. In 2017, No. 1 Central Document, an annual policy document issued by the Central Committee of the CPC and the State Council, elevated green and sustainable development to the status of the second major development goal (Scott et al., 2018:39-41).

China’s efforts in improving green agriculture and building eco-villages go hand in hand with its strategy of sustainable urbanisation (Hu, Liu, & Sun, 2017). The eco-city movement (生态城市) was launched in 2003 on the initiative of the Ministry of Environmental Protection. This initiative sought to create a model of a low-carbon and circular economy, expand green and protected zones, encourage recycling and energy conservation, promote sustainable architecture, prevent air and noise pollution, and improve social welfare and harmony in urban areas (Wang, 2018; Zhou, He, & Williams, 2012). According to research from 2009 conducted by the International Eco-Cities Initiative (IEI), only 6 out of the world’s 79 eco-cities originated from China. In the 2011 IEI survey, the number of China’s eco-cities rose to 25. Research from 2015 conducted by China identified 658 major eco-cities across the world, 284 of which originated from China. This means that more than 43% of the world’s eco-cities are currently based in China (Williams, 2017:4).

The eco-city movement also contributed to China’s efforts in improving multilateral environmental cooperation. Indicative of Chinese leadership in the global eco-city movement are the Tianjin China-Singapore Eco-City, the Sino-Dutch Shenzhen Low-Carbon City, and the Sino-French Wuhan Ecological Demonstration City. Particularly, the construction of eco-industrial parks represents central instances of environmental cooperation among developing countries in the eco-city movement. The China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park contains green areas and lakes, whereas the Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city possesses systems for energy efficiency, green transportation, green architecture, sewage treatment, and recycling (China-ASEAN Environmental Cooperation, 2018:161; Liu & Lo, 2021:12).

As a locomotive of multilateral environmental cooperation, China has extended its leading role to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In 2009, China and ASEAN signed the Strategy on Environmental Cooperation, which later contributed to the creation of the China-ASEAN Environmental Cooperation Centre. This was followed by the China-ASEAN Environmental Cooperation Action Plans for 2011-2013 and 2014-2015 as well as the 2016-2020 Strategy on Environmental Cooperation. These strategies and action plans sought to improve regional efforts in research & development and eco-city construction. Also included in such efforts is the Green Silk Road Envoys Program, which sought to develop staff training, scientific exchange, and political dialogue on matters of sustainability, green innovation and entrepreneurship, biodiversity, and ecological protection (China-ASEAN Environmental Cooperation, 2018:viii).

China has recently accelerated its multilateral environmental cooperation through the channel of the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). The 2015 “One Belt, One Road” document pledged for the BRI to assume greater responsibility in environmental protection, biodiversity, and climate change. The BRI developed a more systematic approach to sustainability upon Xi Jinping’s 2016 call for the construction of a “green, healthy, intelligent, and peaceful” Silk Road, which led to the publication of the “Guidance on Promoting Green Belt and Road” and the implementation of the Green Action Plan and the Maritime Cooperation Vision driven by the principle of maritime protection (Simonov, 2018). As a result, the Second BRI Forum held in 2019 formulated green investment principles (Cheung & Hong, 2021).

The BRI devotes special attention to ensuring it does not impose policies on its participants and undermine their national sovereignty. The adoption of BRI’s principles on ecological civilization is left to the initiative of participant states (Ikenberry & Lim, 2017). In the Second BRI forum, BRI members were invited to join environmental initiatives such as the International Green Development Coalition, the Sustainable Cities Alliance, the South-South Cooperation Initiative on Climate Change, the Environmental Technology Exchange and Transfer Center, the Environmental Big Data Platform, and the Green Investment Fund (Garey & Ladislaw, 2019; Iken- berry & Lim, 2017). These initiatives gained momentum in response to rising criticism on the part of civil society groups against the majority of BRI investments being transferred to carbon-driven sectors and large-scale infrastructure development at the expense of local environments (Harlan, 2021).

Coupled with BRI’s forum initiatives is green finance, which includes financial practices involving bonds that fund sustainable projects, credits that support sustainable investments, and insurance schemes for protection against environmental disasters. Chinese green investment has supported environmental initiatives such as low-carbon transportation, high-speed trains, clean energy projects, projects against environmental pollution, and clean coal investments. As such, China has risen to the status of the world’s top leader in green bonds and credits by outperforming the US in 2019 (Green Belt and Road Initiative Center, 2019b, Chinadaily 2020b; Harlan 2021; Rooney 2019).

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) –as Asia’s first bank to be independent from Western hegemony and the world’s fourth-largest multilateral development bank– constitutes an important financial vehicle for BRI (Gürcan, 2020; Fahamu, n.d.; Koop, 2018). It started to operate in 2016 under China’s initiative as “the world’s first multilateral development bank (MDB) dedicated to infrastructure” (Wilson, 2017). The declared intention of the bank is to fill the “gap between supply and demand for infrastructure spending in Asia”, which was estimated at “as high as $8 trillion by 2020” (Cai, 2018). The bank’s approved projects mostly focus on the energy, water, and transportation sectors (Chen, 2019). Almost half of these projects are co-financed with other financial institutions such as the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Islamic Development Bank, and the World Bank (Rana, 2019; Bustillo & Andoni, 2018). In the period 2016–2017, the AIIB approved nearly $5 billion in loans, and 35 infrastructure projects with an estimated value of $28.3 billion (Cai, 2018; Chen, 2019). Unlike the World Bank, the AIIB does not impose political conditionality and does respect the sovereignty of claimant nations (Gürcan, 2020).

China’s initiative has led the AIIB to adopt a strong stand on ecological civilization. In 2016, the AIIB adopted the Environmental and Social Framework (ESF), which encourages financed development projects to target social and environmental sustainability in tandem, including green economy, gender equality, and labor rights. As regards environmental sustainability, the ESF places a strong emphasis on balanced development, decreasing fossil fuel consumption, environmental resilience, energy conservation, and biodiversity (Gabusi, 2019). In its second annual meeting held in South Korea in 2016, the AIIB adopted the Sustainable Energy for Asia Strategy and approved its first loan for a project that seeks to reduce coal use in China. The AIIB’s fourth meeting was held in Luxembourg in 2019, where the bank reiterated its commitment to supporting green economy (Altay & Zeynepcan, 2020). The AIIB’s new funds that target social and environmental sustainability include “the $75 million Tata Cleantech Sustainable Infrastructure On-Lending Facility (India), US$75 million Asia Investment Fund (Asia-wide), US$100 million L&T Green Infrastructure On-Lending Facility to finance wind and solar energy projects (India), US$200 million TSKB Sustainable Energy and Infrastructure On-Lending Facility (Turkey), and US$150 million to the India Infrastructure Fund to finance infrastructure projects including renewable energy (India)… [as well as] a US$500 million AIIB Asia ESG Enhanced Credit Managed Portfolio (Asia-wide) with Aberdeen Standard Investments, to partner on developing debt capital markets for infrastructure… [and the] US$ 500 million fund, the Asia Climate Bond Portfolio, to accelerate climate action in the Bank’s members, and spur the development of the climate bond market.” (Vazquez & Chin, 2019: 598) Besides energy and infrastructure, the AIIB’s green framework extends to sustainable urbanization, green transportation, and rural sustainability. These efforts are clearly exemplified in a US$329 million loan for India’s Gujarat Rural Roads Project, a US$335 million loan for India’s Metro Line Project, a US$140 million loan for India’s Madhya Pradesh Rural Connectivity Project, a US$445 million loan for India’s Andhra Pradesh Rural Roads Project, a US$40 million loan for Laos’ National Road 13 Improvement and Maintenance Project, a US$216.5 million loan for Indonesia’s National Slum Upgrading Project, a US$270.6 million loan for the Philippines’ Metro Manila Flood Management Project, a US$400 million loan for India’s Andhra Pradesh Urban Water Supply and Septage Management Improvement Project, a US$200 million loan for Sri Lanka’s Colombo Urban Regeneration Project, and a US$100 million loan for Bangladesh’s Municipal Water Supply and Sanitation Project (Vazquez & Chin, 2019).

Finally, a word of caution: it is too early to estimate the future of the AIIB and BRI’s contributions to ecological civilization, given that the Green Silk Road project was only put into action in 2019, whilst the AIIB started to operate in 2016. However, there is room for optimism considering that China has already become a leading country in multilateral environmental cooperation. The AIIB’s strategy on social and environmental sustainability has already been put into practice through green funds implemented in several Asian countries. Furthermore, China’s green investments as part of the BRI have gained momentum since 2016. Cases include China’s increasing investments in Vietnam’s solar panels, its leading role in establishing the Quaid e-Azam Solar Park and the Jhimpir Wind Farm in Pakistan, the Aisha Wind Farm and Wolayita Sodo Power Transmission Line in Ethiopia, and other similar projects in countries such as Thailand and Malaysia (Chernysheva et al., 2019).

Review and Discussion
As a strong expression of ecological imperialism, prompted by neoliberal globalisation and the Third Industrial Revolution, Western metropoles initiated the shift in axis for global production to Asia. This enabled Western metropoles to take advantage of cheap labour supplies and access natural resources in the absence of strict environmental regulations (Gürcan, Kahraman & Yanmaz, 2021). China was the main target of these pillaging efforts. However, it managed to benefit from these neoliberal assaults by utilising public-driven policies, which, despite a number of liberal compromises, served to protect itself from becoming a neo-colony. Public-driven policies also served to build a strong economy driven by national interests, thus generating grave concerns for Western metropoles whose global hegemony was challenged. As a result, Western metropoles now resort to an ecological-imperialist campaign that blames environmental degradation on developing countries, particularly China, whose leading environmental efforts –as the locomotive of global welfare and the greatest enemy of global poverty– are often undermined by this Western-centric campaign.

China has developed a firm awareness of its environmental problems, which are realised in its revised national security strategy that incorporates the concept of “ecological civilization”. China is in the early stages of building an ecological civilization and still has a long way to go before it reaches a high level of ecological development. Perhaps the most immediate threat to ecological civilization stems from the growing aggression of US imperialism in the form of geopolitical containment strategies, techno-economic wars against China, and other factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic such as Western-fueled Sinophobia and pandemic-related economic strains (Gürcan, 2019; Gürcan, Kahraman & Yanmaz, 2021). Nevertheless, China’s key achievements on the path towards ecological civilization involve a series of three unfolding and mutually conditioning revolutionary processes that also lead the way in international environmental cooperation, as embodied in China’s role in ASEAN, the AIIB, and the Green Silk Road. They include a clean energy revolution, a sustainable agricultural revolution, and a green urban revolution.

China has already become a global leader in green finance. It leads the eco-city movement with over 43% of the world’s eco-cities being Chinese and is the second leader in sustainable architecture, next to Canada. Many Chinese cities have dropped down or out of the list of the most polluted cities, leaving India and Pakistan at the top. China’s cities have also joined the ranks of those with the strongest sewage treatment capacity in the world. Another point worth mentioning is that China has the most electric vehicles, bikes, and efficient public transportation. China is considered, not only as the world’s centre of electric bus production and consumption but also as having cities with the world’s longest subway systems. From 2013 onwards, the share of coal in China’s total energy consumption has seen a noticeable decline, accompanied by the increasing share of renewable resources in total energy consumption as a result of conscious efforts at a clean energy revolution. Key to this revolution in the making is China’s strong reputation as the world’s top investor in clean energy. As such, it has succeeded in creating the world’s largest wind, solar, and hydroelectric systems for power generation. Finally, concerning China’s unfolding revolution in sustainable agriculture, one should acknowledge its adoption of green food standards, the expansion of its agricultural area under certified organic farming, and especially the fact that, as a world leader in green agriculture, it now has the third-largest agricultural area under organic farming. Ultimately, the continuation and amplification of all these achievements are predicated on the future determination of the Xi Jinping administration (and its successors) to build ecological civilization while facing imperialist aggression.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/11/25/o ... ilization/

References at link.

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China sets good climate example for all: Envoy
By MINLU ZHANG at the United Nations | China Daily | Updated: 2022-11-26 07:37

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The file photo shows a wind power plant in Zhangjiakou, North China's Hebei province. [Photo/Xinhua]

Pakistan's chief climate negotiator and permanent representative to the United Nations said China has made remarkable progress toward renewable and sustainable energy and has set an example for developing countries in fighting climate change.

"China has set the example of demonstrating that it is possible to move toward renewable energy at a very rapid pace," Munir Akram, who is also chairman of the Group of 77 and China, told China Daily in an exclusive interview. The G77, which got its name from its 77 founding members, is now a group of 134 developing countries at the United Nations.

"And that is what is needed for developing countries. If they are not going to repeat the same mistakes of polluting their own atmosphere, they have to move to a more sustainable energy requirement for infrastructure," Akram said.

China has made significant strides in renewable energy production to improve its energy structure. In 2021, China invested $380 billion in clean energy, more than any other country, accounting for nearly half of new renewable energy investment worldwide.

China has been at the forefront of the innovation and installation of renewable energy, whether it is hydropower, solar power, wind power or nuclear power. All of these are now greatly contributing to China's own energy metrics, Akram said.

From 2012 to 2021, China enjoyed average economic growth of 6.6 percent with an annual increase of 3 percent in energy consumption. Carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP fell by 34.4 percent, and energy consumption per unit of GDP decreased by 26.4 percent, equivalent to saving 1.4 billion tons of standard coal.

"Developing countries work in close cooperation with China to acquire some of these renewable energy capabilities through cooperation on a bilateral and multilateral basis," Akram said.

They would obviously "benefit greatly from cooperating with China and learning from China and the provision of Chinese support to the creation of these new capabilities in the developing world", he added.

South-South cooperation between China and other developing countries will "continue and will contribute to the transition that is required in energy from a fossil fuel economy to a renewable and green economy. But the responsibility of industrialized countries, which have contributed the most to global warming and climate change — those responsibilities remain. We will continue to insist on the contribution from the industrialized North to finance technology and capacity building in developing countries", Akram said.

A long-awaited "loss and damage" fund was approved on Nov 19 at the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP27) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh.

For more than three decades, developing countries, especially small island countries and low-lying nations seen as most vulnerable to climate change, have sought money to pay for loss and damage caused by global warming. But rich countries have historically resisted such calls, fearing they could be held liable for billions of dollars in damages from their emissions.

Akram said developing countries haven't contributed to global warming. Industrialized nation policies over the last 150 years have fueled global climate change, leaving developing countries, who are not responsible for the damage, suffering from the impact.

"They should be assisted to recover from such disasters," he said.

Pakistan was hit by devastating floods this summer that scientists say were made worse by global warming, killing more than 1,500 people and leaving one-third of the country underwater and causing $30 billion in damages. Pakistan contributes less than 1 percent of the world's planet-warming emissions.

At the 2009 COP15 meeting in Copenhagen, wealthy countries promised that by 2020 they would transfer $100 billion per year in climate finance to help poorer countries. They are still falling short by tens of billions of dollars annually.

"There are a lot of promises which have been made in Paris, in Glasgow, which have not yet been fulfilled," said Akram. But climate change is a global issue, and developing countries need help to address the impact of climate change and to adapt to the damage, or the whole agreement on global climate action will fall apart, he said.

It is hoped that industrialized countries will now see that it is essential to keep their promises, Akram said.

The "loss and damage" fund approved at COP27 is "a manifestation of the principle of climate justice for developing countries", he added.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... a1282.html

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Xi Jinping, Justin Trudeau and White Supremacist Ideology
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 23 Nov 2022

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Image: CBC

Western arrogance and anger about the economic prowess of a non-white nation resulted in Xi Jinping's very public dressing down of Justin Trudeau.

The Group of 20, or G20, comprises those nations said to be those with the largest economies in the world. The heads of state who attend the annual summit may have meaningful meetings with one another but the recently convened G20 in Bali, Indonesia was more a source of U.S. inspired drama than anything else. For example, it wasn’t clear if Chinese president Xi Jinping would meet with Joe Biden after the numerous insults involving Taiwan, including sending the Speaker of the House there after China made clear that this was a red line provocation. Of course, being more mature than the Americans, Xi met with Biden, perhaps only to determine if he was up to some new foolish behavior. The summit was fully devoid of any seriousness when the traditional group photo was eliminated because the U.S. and its NATO/EU vassals didn’t want to be seen with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. But an interesting encounter between Xi Jinping and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was both amusing and instructive about China and how it is perceived and treated by western nations.

Xi and Trudeau spoke briefly at the G20 but not in an official bilateral meeting. According to media reports Trudeau raised the issue of whether China had funded candidates in the 2019 federal elections. As the meeting was unofficial, there were no readouts detailing their discussions, but the leaked conversation didn’t sit well with Xi.

Trudeau is fortunate that Xi is the smarter and more experienced of the two men. In fact, Xi has good reason not to speak to Trudeau at all. In 2018 the Trump administration asked the Canadians to arrest Meng Wanzhou, CFO of the Huawei corporation and the daughter of its founder. The extradition request was based upon a claim that China was violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. The charge was of questionable legality and Canada should have refused to act on the Trump administration’s behalf. They didn’t and China retaliated by arresting not one, but two Canadians living in China and charged them with espionage. The U.S. backed down and in 2021 dropped the charges against Meng and the two Canadians were allowed to go home.

The entire affair encapsulated everything that is wrong with US/NATO foreign policy, from wishful thinking about dubious outcomes, such as believing they can diminish China’s economic prowess with a bizarre kidnapping effort, or that China would allow such an affront and not respond in kind.

But the biggest problem that Canada, the U.S., and other western nations may have with China is that it is an economic powerhouse that isn’t run by white people. They don’t know that China was the richest country on earth during Europe’s Dark Ages. Perhaps they do know but modern white supremacy causes them not to care or to be even angrier and to behave as though their arrogance alone can change the course of history.

Justin Trudeau as an individual is certainly an adherent of this belief system. In 2019 photos emerged of Trudeau wearing black face on more than one occasion and when he was a grown man who should have known better. But the pampered and callow child of another prime minister and therefore of privilege, not only didn’t try to hide his racism but thought it was funny.

Now he is just another western mediocrity, joined at the hip with his American partners in crime. They may tell him to arrest a Chinese executive or declare Juan Guaido the president of Venezuela and he will go along. Canadians are on the same page after all, and even if they aren’t they will obey the hegemon.

Even after the damage done by the Meng Wanzhou affair and the embarrassing climb down, Trudeau thought he could violate protocol and leak information from an informal conversation. Trudeau and Biden and the other western leaders never leave their feelings of superiority behind, and the end result is dangerous behavior that could provoke a hot war. But this group is made up of arrogant and stupid people who believe that wishful thinking will turn back the clock and get them what they want, namely the return of a unipolar world with them at the top. They live in unreality and think there will be no consequences for their actions.

Trudeau thought that the same man who snatched up two Canadians to teach him a lesson wouldn’t pay attention when protocol was breached. He found out otherwise when Xi confronted him publicly and said through an interpreter, “Everything we discussed has been leaked to the papers. That is not appropriate. And that’s not the way the conversation was conducted.” Trudeau was taken by surprise and engaged in platitudes “about free and open dialogue” but he walked away looking stunned.

They still don’t get it. China is on the verge of becoming the world’s leading economy and Biden thinking that he can destroy their microchip industry or send American politicians to Taiwan won’t change that fact. Every action they take to hurt China only hurts themselves. Their foolish gambit in Ukraine brought China and Russia closer together and led other nations into their orbit and away from the western nations. The poles have shifted whether Biden or Trudeau or their friends like it or not.

The US/NATO axis behaves as hegemons and their vassals always do. They cannot do otherwise and that is why they are so much more dangerous than the countries they vilify.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/xi-ji ... t-ideology
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Nov 28, 2022 3:15 pm

China Records Record Number of COVID-19 Infections

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The authorities indicated that 61 of the symptomatic cases and 224 of the asymptomatic cases correspond to travelers from abroad. Nov. 27, 2022. | Photo: Sputnik / Miguel Candela

Published 27 November 2022 (19 hours 28 minutes ago)

Health authorities report the highest numbers of infection since the start of the pandemic in 2020.

China's National Health Commission (NHC) recorded 39,791 new cases of Covid-19 in the country on Saturday, setting a record fourth consecutive day of infection figures.

According to the report, 36,082 patients are asymptomatic, 90.7 percent of the total. Among the 3,709 who have shown symptoms, the vast majority occurred through autochthonous transmission.

The areas with the highest incidence in this respect, according to the document, are those of Canton (southeast, 1,386 infections), Beijing (747) and Chongqing (center, 194), a municipality where one person also died of the disease.

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The authorities indicated that 61 of the symptomatic cases and 224 of the asymptomatic cases correspond to travelers from abroad.

Nationwide, more than 320,000 people are isolated under medical supervision in isolation centers for being asymptomatic carriers of the virus, of which 1,600 come from other territories.

Statistics indicate that since the beginning of the pandemic, China has recorded a total of 307,802 confirmed cases, taking into account only symptomatic cases, and 5,233 deaths.

The Chinese government is currently applying a zero-tolerance policy in response to the resurgence of the disease in recent weeks, attributed to the Omicron variant.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Chi ... -0003.html

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Recent Chongqing COVID cases surpass 80,000
By Tan Yingzi in Chongqing | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-11-28 15:59

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Residents, taxi drivers, deliverymen and others volunteer to help distribute daily necessities to people in Chongqing. [By Guo Xu/For chinadaily.com.cn]

Chongqing, with its 32 million people, has logged more than 80,000 COVID-19 infections since a local outbreak on Nov 1, and it continues to face a difficult and complex situation, officials said at a daily briefing on Sunday.

As of Sunday, Chongqing had reported 238 newly confirmed local cases and 9,447 new asymptomatic carriers, a record high, according to figures released by the municipal Health Commission.

"Daily infections have remained at a high level, and continued to grow," Li Pan, deputy director of the commission, said at a news conference. "The epidemic situation is still very challenging and complicated."

As of 6 pm on Sunday, 166 of the confirmed cases were moderate, 33 were severe and 12 were critical, Li said.

Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan inspected the epidemic control and prevention work of the city on Saturday and Sunday and reiterated that the city needs to focus on the current priorities and difficulties, Chongqing Daily reported.

Sun said Chongqing has achieved initial positive results in epidemic prevention and control, and the rapid rise has been effectively contained, but the work is now at a critical point, and all people must further strengthen their resolve to curb the virus.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202211/ ... a175d.html

Expert: Home quarantine for COVID patients not workable yet
By Ma Chi | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-11-28 18:10

Beijing is facing a severe COVID-19 outbreak, as the city's new infections surpassed 4,000 on Saturday, a record high since the pandemic began.

Li Dongzeng, a doctor at the infectious diseases department of Beijing You'an Hospital, answered some of the public's most asked questions.

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Epidemic prevention workers in protective suits walk in a locked-down residential compound as outbreaks of the coronavirus disease continue in Beijing, Nov 23, 2022.
Q3: Is it feasible for infected people to quarantine at home instead of going to centralized isolation facilities?

Li: While most people prefer to stay home for quarantine, one should take into consideration the concerns of family members and the whole community before making the decision.

As the Omicron variant is highly infectious, families with elderly people and pregnant women should be cautious. Elderly people with pre-existing health conditions are at higher risk of developing into severe or critical cases.

Regarding the issue of home quarantine, different voices can be heard: while some agree with their infected neighbors to quarantine at home, some are worried about their own family members being affected.

Ideally, a tailor-made policy that meets the needs of every household and every individual would be the best. But it requires medical professionals to evaluate the environment of the community as well as the ventilation and sewage systems of households to ensure no cross-infections happen during home quarantine.

In reality, however, such evaluations are not available, and thus home quarantine is not yet viable in most communities.

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A resident takes an inhaled COVID-19 booster vaccination in Beijing on Nov 17, 2022. [Photo/VCG]

Q4: What are the common feature of the four deaths in this outbreak?

Is it still important to receive vaccination?

Li: All the four people that died of COVID in this outbreak had serious underlying health conditions.

Global experience suggests vaccination can effectively reduce the risk of severe illness and death. For elderly people who have chronic diseases, they should not be overly worried about COVID-19 vaccination as long as their underlying health conditions are stable.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202211/ ... a17be.html

Guangzhou steadily lifting closed management for communities
By Qiu Quanlin | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-11-28 19:23

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A child is tested in Haizhu district of Guangzhou, Guangdong province. [Photo by Qiu Quanlin/chinadaily.com.cn]

Closed management measures will be lifted in more than 10 smaller areas in Haizhu district of Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, as the city has strengthened efforts to build epidemic-free communities in controlled areas, according to a local health official.

"We are building epidemic-free communities inside the controlled management areas as part of efforts to resume production and social activities as soon as possible in the hardest-hit district of Haizhu," said Zhang Yi, deputy director and spokeswoman of the Guangzhou Health Commission.

Such communities will be built in residential compounds, villages or buildings which report no new infections of COVID-19 for five consecutive days, according to Zhang.

As of Monday, more than 10 communities and villages in high-risk areas of Kanglu, Datang, Chisha and Houjiao have qualified for lifting closed management measures.

"However, it should be emphasized residents in these epidemic-free communities should also strengthen personal protection and avoid gathering," Zhang said during a press conference on Monday afternoon.

In addition to building epidemic-free communities, local authorities have also optimized prevention and control measures in Haizhu with closed management areas being reduced in the district, according to a notice issued on Sunday evening.

Controlled management areas are mostly concentrated in the middle part of Haizhu, where public transportation, catering and driving services, as well as production and operation of businesses, are still suspended.

The city's daily number of new infections declined slowly, with 199 new locally transmitted confirmed cases and 7,166 asymptomatic carriers on Sunday, of which 94 were found at community level.

On Sunday, 5,351 people infected with the novel coronavirus in the city were discharged from makeshift hospitals, bringing the total number to 23,398 in this latest outbreak.

Additionally, elderly people living at home, students taking online classes and people working at home outside the districts of Haizhu, Panyu, Tianhe and Baiyun will no longer be required to take nucleic acid tests unless they need to go out.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202211/ ... a17d4.html

Epidemic control not related to fire deaths in Urumqi: Govt
By Cui Jia | China Daily | Updated: 2022-11-28 07:26


COVID-19 epidemic control measures did not affect the evacuation of residents in the fire that killed 10 people in a residential building in Urumqi, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region on Friday, the local government and official newspaper said.

The fire broke out at 7:49 pm on Thursday, and was put out at around 10:35 pm. Ten people were killed and nine others were injured after a fire broke out on the 15th floor of a building in the Jixiangyuan residential area in Tianshan district. The nine injured have been hospitalized for treatment due to inhalation of smoke and are not in danger of losing their lives, Memtmin Kadeer, mayor of the city, said in a news conference on Friday night.

The conference came after claims the door to the building was sealed due to epidemic control went viral on social media, triggering outrage from the public. People also have questioned whether rescue efforts had been delayed and residents couldn't evacuate the building because of epidemic control measures.

"It has been confirmed by sources from the community and fire crews that none of the doors to the apartments or the building were sealed, and videos circulating online showing they were sealed with wire were filmed elsewhere and put together with footage of the accident with ill intention," said Hamit Memetmin, head of the Tianshan district.

According to a report published by Xinjiang Daily on Saturday, the fire first broke out in the apartment of Abuyisham Memetali on the 15th floor. Around 7 pm, the breaker on the electric panel in the apartment tripped when she was taking a bath. She then put it back on. Later her daughter noticed a power board in a bedroom was on fire and cried for help. Soon the bed linens were also caught on fire, which started to spread and eventually reached the 17th floor.

Failing to put out the fire, the mother and daughter then fled the apartment. They met a community worker who heard about the fire that had spread fast, producing toxic fumes reaching the 21st floor. They ran downstairs with other residents.

When the group reached the ground floor, objects on fire started to fall in front of the exit to the building. They entered an apartment on the ground floor and climbed out of the window to escape.

Munire Ahemet, a resident in the same building, asked for help in a WeChat group of Jixiangyuan residents after seeing the building's corridor was filled with dark smoke and finding it difficult to breathe. Following instructions from the fire crew, she and her family stayed in the apartment to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning and waited for help. Soon they were rescued by the fire crew.

"The door to the building has been kept open. Also, it's never been tied up with wires or sealed," Munire told Xinjiang Daily.

Many parts of Urumqi, which has a population of about 4 million, have been put under static management to contain the COVID-19 outbreak there. Hamit said Jixiangyuan has been designated as a low-risk area since Nov 12 after the epidemic control situation had improved. He added residents have been able to leave their apartments and move around in the residential area on a staggered basis since Nov 20.

At the news conference on Friday night, Li Wensheng, head of Urumqi Fire and Rescue Department, said the fireproof door of the floor where the fire broke out had been open, which propagated the spread of fire, and the road leading to the building was occupied by other vehicles, making it difficult for fire engines to get to the site quickly.

Li said the department's command center received the emergency call at 7:49 pm and the first three fire engines and 15 firefighters arrived at the scene at 7:54 pm. A total of 20 fire engines and 94 firefighters were involved in the rescue, and the fire was put out at 10:35 pm.

"The fire crew had to remove the parking bollards and vehicles blocking the way before the fire engines could get to the building," Li said. According to Xinjiang Daily, the parking pollards weren't put in place for epidemic control purposes, but were part of routine traffic management in the residential area.

Memtmin Kadeer, mayor of the city, said Urumqi has established an investigation team and people found to be negligent in their performance of duties before and during the accident must be held accountable.

On behalf of the local government, the mayor expressed deep condolences to the victims, extended sympathy to the bereaved families, the injured and their families, and apologized to the people of the city.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... a13c8.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed Nov 30, 2022 4:01 pm

Protests take place in China against COVID-19 policies
The protests started on Friday in the north western city of Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang province, and in the following days spread to bigger cities including Beijing and Shanghai

November 29, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch

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Protests took place in China against the government’s COVID-19 policies over the weekend. The protests started on Friday in the north western city of Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang province, and in the following days spread to bigger cities including Beijing and Shanghai. Protests also took place in some universities in the country.

The protesters have been raising issues related to the strict lockdown policies adopted by the local administrations in various parts of the country, demanding their withdrawal. There were reports of clashes between the police and the protesters in Shanghai on Sunday.

The protests broke out after at least 10 people died and nine others were injured in a fire accident in Urumqi.

There is a perception that the strict lockdown prevented people from escaping and that COVID-19-related policies were responsible for the deaths in Urumqi. However, some media organizations reported that this was not the case.


The ‘Zero COVID’ policies adopted by China have been a center of debate in the country for some time. The government has argued that the policy is necessary to prevent a large number of deaths. China’s low death rate from the pandemic, which broke out in the country in late 2019, has been acknowledged globally. The US has seen over 20,000 deaths due to COVID-19 this month already, while COVID-19-related deaths in China are almost negligible. China had announced an easing of some of the norms earlier this month while sticking to the larger Zero COVID policy.

On Saturday, China reported more than 40,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 infections, most of them asymptomatic. Cases are on the rise due to new and more infectious variants of the virus.

When the rest of the world has largely stopped lockdown measures, people in many cities in China were undergoing strict lockdowns, sometimes for months. Apart from lockdowns, China continues with repeated mass testing and strict tracing of the virus. Some cities have repeatedly enforced lockdowns, which has led to anger and frustration among sections of the population, occasionally erupting in small-scale protests.

In the aftermath of the protests, media reports said that local authorities had eased some of the restrictions in some areas. An article in Global Times said health authorities had dispatched teams to supervise the implementation of norms by local authorities. The article quoted experts as noting that “some local authorities have taken a “one-size-fits-all” approach and excessive policy steps, increasing the burden on local medical resources and residents, and some places have not fully followed the new measures, which has also amplified the impact on economic and public services to livelihoods.”

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/11/29/ ... -policies/

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MYTHS ABOUT PROTESTS IN CHINA AND THE "POLICE" STATE
29 Nov 2022 , 4:51 pm .

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The recent protests in China against the measures of the Beijing government to stop covid infections occupy the headlines of the main Western media. Given the rarity of the event, these are events that were obviously not going to be passed up to promote anti-China propaganda.

The BBC , for example, argues that the protests are actually more against the repressive communist government of Xi Jinping than the sanitary measures. What follows is to be expected: the romanticization of those protesting against his bravery in standing up to the "monster" as the Chinese state.

"Across the country, 'I want freedom' has become the rallying cry of a wave of protests led mainly by the younger generation," CNN says with a bit more drama.

However, beyond what they seek to project, these facts dismantle several myths about China and the supposed "repressive" regime and few freedoms. On this, the self-taught and expert in Chinese medicine Arnaud Bertrand says the following:


*The Chinese can protest and every year there are thousands of protests.
*"China is a police state." Fake that falls by itself when videos of people arguing with police circulate on social networks, "where it is clear that in reality there is very little fear of the police in China."
*In fact, he says that the Chinese are more confrontational with the police than in most other nations.
*Contrary to the narrative that there is a blockade by the government, the Chinese are aware of what is happening in their country. Although it was not official news, it was spread throughout China that some people died due to the blockade due to sanitary restrictions.
*There are information networks as in other countries.
*"The Chinese government has full control of the population." The protests show that this is false.
*Also debunked is the myth that over the past 30 years there has been a lot of repressed and hidden anger against the government of China. On the contrary, in that period there was no crisis or anything for which there was a social outbreak.
*Finally, there is no such dark "monster" that has brainwashed the population. China has a very strong state, but it is far from all-powerful.

https://misionverdad.com/los-mitos-sobr ... o-policial

Google Translator

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Protesters hold up blank papers and chant slogans as they march in protest in Beijing, Sunday, November 27, 2022

Zero-Covid and the China protests: look at the bigger picture
Originally published: Morning Star Online on November 2022 by Morning Star Online (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Nov 30, 2022)

ESTABLISHMENT media have seized on protests over Covid lockdowns to rehearse their favourite anti-China narratives.

Ever since the world’s first Covid outbreak in Wuhan, the virus has been used as a stick to beat China.

Donald Trump cynically portrayed the pandemic as a Chinese weapon—

the worst attack we’ve ever had on our country … worse than Pearl Harbour.

Trump’s ravings were seldom taken seriously even by U.S. allies. But the resurrection of the “lab leak” conspiracy theory by the Joe Biden administration made it respectable, and the judgement of a World Health Organisation scientific team, that the virus likely evolved in bats and was “extremely unlikely” to have originated in a laboratory, was howled down.

As one British member of the team complained,

it’s disappointing to spend time with journalists explaining key findings … to see our colleagues selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began.

Since Western governments have moved on from Covid, the focus has shifted from trying to blame China for the virus to attacking its zero-Covid policy.

Clearly resumed lockdowns are causing genuine anger in some places. The Chinese government has recognised the problems caused by a “one size fits all” approach: reminding authorities in Henan’s capital Zhengzhou for example of the exceptions that need to be made to stay-home orders and rebuking police in Anhui for over-strict enforcement of quarantine.

But Western reportage is misleading. Top billing on the BBC implies protests on a far larger scale than is actually the case: just as in 2019 when riots in Hong Kong received blanket coverage while far more serious police violence against the Yellow Vests in France was downplayed, any sign of dissatisfaction in China is exaggerated for political reasons.

China watchers have noted the role of mistranslation in attributing broader political aims to the protests: that “jiefeng” (lift the lockdown) has been rendered “jiefang” (liberate), or that calls to loosen Covid restrictions in Xinjiang have been portrayed as calls to “free Xinjiang” to reinforce Western claims of Chinese oppression in the region.

We should also look at the bigger picture. China has effectively contained Covid-19, suppressing outbreaks through rapid localised lockdowns. The result is a death rate of 10.38 per million.

The British rate is 2,668.64 per million–British citizens have been 257 times more likely to die from Covid than Chinese. The fact that this disparity is treated as irrelevant by most commentators says something unpleasant about how little our society values the lives of vulnerable and elderly people.

The limited economic impact of China’s short, targeted lockdowns is obscured by Western crowing about a slowing in China’s GDP growth rate, which seems bizarre given it still comfortably outpaces all Western economies.

Coverage rarely mentions the fact that slower growth is a deliberate part of China’s economic planning, reflecting Xi Jinping’s shift of emphasis from growth at any cost to development that limits inequality and protects the environment.

Those who dismiss these stated goals as propaganda ignore palpable evidence that they are serious: only a government prepared to sacrifice economic output for long-term sustainability would have enacted a policy such as the 10-year ban on fishing in the Yangtze river imposed last year to allow wildlife to recover, a measure that saw the authorities allocate billions to creating new employment for the 231,000 people who relied on fishing China’s biggest river for their livelihoods.

To an excitable Western commentariat loyally plugging the new cold war line set in Washington, Beijing’s zero-Covid policy is evidence of its paranoid authoritarianism.

The government has repeatedly adapted its approach, and recent protests may prompt further revision. But the fact remains that by comparison with Britain or any other Western country, China’s strategy has saved millions of lives. We should be wary of mocking it or presenting our governments’ record as somehow superior.

https://mronline.org/2022/11/30/zero-co ... -protests/

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Western media has not much evolved from the era of the yellow peril in its routine China-bashing
Originally published: CovertAction Magazine on November 27, 2022 by Felix Abt (more by CovertAction Magazine) | (Posted Nov 29, 2022)

It is common for Western media to automatically imply or label everything that happens in China as “evil.” The most recent case concerns the events surrounding former Communist Party Chairman Hu Jintao at the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing.

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[Source: jpost.com]

“A ghostly scene at China’s top of power: Xi Jinping’s predecessor is taken away. The ‘new emperor’ is reaching for absolute power. What are the consequences for the world?” This is the title and the introduction of the newspaper Die Weltwoche to a German-language article by the British historian Francis Pike, in which he writes: “Hu’s media-fueled removal takes on the appearance of a political drama reminiscent of Chairman Mao’s brutal purges of party members in the 1950s.” He is referring to a video from the Chinese Party Congress showing former party leader Hu Jintao allegedly being “forcefully taken away.”
“The removal of Hu from the hall occurred mere minutes after foreign media were allowed into the Great Hall,” Pike adds. This immediately raises the question of why Xi Jinping should wait to “remove” Hu Jintao until Western media are on the scene, having only waited for such an opportunity to pillory the “cruel and inhumane dictator Ji Jinping”?

As for Xi Jingping’s dictatorship, it is worth noting in passing that last month at the Athens Democracy Forum (in collaboration with The New York Times), a scholar from the University of Zurich was asked to comment on democracy in China, and her response was not exactly what one would expect with so much Western dictatorship talk: In recent years, under Xi Jinping, there have been increased “democratic experiments, for example, to allow greater citizen participation and to make local government officials more responsive and accountable to citizens.” This is all the more remarkable because, in the so-called democratic West, the trend is in the opposite direction, namely toward a creeping dismantling of citizens’ democratic rights. And, as might be expected, the media did not report on it because, unlike Hu Jintao’s earth-shattering “removal” from the convention hall, it was apparently an insignificant detail that would also upset their China narrative.

Unwelcome details blanked out

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Ex-Chinese President Hu Jintao being removed from Communist Party Congress on October 22, 2022. [Source: nypost.com]

The same media did not mention that the frail 80-year-old man, who left a somewhat bewildered impression, had been escorted to and from the convention for several days during the Party Congress and before the “forced removal” hyped by the Western media on the last day of the Congress.
Here, for example, you can see Xi Jinping taking care of him as a friendly usher.

Cutting away an important part of the message and changing perceptions with misleading text is manipulation and is—rightly!—castigated by the same media when it is done by China.

That Hu Jintao has a health problem was first noticed by China observers at the 2019 National Day parade, when he was seen on the Tiananmen Balcony in Beijing with his hands shaking badly.

Immediately prior to the incident at the Party Congress, Hu Jintao participated in the election as the second eligible voter, just after Xi Jinping, who cast his vote at the ballot box. In a society that is much more Confucianist than Communist, this symbolic placement in the vote signifies great respect for the elder statesman. The Western media also blanked this out of the overall picture. This made it easier for them to construct a coup, a purge and a humiliation of the former president.

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[Source: biz-at-it.blogspot.com]

If Hu had really been purged during the day, as Western media claimed, it is highly unlikely that Chinese television would have shown him in its report in the evening.
According to George Soros, Xi is the “most dangerous man in the world.”

Political purge and humiliation for the history books or disruption of “worship”?
Little was heard from the official Chinese side about the incident, apart from a tweet from Xinhua News Agency saying Hu “did not feel well” during the meeting.

A report by Singaporean TV station CNA added an important detail that Western media representatives who were in the room seemed to have deliberately ignored: Hu had been looking at some documents on the table in front of him and apparently had a disagreement with the current chairman of China’s legislature, Li Zhanshu, who was sitting to his left, who took the documents out of his hand.

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“Child soldiers” in newsrooms turned into shooting galleries drop speculative bombs on China: Young German journalist Fabian Kretschmer writes from Beijing for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) and various other media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as “for the history books.” (Above translation into English by Felix Abt)

And when Li Zhanshu tried to get up to help Hu stand, Li was briefly dragged back to his seat by Wang Huning, a party ideologue and former professor of international politics to his left, making matters even more confusing. Xi stopped this disruption to the choreographed party meeting and summoned a staffer, who then tried to get Hu to leave, and who then escorted him out of the room. The video also shows that Hu, after standing up, first hovered in place, then took a few slow steps, then stopped and turned to Xi, who nodded briefly but continued to look at the assembled delegates.

Claimed purge makes no sense

If it had been a dispute, the incident would have been extraordinary, because in communist parties, which are not known for their transparency, disagreements are settled behind closed doors, and in any case not in front of running cameras from the whole world. So one would need to know what is in the documents. A former Chinese insider told the BBC, “Why would the party put a document on Hu’s desk if he wasn’t allowed to see it?”

Bill Bishop of the China newsletter Sinocism stated that the “purge claimed by the media doesn’t make sense that way.” Hu Haifeng, Hu Jintao’s son and party secretary of Lishui, Zhejiang, also sat in the room. “A purge of one without the other would be unlikely,” Bishop explained.

A real China insider was interviewed by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. When asked about Xi Jinping’s possible motives for the alleged “forced removal” of Hu Jintao, he replied:

“Xi is certainly not shy about taking drastic action, but his obsession is to restore party discipline through rules and procedures. He has never gone the way of Stalin or North Korea of just making his enemies disappear. Even with his bitterest foes—such as Bo Xilai, Zhou Yongkang, and Guo Boxiong, people who, in fact, plotted a coup against him—Xi took them down, but did everything according to the procedures.

He is a stern but not an arbitrary ruler. His books and speeches have more citations from China’s Legalism school than anything else. Legalism (a bad translation) stresses the importance of rules and regulations over arbitrary power.

If anyone wants to challenge Xi, it would be incredible for them to do so on the last day of the party congress, which is mainly for formal endorsement and communication. The debate and negotiations happened behind the scene MONTHS beforehand. There were plenty of opportunities for the two to argue if they didn’t agree with each other. This was simply not the case.”

Why have some Western media platforms gone wild with speculation, including suggesting it was a purge, the interviewer asked:

“This is the problem I have with the Western media and those ‘experts.’ You can be critical of the Chinese system, and you may dislike it intensely, but you at least need to understand what you are criticizing. Their imagination of China is just a plus-size North Korea, a modern-day Stalinist state, or the new Nazis. In fact, many Western media just borrow the same analytical tools they used to analyze the Soviet Union or North Korea or even Nazi Germany and apply it to China.

This is what I call the intellectual Procrustean bed they have forced on everyone studying China. Sometimes it can get really ridiculous. It’s either laziness or dogmatic rigidity or having an agenda—or a combination of all these.

| Hu Heifeng Source taiwannewscom | MR Online
Hu Heifeng [Source: taiwannews.com]

There are many problems in Xi’s system, and so far he and the party have not come up with convincing answers to them. But to imagine it simply as another Soviet Union or North Korea is missing the point. If people start to make decisions based on such skewed views and perceptions, that will lead to real-life consequences. Hong Kong is a living example of it.”
So it is okay to criticize the Chinese system harshly, and pundits and the media may deeply loathe it, but they do so while being quite clueless.

Also, contrary to the predictions and speculations of experts and media in the West in the run-up to the Party Congress, the “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” was not shortened to Xi Jinping Thought in the Constitution, nor was Xi given new descriptive titles such as “Leader/领袖.”

Further background and insights censored by the Western media

There are two other key current things that pundits like John Pike and the mainstream media will not tell you:

1.China has remained essentially Confucian for more than two thousand years. Confucius advocated a government that cares for the people and makes their welfare its primary concern. It should be a meritocracy, in that “those who govern should do so on the basis of merit and not on the basis of inherited status,” he proclaimed, and that it should be enlightened and benevolent (in which the demonstrably most capable people who best serve the people should rise to positions of leadership).

2.This is in contrast to Western democracies, where even the most incompetent can come to power thanks to empty promises and/or because they were well sponsored, and then have their own interests and those of their patrons in mind rather than the interests of their constituents. In China, civil servants still have to pass exams and prove themselves if they want to keep their jobs. This corresponds to the centuries-old Confucian tradition, according to which anyone, regardless of their social background, could obtain a position in the civil service at the imperial court after passing an entrance examination in various subjects. The fact that 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty in China over the past 40 years, accounting for more than 75% of global poverty, is no accident, but part of the application of this philosophy.

3.Mainstream media such as Foreign Affairs magazine highlighted the “Collateral Damage in China’s War on Covid,” or Nikkei, the world’s largest financial newspaper, headlined “Self-isolated: China’s lonely zero-COVID battle in spotlight” without ever telling their readers and viewers why the Chinese government took draconian measures against the Covid pandemic: China’s biggest weakness is its health care system. South Korea has 10 intensive care beds per 100,000 people, America has 34, and China has only 4. As a result, the government feared that the health care system would not be able to handle a large influx of seriously ill patients. Most retirees are not vaccinated.

The reason that modern medicine, including hospitals with intensive care units, lags behind the rest of the world in China is that the Chinese believe in their traditional medicine (acupuncture, herbal medicine, diet, exercise, and manual therapy to correct imbalances in the body and promote mental and physical health) because it has been used for thousands of years and is steeped in tradition, belief, popularity and anecdote. Western remedies are far less popular because the vast majority of Chinese also believe that traditional Chinese medicine has fewer side effects and has a stronger restorative effect on the body.

In contrast to the seemingly completely out-of-touch Western media, East Asian media, which have a far better understanding of China, used less charged language related to Hu Jintao’s escort out of the Party Congress hall. It is also important to note in this context that, unlike Europe, Asian countries do not want to be drawn into the U.S. fight against China at their own expense, as I have detailed here.

For example, the conservative Korea Herald in Seoul soberly headlined that Hu Jintao was helped off the stage at the Party Congress.

It can therefore be assumed that the escorting of Hu Jintao at the Party Congress will not go down in the Korean history books.

“Media war between China and the West”
On the one hand, everything that comes out of China is hyped up, twisted and used in the West for China-bashing. On the other hand, more important things that would contribute to a better understanding of the country are simply suppressed. Another recent example:

Do you know Dilana Dilixiati? No, of course you don’t. But you certainly know Peng Shuai, the famous Chinese tennis player who, according to Western media reports, accused a retired top politician of rape (the word rape does not appear in her original Chinese text), after the years-long secret love affair with many ups and downs between the two had gone to pieces.

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Tennishead magazine wrote (December 6, 2021): “The USA are reportedly set to announce a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games this week in response to the censorship of Peng Shuai and her sexual assault allegations.” This boycott was carried out by the United States and its Western “coalition of the willing.” [Source: Screenshot courtesy of Felix Abt]

Western politicians and media therefore immediately called for a boycott of the Winter Olympics in Beijing.

The athlete was subsequently often seen in public, laughing and talking to other people. Since she apparently did not disappear into a gulag, as Western politicians and media must have secretly hoped, she soon disappeared again from Western media discourse.

Dr. Pan Wang, a China expert from the University of New South Wales, provided background information and insights into the case on Australian television that were not available elsewhere.

She said it was only natural that Western organizations such as the World Tennis Association interpreted Ms. Peng’s social media post as a complaint of sexual misconduct and were suspicious of Beijing’s response given the lack of detailed information, communication or transparency and censorship on the matter.

However, she dismissed the accusation, saying there is no clear allegation of rape, which is a criminal offense in China, and “sexual harassment” falls under the Civil Code.

Whether the persuasion or coercion of the former vice premier described by Peng Shuai could be called “sexual assault” in the usual sense is subjective, she said.

She added that, while Beijing wants to suppress any controversy about its officials, the Western media are also pursuing their own political agenda regarding China.

“This case is about harassment, power and skepticism, and it occurred in a broader context of growing tensions between China and, for example, Australia, stemming from diplomatic tensions, trade disputes and growing accusations against China’s human rights, democracy and censorship,” she added.

She concluded: “So there’s a media war between China and the West and the Australian media here, too, and that’s reflected in the opposing views of the social media posts.”

The hidden story of the amazing career of a Uyghur woman

Back to Dilana Dilixiati. She, too, is a Chinese sports star. Her team had recently won an unexpected, sensational victory in the semifinals against basketball superpower Australia at the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup. Australian media reported, “They defeated the hosts 61-59 at the Sydney Superdome on Friday night in a thrilling encounter that was decided only in the final seconds.” The dramatic thriller sent shock waves.

Image
[Source: english.news.cn]

Those who followed the game immediately recognized that Dilana Dilixiati (on the left in the photo above) looked different from her teammates. The journalists must have noticed her. Strangely enough, the Uyghur, who writes her name in Uyghur like this: دىلانا دىلشات, which does not look like Mandarin, did not attract any interest, although she would have been more suitable than any other for a sensational success story inviting clicks.
The 1.94-meter (6’ 4-1/2”) center basketball player of the Guangdong Vermilion Birds, who helped the Chinese women’s national team win a silver medal at the World Cup, regularly visits her family in Xinjiang.

A Twitter user found out that a Uyghur woman played on China’s successful national women’s basketball team and that the media did not want to know about it.

The Australian think tank ASPI, funded in particular by the Australian Department of Defense, the U.S. government, and the Western war industry, published the widely cited but refuted pamphlet “Uyghurs for Sale.” The organization was one of the driving forces in spreading the propaganda campaign of “genocide” against the Uyghurs in China, which originated in the United States.

The case is clear: Dilana Dilixiati, a Uyghur, and her ability to pursue a career as a top athlete and to travel, contradicts the Western narrative that is ingrained in people’s minds that Uyghurs, who are totally discriminated against, are prisoners and victims of genocide and cannot leave Xinjiang. Their story had to be kept quiet by the media, because consumers would naturally have noticed that there was something wrong with the prevailing narrative, and who likes to be manipulated.

https://mronline.org/2022/11/29/western ... a-bashing/

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China to Further Boost COVID-19 Vaccination Among Elderly

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File photo shows an elderly resident receives a shot of COVID-19 vaccine at home during a medical service for the elder in Dongcheng District of Beijing, capital of China, May 10, 2022. | Photo: Xinhua/Chen Zhonghao

Published 29 November 2022

The Chinese government has released a work plan to ramp up vaccination among its elderly population to protect this vulnerable group against COVID-19.


The work plan issued on Tuesday by the State Council joint prevention and control mechanism against COVID-19 aims to leverage the protective effect of vaccination to reduce the risk of severe or critical illness and death among infected seniors.

The vaccination work should be spearheaded by the government and carried out through inter-department coordinations, and the accountability of local jurisdictions for the work should be ensured, according to the work plan.

It urged efforts to ensure precise research and management, further improve relevant services, and enhance supervision regarding vaccination work among the elderly.

It also called for efforts to accelerate the increase of vaccination rate among people aged 80 and older, and continue to raise that among people aged between 60 and 79.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Chi ... -0019.html

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Image

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/8003036.html

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China Keeps Aggressively Surrounding Itself With US Bases: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Image

Facts:

There are Chinese people with real grievances against their government.
The US empire’s propaganda machine will spin current protests in China to advance imperial agendas.
Western intelligence agencies will become more and more involved in these protests the longer they go on.

It still amazes me how many people who fancy themselves anti-establishment critical thinkers will spend all day mindlessly regurgitating mainstream media lines about China.

I cannot emphasize enough how little respect I have for anyone who parrots US empire narratives about China and how completely dismissive I am of all their attempts to explain to me that it’s actually right and good to do this. Literally all of our major problems are because of the people who rule over us; if you’re buying into the narrative that who we should really be mad at right now is a government on the other side of the planet with no power over us, you’re a fucking loser. You’re a bootlicking empire simp. You’re worthless, bleating human livestock.



Why does China keep aggressively surrounding itself with US military bases?




Everyone knows the US has invaded countries completely unprovoked very recently and will definitely do so again, but we still have to pretend that Putin is the worst thing since Hitler.



It’s disturbing how many people I encounter who claim Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is worse than America’s invasion of Iraq because Ukraine is a “democracy”. How fucked up do you have to be inside to believe human lives are worth less because of their nation’s political system?

Leaving aside the fact that a nation which bans political parties, shuts down opposition media, imprisons opposition leaders, and is vastly more accountable to Washington than to its own people is in no way a “democracy”, that’s just a profoundly disturbed way of looking at life. A mother holding the remains of a child whose body has been ripped apart by military explosives does not care whether her country is considered a “democracy” by the western governments who are invested in that country’s military outcomes.





Rightists correctly believe that liberals subscribe to an artificially constructed worldview designed by the powerful in the service of the powerful, but incorrectly believe that they themselves do not.



Common debates:

Which status quo party is best
Which side of the culture war is correct
How the western empire should act
What capitalism should look like

Uncommon debates:

Should status quo politics exist
Should the western empire exist
Should capitalism exist
Should class war replace culture war
And it is of course entirely by design that the former are common and the latter are uncommon. Keeping everyone debating how establishment power structures should exist, rather than if they should, ensures the survival of those power structures.



It’s actually a really big problem that the most visible “left” in the US is completely worthless on war and militarism. When Americans who are critical of those things look right and see people like Rand Paul and Tucker Carlson doing something then look left and see AOC and Bernie doing nothing, which side do you think they’ll choose?

And of course this is because the so-called progressive Democrats are not “left” in any meaningful way, but your average mainstream American doesn’t know that, and perception is reality. The US is the nation where antiwar sentiment is most important and the most urgently needed, and it’s been buried on the left. Americans are trained that Clintonites are “center-left” and AOC/Bernie are “far left”, and anyone further to the left than them on foreign policy is demonized by these progressives as a Russian agent. This creates the very understandable impression that the entire left is pro-war.

When you’ve got Ilhan Omar and AOC calling people who protest US proxy warfare at their rallies Russian operatives and antiwar leftists like Jill Stein branded as Kremlin agents, the message mainstream Americans come away with is that antiwar sentiment is only welcome on the right.

Again, I get this isn’t true and there’s lots of antiwar sentiment on the true left in the US, but nobody sees that left. It’s denied any media presence or political validity; mainstream Americans don’t know the difference between an anti-imperialist socialist and a Berner. This causes antiwar Americans to drift to the right; I’ve watched it happen in real time with some of my US followers. I do my best to make the case for the left, but I’m just one voice amid a surging deluge of messaging they’re getting that the real opposition is on the right.



Naming your war machinery after the Indigenous tribes your government genocided is the modern-day equivalent of wearing the skulls of your enemies on your war horse.



A lot of acceptance of the status quo worldview boils down to a failure of imagination. People literally can’t imagine the possibility that reality is as different as it is from what they’ve been told by their teachers, parents, pundits and politicians. It’s actually unfathomable to them, and that is because it’s so different. The world we’re trained to see by establishment perception managers is as different from the real world as any fictional world is.



The claim that capitalism is the best system for generating profits is basically correct; it’s hard to beat greed and starvation as a carrot and stick to get the gears of industry whirring. The issue here is that merely generating profits won’t solve most of the world’s problems, and in fact many of our problems come from the fact that capitalism is too effective at turning the gears of industry. Our biosphere is dying largely because capitalism values making lots of things but not un-making things; we’re choking our ecosystem to death because it’s profitable.

Capitalism has no real answers for problems like ecocide, inequality, exploitation and caring for the needful. Yes “let the markets decide” will generate lots of profits for those set up to harvest them, but profit-seeking cannot address those very serious problems. The “invisible hand of the market” gets treated as an actual deity that actually exists, with all the wisdom necessary to solve the world’s problems, but in reality the pursuit of money lacks any wisdom. It can’t solve our major problems, it can only make more stuff and generate more profit.

Find me a capitalist business plan for leaving a forest untouched. Find me a capitalist business plan for keeping someone free of illness, for ensuring that someone with nothing gets what they need, for giving resources to a struggling parent. You can’t. Capitalism can’t do this. These are the most important things in the world, and no possible iteration of capitalism has any solutions for any of them whatsoever, apart from “Well hopefully rich people will feel very charitable and fix those problems.” And how is that solution working out? It’s a joke.

The “Maybe the very rich will feel charitable and fix our problems for us” solution assumes that the very same people who are wired to do whatever it takes to claw their way to the top of the ladder will suddenly start caring deeply about everyone they stepped on to get there. Capitalism elevates sociopaths, because profit-seeking competition-based systems reward those who are willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead. That’s why we are ruled by sociopaths, and it’s why looking to “philanthropy” as a solution to our problems is a ridiculous joke.

When capitalism proponents tell socialists and communists “You don’t understand economics,” what they really mean is “You don’t understand that capitalism is the best system for generating profits.” But socialists and communists do understand this; it’s just that generating profits, in and of itself, is not sufficient.

If lack of wealth is your major problem, then capitalism can be a tool to address it; that’s what China is temporarily doing to keep up economically with the western forces who wish to enslave it. But such measures won’t solve ecocide, inequality, exploitation, and caring for the needful. For that other measures are needed.

If you want to make more of something (money, material goods), then capitalism can be a good way to do that. But if you need to make less of something (pollution, inequality, exploitation, sickness, homelessness, etc) it’s worthless, and other systems must be looked to.

You can say “But communist regimes are authoritarian blah blah” all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that capitalism has zero answers for the most important problems facing our species. This still needs to be addressed, and moaning about Mao and Stalin isn’t an answer. Don’t like the iterations of socialism we’ve seen so far? Okay. Then find another answer, and remember we’ve already established that capitalism is not an answer; it cannot address the problems we’ve discussed here. So we need to find an actual answer that does actually work.

Dismantling capitalism, if we ever achieve it, will be the most difficult thing that humanity has ever accomplished. As hard as everyone becoming a buddha, and essentially not much different. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is existentially necessary for us to do so.

We’ll either move from competition-based systems to collaboration-based ones, eliminating all the obstacles necessary for us to do so, or we will go extinct. We are at our adapt-or-die juncture as a species.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/11/29 ... ve-matrix/

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PATRICK LAWRENCE: Zhou Enlai’s Posthumous Triumph
November 28, 2022

Nations now fashioning a post–Western world order appear to be abiding by the Five Principles espoused by China’s first and long-serving premier.

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King Fahd Road, Riyadh, 2020. (Timon91, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News

The big news over the Thanksgiving weekend — big such that you could hardly find it in the mainstream press — is that top officials from China will travel to Riyadh in early December to meet counterparts not only from the Saudi kingdom but also from other Arab nations. There appears a strong possibility that Xi Jinping will attend.

The Chinese president is already scheduled to summit in the kingdom next month with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and, almost certainly, MbS’ father, the aging but on-the-ball King Salman bin Abdulaziz. I do not know why Beijing and the Arabs are coy as to Xi’s presence at the larger summit, but one way or the other this will be his first visit to Saudi Arabia since 2016 and could hardly come at a more significant moment.

Making the December docket yet more interesting, TRTWorld, the Turkish broadcaster, reported the day after Thanksgiving that this is to be understood as the “inaugural Chinese–Arab summit.” This starts to sound like the start of something very big indeed.

Riyadh’s rather bitter drift away from its oil-for-security alliance with the U.S., worn thin after nine decades, is by now a matter of public record. The interesting thing here is that Xi’s talks with MbS and presumably his Pop are to focus on none other than trade, as in oil and security.

It has been hard to miss these past months the Saudi kingdom’s simultaneous new tilt toward partnerships with major non–Western nations, China and Russia chief among them. Along with Turkey, Egypt, Qatar and various other nations, it had observer status at the 22nd summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Samarkand in mid–September.

As also noted in this space, Saudi Arabia is one of numerous nations that are also interested in joining an expanded version of the BRICS, whose original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, give the organization its name. The non–West waxes — a key feature of our century, as I have long held — just as the West’s ties with these nations wane, gradually or otherwise.

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Shanghai Cooperation Organization Secretariat in Beijing, 2022. (N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

It is best to take the long view when trying to explain this fundamental shift. It is the flower of many decades of incremental material progress in the non–Western world. As the BRICS, the SCO’s members and other non–Western nations clambered up the development ladder from the 1950s and 1960s onward, Western markets were no longer the only markets if these nations had something to sell or as they searched for investment capital.

In this way the end of the West’s 500 years of global dominance has been rolling our way like a big, black bowling ball for a long time. To extend the simile, in our time we watch as it strikes its pins. The non–West now accounts for the majority of global gross domestic product — a reality that cannot be more than a couple of decades old but is among the key determinants of our era.

Why wouldn’t the Saudis, the other Gulf states, and various other nations traditionally allied or partnered with the West begin to shift loyalties? Why wouldn’t the BRICS now be planning to develop an alternative to the dollar based on a basket of currencies that heretofore have had a very minor place in global trade — notably but not only in oil?

“The end of the West’s 500 years of global dominance has been rolling our way like a big, black bowling ball for a long time.”

It is a dollars-and-cents question, then. Markets, investment capital, high-technology and heavy-industry development, scientific, cultural and educational exchanges: Not only is the West no longer the only game in town; it is not the most dynamic game in town, either.

But when I think of these practical reasons for this shift in global vitality, I get to thinking about Zhou Enlai, China’s first and long-serving premier and vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party during Mao’s final years.

Zhou was, more to the immediate point, among the visionary figures of those postwar decades when scores of nations were achieving independence and working out what kind of world order they proposed to live in.

The Five Principles

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Zhou Enlai, left, Mao Zedong, center-left, and and Bo Gu, first from right, in Yanan, 1935. (Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

Readers of this column may recall the admiration I have severally expressed for Zhou’s Five Principles. All five had to do with how nations should conduct themselves in an emerging era of unprecedented multiplicity: They were mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, nonaggression, noninterference in the internal affairs of others, equality and mutual benefit in relations, and peaceful coexistence.

Zhou fashioned these principles as Beijing and New Delhi worked out the Sino–Indian Agreement of 1954. Then they assumed a life of their own. Nehru took to citing them. They were incorporated into the People’s Republic’s constitution. When Sukarno hosted the seminal meeting of the Non–Aligned Movement at Bandung in 1955, the NAM declared its Ten Principles, elaborations of Zhou’s Five.

I have always thought of Zhou’s principles as great ideals. I still consider them in this way. A scholar named Dawn Murphy compares them with the tenets of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, wherein the European powers settled on a code of conduct among themselves that amounted to an early formula for achieving peaceful coexistence and avoiding war.

But as I watch the steady, encouraging coalescence of emerging non–Western nations, it seems to me Zhou’s Five Principles have a lot to do, in an altogether practical way, with their evolving relationships. Oddly enough, this is Zhou’s posthumous moment of triumph.

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China’s President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin during welcoming reception for the Russian president in Beijing, June 2018. (Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Think about any set of relations among non–Western powers and consider the fundamental nature of their ties. The Russians or the Chinese or the South Africans would not dream of telling the Saudis or Egyptians or Indians how to conduct their internal affairs, or of intruding on their sovereignty. The same holds true, of course, if you reverse the exercise.

I suppose I ought to state a couple of obvious points here. One, there are some unwholesome names among the non–Western nations I have mentioned, just as there were among the NAM’s members. This must be acknowledged. Abdel Fattah al–Sisi’s Egypt? Another tragic dictatorship in Egypt’s long line of them. The Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan? The man is a tinpot tyrant.

Two, despite one’s objections to such nations, and I am sure figures such as Zhou and Nehru had theirs in their day, the principle of noninterference must prevail for the sake of a working, ultimately humane world order. There are exceptions to this having to do with extreme cases, of course, but this does not mean the kind of flagrant abuse the U.S. makes with its unlawful, disorderly, typically violent “humanitarian interventions.”

Going back to the 2001 attacks in New York and Washington — and one could go back much further — do you think the non–Western world did not take note of America’s lawlessness when it invaded Afghanistan, and then Iraq, and then Libya, and then Syria? I do not even have to ask in the case of Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine. The great majority of nations objects, and no longer so silently as in the previous cases I mention.

Without saying so explicitly, and I do not know why they do not, those nations now fashioning a post–Western world order come to abide by Zhou’s principles even as they are fed up with America’s incessant violations of them. Again, we are talking about ideals and profound practicalities all at once.

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Wuhan, China. 2018. (MEAphotogallery, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

On Nov. 14, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft sponsored a forum under the title, “Is America Ready for a Multipolar World?” I did not think this an interesting question because the answer is so obviously no. But the occasion elicited some worthy remarks nonetheless, notably from Gérard Araud, formerly France’s permanent representative to the United Nations and more recently its ambassador to Washington. (He is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, but nobody is perfect.)

Here are a few snippets from his comments:

“I’ve always been extremely skeptical about this idea of a ‘rules-based order.’ This order is our order…. Actually, this order is reflecting the balance of power in 1945….

When the Americans basically want to do whatever they want, including when it’s against international law, as they define it, they do it.

And that’s the vision that the rest of the world has of this order. Their vision of the world, is certainly not a ‘rules-based order.’ It’s a Western order. And they accuse us of double standards, hypocrisy, and so on and so on.”


It is noteworthy that a prominent diplomat from one of the West’s great powers is now saying such things. Araud is articulating precisely what the non–West has been saying for a very long time. His appearance at Quincy is merely evidence that the message is now crossing the great divide between the West and non–West.

This is not to say I am confident the message is heard in the Atlantic world’s capitals. I do not think it is. But they will surely start hearing it in Washington, London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin as the BRICS, the SCO and many nations not members of either make it plain by what they do and what they stand for. They will stand for a world order made of practicalities and ideals such as Zhou’s —practical ideals, if there is such a thing.

We should keep these matters in mind when Xi Jinping travels to Saudi Arabia next month. Any gathering of world leaders that puts people such as MbS in the room will challenge those who favor a world order that rests, if implicitly, on Zhou Enlai’s Five Principles.

Let us not be daunted. Let us not imagine Zhou assumed the non–West was led by a band of angels. Let us recall that in full what Zhou stood for was titled Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. They are as valid today, indeed as urgent, as they were when he drafted them not quite 70 years ago.

https://consortiumnews.com/2022/11/28/p ... s-triumph/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 02, 2022 3:57 pm

China - Protest Instigators And Zero-Covid Policies

Within the last two days the New York Times produced four anti-China opinion pieces:

Are the Chinese Protests a Moment or a Movement?
The Communist Party Is Losing China’s People
Banana Peels for Xi Jinping
Xi Broke the Social Contract That Helped China Prosper


All four predict doom for China and president Xi's leadership. In typical color-revolution fashion the sudden onslaught of these pieces follows recent reports of minor protests in some Chinese cities related to zero-Covid measures.

But the biggest recent protest was actually a labor conflict at a factory where the Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn is producing iPhones:

A violent workers’ revolt at the world’s largest iPhone factory this week in central China is further scrambling Apple’s strained supply and highlighting how the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy is hurting global technology firms.
The troubles started last month when workers left the factory campus in Zhengzhou, the capital of the central province of Henan, due to Covid fears. Short on staff, bonuses were offered to workers to return.

But protests broke out this week when the newly hired staff said management had reneged on their promises. The workers, who clashed with security officers wearing hazmat suits, were eventually offered cash to quit and leave.


Within a day that labor conflict was largely resolved.

Other protests were mostly small symbolic events carefully designed to get some media attention in the 'West'.

Image

For a huge country like China the total number of protests was laughable small:

Nathan Ruser @Nrg8000 - 23:17 UTC · Nov 30, 2022
For our China Protest Tracker map, we tracked reports of 7 protests that took place across China on November 29th. Totalling 51 protests since November 25th, across 24 cities. See the third edition of our map.


There are signs of foreign meddling:

Angelo Giuliano 🇮🇹 🇨🇭/ living in 🇨🇳 @Angelo4justice3 - 3:08 AM · Nov 30, 2022
Telegram Channel / protests China
They have open channel with Western journalists, here is the list.
Here a list of organisers, all based outside China.
Sydney Daddy one of them, YouTuber based in Australia.
So much for "organic" movement.

Covid protest YES, foreign meddling NO
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To me this looks as if some 'western' color-revolution instigators are trying to hitch a ride with reasonable protests against some zero-Covid measures. They are likely to fail.

Exactly three years ago Wuhan reported the first case of an unknown type of pneumonia. China had since then adopted a whatever-it-takes stand against the spread of Covid. While the zero-Covid measures at times seem harsh they are also a necessity. The Chinese medical system is still underdeveloped and can not handle large outbreaks in multiple big cities. Not all Chinese elderly are vaccinated. A free running epidemic would cost several million lives and would leave tens of millions hampered with long-Covid conditions.

That is unsatisfying for the young who are unlikely to die of Covid-19 but have to live with the zero-Covid restrictions. But China is a Confucian society. People in China are traditionally valuing their elderly. China's constitution makes care for the elderly in ones family an obligation for every Chinese citizen:

Article 49 Marriage, families, mothers and children shall be protected by the state.
Both husband and wife shall have the obligation to practice family planning. Parents shall have the obligation to raise and educate their minor children; adult children shall have the obligation to support and assist their parents. Infringement of the freedom of marriage is prohibited; mistreatment of senior citizens, women and children is prohibited.


China can therefore not open up and let the pandemic run its course. Its government would likely see more protest than now should it suddenly decide to fully open up and to let the elderly die.

But China can, as Peter Lee predicted, modify its current policies.

chinahand @chinahand - 12:54 UTC · Nov 30, 2022
My prediction that CCP crabwalking to a new covid policies (w/ collateral political and public health implications) holding up rather well. Subscription required!

Less Than Zero...Covid - Peter Lee's China Threat Report on Patreon.


Two weeks ago the Chinese National Health Commission had already announced 20 new guidelines.

What it can further do to avoid more demonstrations and unrest is to apply sensible zero-Covid measures in a less restricting way. Some local governments have already reacted to some of the protests:

Chinese cities including Beijing, Guangzhou and Chengdu, where the virus is rife, have continued to optimize their anti-epidemic policies in recent days, with Guangzhou resuming businesses, allowing dine-in services in low-risk areas; and shopping malls gradually opening in Beijing starting Thursday. Some cities have also started to allow close contacts to have home quarantine under certain conditions and exempt some groups from routine nucleic tests.
Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan underlined again on Thursday the importance of continuously optimizing China's response to COVID-19, following similar remarks she made on Wednesday saying the country is facing a new situation and new tasks in epidemic prevention and control as the pathogenicity of the Omicron virus weakens.

Epidemiologists said such optimized measures aims to strike a better balance between COVID-19 control and ensuring people's normal lives. Allowing home quarantine for some risk groups also relieves pressure of already strained hospital resources.


China wants to hold out as "the pathogenicity of the Omicron virus weakens."

The Omicron variant seems to be more transmissible but less lethal than the original version of SARS-CoV-2 or the delta variant. But we do not know if it will further develop in that direction. New variants are found on a nearly daily basis. If China can hold out for another years until an even milder variant becomes prominent it probably can avoid a huge number of deaths.

Some economist predict that China will open up around the mid of next year:

China is expected to fully lift its Covid restrictions in the third quarter of 2023, leading to a dramatic economic rebound, said Hu Yifan, regional chief investment officer and chief China economist at UBS Global Wealth Management.
The estimate echoes a forecast by Bloomberg economists, who said they expect a full reopening by mid-2023. A survey by Bloomberg News earlier this month showed that most economists see reopening starting in the second quarter of 2023 after China’s annual top political meetings.

The Chinese government has given no public indication on the timing of an exit from the current “zero-Covid” pandemic control policy, although some municipal governments recently eased controls.


The Times writer who hope for some revolution in China will likely be disappointed.

China's economy is doing reasonably well. The people are mostly content with reasonable health measure and everything else is negotiable.

'Western' op-ed writers like to paint picture of China as a dictatorship suppressing its people. But that is not what China is.

Posted by b on December 1, 2022 at 17:11 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/12/c ... .html#more

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Experts call for attention on COVID anxiety, treatment
By WANG XIAOYU | China Daily | Updated: 2022-12-02 08:41

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[Photo/IC]

Putting down the mobile phone, talking about negative feelings with friends or seeking professional counseling are some of the methods helpful in tackling depression and anxiety during a COVID-19 outbreak, experts said.

As the virus continues to circulate and lockdowns trigger mental stress, experts have called for greater investment in mental health services nationwide.

The World Health Organization said in March that the prevalence of anxiety and depression around the world increased by 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic alone.

Lu Lin, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and president of Peking University Sixth Hospital, said at a forum last month that China is no exception to the global trend.

From March 2020 to March 2021, the prevalence of depression and insomnia in China had risen, and repeated COVID-19 outbreaks, quarantine requirements and the high risk of exposure to the virus could all contribute to worsening people's mental conditions, according to data shared by Lu during the event.

In an interview with People's Daily, Lu said that misinformation circulated online had also magnified people's sense of panic.

The public should pay closer attention to information released by authoritative outlets, he suggested. People should also reduce the amount of time they spend in front of screens and instead chat with friends or family, listen to music or exercise to relax.

"It is normal to experience emotional swings or uncomfortable feelings, such as insomnia, lack of appetite, memory loss and being easily agitated, during this time," he said.

"Most of these conditions can be assuaged by self-adjustment," Lu said. "If necessary, it is suggested to seek online psychological consultation by dialing hotlines published by government departments and hospitals or visiting mental health clinics."

Xi Yingjun, from the Beijing Anding Hospital affiliated to Capital Medical University, said that since the start of the pandemic, the number of people reporting mental health issues had significantly increased.

"As the pandemic and resulting difficulties in people's lives exert a negative influence on mental health, governments should survey people, evaluate the practical needs of the public and formulate policies to address their concerns accordingly," he said.

Social organizations can be mobilized to provide assistance for those in need, such as helping them buy groceries and medicines, Xi said. Some mental health clinics have also been advised by Xi to launch hotlines and guide individuals in need to seek help.

Authorities have ramped up mental health services in parallel with the fight against the disease.

According to the three guidelines released by the National Health Commission on Nov 19, officials are required to relay the numbers of psychological assistance hotlines to residents in high-risk areas, as well as people undergoing home quarantine or health monitoring, so as to help relieve their anxiety and prevent incidents.

When they are found to experience mental issues, community workers should introduce them to mental health institutions promptly.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... a23ac.html

Workers begin returning to iPhone plant
By SHI BAOYIN in Zhengzhou and LI LEI | China Daily | Updated: 2022-12-02 09:22

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Workers return to their dormitories at Foxconn's plant in Zhengzhou, Henan province, on Wednesday. CHINA DAILY

Some 10,000 workers have returned to the world's largest Apple iPhone assembly plant in Zhengzhou, Henan province since Monday, and more are on their way, Foxconn said on Thursday.

The Foxconn plant has sent coaches to return them to employee dormitories in an arrangement known as "point-to-point transportation" aimed at avoiding infection during the journey. Upon arrival, workers need to go through a five-day health monitoring period before starting work, the plant said in a written response to China Daily.

The company has rolled out incentives to encourage employees to work in a closed-loop environment, offered psychological counseling and worked to ensure that warm clothes, food and other necessities are in abundant supply, it said.

"Under the guidance of epidemic control experts, a series of prevention and control measures have been taken, with a focus on balancing epidemic prevention and our production," the statement said.

As many as 300,000 workers work the assembly lines during the peak production season at the sprawling Foxconn plant in the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone, it has been reported.

The return of workers forms part of a broader effort by local authorities to ramp up production after a spike in COVID-19 cases in the provincial capital prompted a mass exodus of its employees in late October.

Many of those who returned this time live in Zhengzhou and surrounding areas, said a management official surnamed Li.

"We have arranged air-conditioned, newly painted dorms with new bed covers," he said, adding they have also disinfected the rooms and prepared N95 protective masks.

One of the returnees, who only gave her surname Guo, said she came back lured by the generous pay, and is currently undergoing health monitoring in her dormitory and expects to return to her post next week.

"The dorm and canteen seemed nice," said Guo, 25, who left the plant in late October and walked for more than a day before reaching her hometown Jiaozuo, which is 90 kilometers northwest of Zhengzhou.

To ease the shortage of workers, the plant also issued a notice asking employees to recommend experienced friends.

According to a recruitment advertisement posted online, new workers are entitled to a one-time compensation, such as the production stabilization and closed-loop management fees, which adds up to 6,500 yuan ($920).

Those who successfully recommended workers will be given 1,000 yuan as a reward, it said.

The effort to resume production has overlapped with the city's decision to end a five-day lockdown starting midnight Tuesday. The "mobility management" rules were aimed to halt the spread of an Omicron-fueled surge of cases in the city of 12.7 million. Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone had made its own COVID-19 control rules and was not subject to the mobility management policy.

Zhengzhou reported 71 local confirmed cases and 319 asymptomatic carriers in the 24 hours ending midnight on Wednesday, according to the National Health Commission, a sharp drop compared with earlier last month.

However, nonessential travel across Zhengzhou's districts or departure from the city are still discouraged, according to a public letter addressed to Zhengzhou residents on Tuesday.

Visitors from out of town require negative test results from within 48 hours, and those from outside the province must test upon arrival in Zhengzhou and daily for another two days during their stay, it said.

The rules freezing mobility in Zhengzhou, a major agricultural area, have also created headaches for local farmers, as logistics issues have prevented large amounts of vegetables and other farm produce from reaching urban markets.

Chen Shiju, general manager of Xinkaiyuan, a cold-chain logistics company in Zhengzhou, said the mass shutdown of restaurants has also contributed to the problem.

The emergency has prompted the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs to launch a sales promotion program that pairs major farm produce markets nationwide with vegetable-growing townships in Zhengzhou.

Data provided by the ministry said 4,677 metric tons of vegetables were sold between Nov 22 and Monday through the partnership. Top buyers include markets in Shangqiu, Henan province, and those in Beijing, and Jiangsu, Hubei and Shaanxi provinces.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... a241a.html

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Zero Covid and the protests in China
The following Morning Star editorial takes a look at the recent protests in various Chinese cities calling for an end to Covid lockdowns. The author correctly frames the discussion on China’s dynamic Zero Covid strategy in terms of its actual public health outcomes, in particular its effectiveness in preventing death. “British citizens have been 257 times more likely to die from Covid than Chinese. The fact that this disparity is treated as irrelevant by most commentators says something unpleasant about how little our society values the lives of vulnerable and elderly people.”

Clearly, China’s management of the pandemic has saved millions of lives, and yet, “to an excitable Western commentariat loyally plugging the new cold war line set in Washington, Beijing’s zero-Covid policy is evidence of its paranoid authoritarianism.” Ironically, this “authoritarian” government seems to be responding to rising popular sentiment in favour of loosening Covid restrictions by, well, loosening Covid restrictions. Readers in the West may wish their governments were so responsive to popular opposition to austerity and war.
Establishment media have seized on protests over Covid lockdowns to rehearse their favourite anti-China narratives.

Ever since the world’s first Covid outbreak in Wuhan, the virus has been used as a stick to beat China.

Donald Trump cynically portrayed the pandemic as a Chinese weapon — “the worst attack we’ve ever had on our country … worse than Pearl Harbour.”

Trump’s ravings were seldom taken seriously even by US allies. But the resurrection of the “lab leak” conspiracy theory by the Joe Biden administration made it respectable, and the judgement of a World Health Organisation scientific team, that the virus likely evolved in bats and was “extremely unlikely” to have originated in a laboratory, was howled down.

As one British member of the team complained, “it’s disappointing to spend time with journalists explaining key findings … to see our colleagues selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began.”

Since Western governments have moved on from Covid, the focus has shifted from trying to blame China for the virus to attacking its zero-Covid policy.

Clearly resumed lockdowns are causing genuine anger in some places. The Chinese government has recognised the problems caused by a “one size fits all” approach: reminding authorities in Henan’s capital Zhengzhou for example of the exceptions that need to be made to stay-home orders and rebuking police in Anhui for over-strict enforcement of quarantine.

But Western reportage is misleading. Top billing on the BBC implies protests on a far larger scale than is actually the case: just as in 2019 when riots in Hong Kong received blanket coverage while far more serious police violence against the Yellow Vests in France was downplayed, any sign of dissatisfaction in China is exaggerated for political reasons.

China watchers have noted the role of mistranslation in attributing broader political aims to the protests: that “jiefeng” (lift the lockdown) has been rendered “jiefang” (liberate), or that calls to loosen Covid restrictions in Xinjiang have been portrayed as calls to “free Xinjiang” to reinforce Western claims of Chinese oppression in the region.

We should also look at the bigger picture. China has effectively contained Covid-19, suppressing outbreaks through rapid localised lockdowns. The result is a death rate of 10.38 per million.

The British rate is 2,668.64 per million — British citizens have been 257 times more likely to die from Covid than Chinese. The fact that this disparity is treated as irrelevant by most commentators says something unpleasant about how little our society values the lives of vulnerable and elderly people.

The limited economic impact of China’s short, targeted lockdowns is obscured by Western crowing about a slowing in China’s GDP growth rate, which seems bizarre given it still comfortably outpaces all Western economies.

Coverage rarely mentions the fact that slower growth is a deliberate part of China’s economic planning, reflecting Xi Jinping’s shift of emphasis from growth at any cost to development that limits inequality and protects the environment.

Those who dismiss these stated goals as propaganda ignore palpable evidence that they are serious: only a government prepared to sacrifice economic output for long-term sustainability would have enacted a policy such as the 10-year ban on fishing in the Yangtze river imposed last year to allow wildlife to recover, a measure that saw the authorities allocate billions to creating new employment for the 231,000 people who relied on fishing China’s biggest river for their livelihoods.

To an excitable Western commentariat loyally plugging the new cold war line set in Washington, Beijing’s zero-Covid policy is evidence of its paranoid authoritarianism.

The government has repeatedly adapted its approach, and recent protests may prompt further revision. But the fact remains that by comparison with Britain or any other Western country, China’s strategy has saved millions of lives. We should be wary of mocking it or presenting our governments’ record as somehow superior.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/12/02/z ... -in-china/

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Covid, cold war and Chinese socialism debated at Marx Memorial Library
We republish below a report by Roger McKenzie for the Morning Star of the dialogue we recently co-organised on the evolving significance of the Chinese Revolution. Roger also moderated the event.

The video stream is embedded below the article.
Activists held a packed meeting at the Marx Memorial Library on Monday night to consider the “evolving significance of the Chinese revolution.”

The meeting, jointly organised by the historic library, the Friends of Socialist China and the Morning Star, heard from Ken Hammond, an activist and professor of east Asian history at New Mexico State University.

Prof Hammond said: “The Chinese revolution didn’t just flip over into some utopia of the working class. It’s a struggle. It’s going to take a long time.

“Only 6,000 people in China have died from Covid, as compared to more than a million in the US, because they have prioritised saving lives.

“The US put economic interests first and decided to let more than a million people die — because that was more profitable.”

“In China, they prioritised saving lives,” he added.

“There is no doubt that living with the lockdowns is certainly going to be frustrating for people.

“Some people will undoubtedly reach a point of frustration that they are going to take that outside in protest just at a time when the government has taken steps to ease the restrictions.”

The second speaker was writer and former Stop the War Coalition chairman Andrew Murray, who is also a Morning Star columnist.

He said: “Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have seen China’s rise in the world.

“That rise is ending two centuries of hegemony of European and North American powers.

“China is being attacked because it threatens the unipolar world order.

“Its strength and power gives other countries choices they might not otherwise have.

“It creates the possibility of a more equal world between countries.”

A key theme of the meeting was the question of whether China is socialist or capitalist.

Mr Murray said: “These are concepts that are universal and emerged in the 19th-century industrial revolution.

“It cannot be expected that these concepts would remain the same once they were globalised and once they encountered other civilisations and cultures.

“They can only be modified to some degree or another through that process.

“If China is a capitalist country, it is not like any we have seen in the past. If it is a socialist country, neither does it correspond to what we saw during the 20th century.”

He concluded: “China is not necessarily a model for the rest of the world, but it is a new perspective on socialism.”



https://socialistchina.org/2022/12/01/c ... l-library/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 08, 2022 5:52 pm

Green-washing The Trade War With China

Under the Trump administration the U.S. launched a trade war against China. It started with various tariffs on Chinese products. The Biden administration topped that by using the flimsy pretext of alleged 'forced labor' in Xinjiang to make it more difficult to import goods from China. This contradicted Biden's plan for climate change as nearly all solar panels are made from raw materials found in Xinjiang. The trade war continued with the chip war against China's technological progress.

The tariffs and restriction run counter to the World Trade Agreement which the U.S. is increasingly willing to ignore.

The administration has now developed a new scheme that will use the pretext of climate change to wage an economic war against China's and other countries' steel and aluminum industries. To be more effective it is trying to get the European Union on board:

The Biden administration on Wednesday sent a proposal to the European Union suggesting the creation of an international consortium that would promote trade in metals produced with less carbon emissions, while imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum from China and elsewhere, according to a copy viewed by The New York Times.
...
The proposed group, known as the Global Arrangement on Sustainable Steel and Aluminum, would wield the power of American and European markets to try to bolster domestic industries in a way that also mitigated climate change. To do so, member countries would jointly impose a series of tariffs against metals produced in environmentally harmful ways.


This is clearly not a policy to mitigate climate change but to limit free trade to the advantage of domestic industries.

The target of this effort is obviously China:

The levies would be aimed at China and other countries that did not join the group. Countries that did join would enjoy more favorable trade terms among themselves, especially for steel and aluminum produced more cleanly.

To join the arrangement, countries would have to ensure that their steel and aluminum industries met certain emissions standards, according to the document. Governments would also have to commit to not overproduce steel and aluminum, which has pushed down global metal prices, and to limit activity by state-owned enterprises, which are often used to funnel subsidies to foreign metal makers. While the concept paper does not mention China, these requirements appear likely to bar it from becoming a member.


The scheme would give advantage to steelmakers who melt scrap in electric arc furnaces to make new steel. (Just don't ask how that electricity was made ...) But the global population is still growing and will require more steel to be made. With the help of coal it is melted from ore in blast furnaces in a relatively dirty process. The raw iron is then converted into steel using oxýgen converters which are likewise not climate friendly.

Most of the basic steel creation is now done in China, India and other less rich countries while steel making in the west is now often a mere recycling process:

The U.S. steel industry is already among the cleanest in the world, as a result of the country’s stronger environmental standards and a focus on recycling scrap metal. The agreement is designed to capitalize on those advantages and help American companies withstand competition from heavily subsidized steel and aluminum manufacturers in China and elsewhere.
But the United States is also home to many industries that buy foreign steel and aluminum to make into other products. They could object that the move would increase their costs.


Those industries will only protest if they cannot put the price increase onto consumers of their products. They will probably demand more tariffs on imports to hinder their foreign competition.

The really dumb part of the scheme is that there is no way in which the U.S. or Europe could measure or even estimate how environmentally friendly or unfriendly foreign steel production actually is:

If the United States and Europe move forward with the structure, there is likely to be an intense fight over where tariffs are set and how carbon emissions are measured.
The development of a method for figuring out the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in the production of any particular product is still in the early stages, and much more data would need to be gathered at the level of specific products and companies, people familiar with the plans said.


The policy has little to do with the reduction of greenhouse gases and is all about limiting trade to the benefit of domestic industries. Consumers will suffer from it due to higher prices. One could summarize it: as rich countries shall punish poor countries for not being rich.

I hope that the Eurocrats will not agree to this scheme as that could give it some credibility. The U.S. would certainly have no qualms to eventually use similar schemes against Europe's industries.

China, India and other BRICS countries will of course oppose the scheme and would likely retaliate against U.S. exports should it ever be implemented.

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For a bit historic background on China and trade policies I highly recommend this talk with Brian Berletic and Carl Zha: China's "Century of Humiliation" & US-Chinese Tensions Today (vid)

Posted by b on December 8, 2022 at 15:47 UTC | Permalink

China Shifts Covid Policies As Previously Announced - NYT Falsely Claims Protesters' Victory

When the New York Times predicted doom for China over some 'western' directed Covid protests I noted that China had already released new Covid guidelines and would further open up while keeping the pandemic under control:

China can, as Peter Lee predicted, modify its current policies.
...
Two weeks ago the Chinese National Health Commission had already announced 20 new guidelines.
What it can further do to avoid more demonstrations and unrest is to apply sensible zero-Covid measures in a less restricting way.


Today the Chinese government did exactly that:

China rolled back rules on isolating people with COVID-19 and dropped virus test requirements for some public places Wednesday ...
The move adds to earlier easing that fueled hopes Beijing was scrapping its “zero COVID” strategy, which is disrupting manufacturing and global trade. Experts warn, however, that restrictions can’t be lifted completely until at least mid-2023 because millions of elderly people still must be vaccinated and the health care system strengthened.

In total the new control measures can be characterized as less of everything:

The 10-point plan unveiled on Wednesday followed last month’s 20-point guidelines to fine-tune the policy – they aimed to make it less disruptive to the public and the economy but have not been consistently implemented.
Under the new plan, anyone who is infected and has mild or no symptoms can now isolate at home, as can their close contacts, instead of being sent to a quarantine facility.

Meanwhile, polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests will only be required for people living and working in high-risk areas. Everyone else will be encouraged to use RATs, or rapid antigen tests, instead of having to regularly line up at testing sites.

Negative PCR test results and health codes are no longer required for most public venues and on public transport, though they will still need to be shown to enter hospitals, schools and aged care homes.

Another key change is that residential complexes will no longer be totally sealed off when a case is found. Instead, high- and low-risk areas will be designated within a building, meaning just a single floor or household might be affected.


The New York Times predictably associates the new measure with the protests it had hyped:

In a remarkable pivot, the Chinese government announced a broad rollback of those rules on Wednesday, an implicit concession to public discontent after mass street protests in late November posed the most widespread challenge to the ruling Communist Party in decades.
The party appears to be attempting a tactical, face-saving retreat that would allow Mr. Xi to change tack without acknowledging that widespread opposition and economic pain forced his hand.


The NYT is claiming victory in a war that has not be fought at all.

The protests were not 'widespread' or 'mass street protest', except on Twitter and on the NYT's op-ed page. They were few, small sized and in only some cities:

Nathan Ruser @Nrg8000 - 23:17 UTC · Nov 30, 2022
For our China Protest Tracker map, we tracked reports of 7 protests that took place across China on November 29th. Totalling 51 protests since November 25th, across 24 cities. See the third edition of our map.


There are more than 100 cities in China that have a population of more than 1 million people. Compared with that the protests were minuscule.

There was thus no need for a 'face-saving retreat'.

All the steps taken now had already been planned weeks ago. The 20 new guidelines were issued on November 11. They had already shortened quarantine times but were mostly general preparation advices for local governments. What has followed now are more detailed implementation directives for those who handle these issues.

The protests have nothing to do with it as this would have happened anyway.

But what the 'color revolution' like 'Covid protests' and their coverage in the 'west' have done is to alert the Chinese authorities and to give them a chance to study the issue. Especially the use of Telegram as the command and control instrument to direct the protests will have consequences. The authorities will make sure that they have tools to prevent a repeat.

Posted by b on December 7, 2022 at 16:38 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/12/c ... .html#more

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The China protests; legitimate grievances hijacked by outside elements

Originally published: Al Mayadeen on December 6, 2022 by Gavin O'Reilly (more by Al Mayadeen) | (Posted Dec 08, 2022)

In the two years since the World Health Organization declared the beginning of the COVID-19 ‘Pandemic’, anti-lockdown protests around the world have been routinely demonized by corporate media outlets.

Regularly lambasted as being ‘organized by the far-right’ and ‘super-spreader’ events, protests against lockdowns and vaccine mandates have also drawn a brutal state response in a number of Western countries, including Germany, Holland, and perhaps most notably, Canada.

In January 2022, following Ottawa’s decision to impose a vaccine mandate on truck drivers re-entering the country from the U.S., the world’s largest land border and a vital component of the Canadian economy, a nationwide Freedom Convoy would commence in the second-largest country on the planet.

In response, the government of Justin Trudeau—previously mooted by the World Economic Forum as one of its ‘Young Global Leaders’—would respond in an authoritarian fashion, freezing the bank accounts of protest organizers and attacking demonstrators using mounted Horses and teargas canisters.

Therefore, onlookers were bemused this week by Trudeau’s declaration of support for anti-lockdown protesters in China, currently demonstrating against Beijing’s ‘zero-COVID’ policy.

Indeed, this was a view echoed by the western media in lockstep, less than a year after the same outlets were condemning European and American demonstrators for carrying out the exact same actions.

To understand the sudden change in attitude toward anti-lockdown campaigners by the corporate press, one must first look at other events that also occurred in January of this year.

During the same week as the World Economic Forum’s virtual Davos Agenda event, the two-year ‘Pandemic’ narrative collapsed almost instantaneously in multiple western countries. including Ireland and Britain. The WHO, a body with a known record of corruption and ties to pharmaceutical giants, would also call for the ending of all travel restrictions during the same period.

In a further coincidental timing, a week after the Davos event, Hungarian business magnate and Open Society founder George Soros would give a speech to the Hoover Institution in the United States, outlining his view of CCP Chairman Xi Jinping as being the ‘greatest threat that open societies face today’ and predicted that widespread opposition to the Chinese leader’s ‘zero-COVID’ policy would eventually lead to his removal from office. It would be a view that Soros would again express during his address at the World Economic Forum’s Davos summit in May of this year, and indeed, it is a situation that is now playing out in real-time.

On November 24, minor anti-lockdown protests that had begun at the start of the month following the decision by the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou to re-impose restrictions would grow exponentially in the aftermath of an apartment fire in the north-western Xinjiang province, leading to the deaths of ten residents, with lockdown restrictions being blamed on preventing firefighters from reaching the scene.

In a classic color revolution style, the “A4 Revolution” has been given coordinated sympathetic coverage by the mainstream media, similar to the 2013 Euromaidan Ukrainian regime change operation, in which the Open Society Foundations also played a key role. What has been given less coverage, however, is the decision by Chinese authorities to listen to the legitimate grievances of anti-lockdown protesters and subsequently remove restrictions in Guangzhou and the city of Chongqing, the focus shifting to the wider demand for the removal of Xi Jinping’s leadership instead.

Indeed, this was echoed in an article supportive of the protests by the National Endowment for Democracy, a Reagan-era Neoconservative foundation that effectively acts as a privatized version of the CIA, fomenting regime change from Libya, to Belarus, and now, using anti-lockdown protests that would have been widely condemned less than a year ago, China.

https://mronline.org/2022/12/08/the-china-protests/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Dec 19, 2022 2:50 pm

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Analysis of China’s three-year Covid-19 strategy and beyond
In this article, originally published by CGTN, Keith Lamb situates the reaction of the western press to the recent and ongoing modifications made by China to its dynamic zero Covid policy in the context of its coverage throughout the last three years of the pandemic. Basing himself on his time spent in China, he explains that he saw for himself how western reporting was inaccurate; how China would be damned by them no matter what it did; and that it would be foolish for China to take advice from such media and the class it serves.

Keith further notes that China has spent the last three years developing antidotes and modernizing its health service. This has created the basis for the recent changes, which have “already been pounced upon by the corporate media who now, making an abrupt turn, warn that opening up will endanger public health. In light of lockdown propaganda, equated with human rights abuse, this concern for China’s health is just a continuation of using the media to delegitimize China to Western domestic audiences and stir up class divisions in China.”
My time in China during the COVID-19 outbreak taught me three things about transnational corporate media reporting on China. First, reporting was inaccurate regarding events and sentiments on the ground. Second, no matter what China did, it would be damned by these media. Third, considering the inaccuracy and malice it would be foolish for China to take advice from these media and their class interests.

In regard to China’s COVID-19 policy, the corporate press exaggerated minority disgruntlement to convey a totality of an undemocratic hellscape to Western audiences. Lockdowns though implemented organically before they became official policy were presented using an “oppressing human rights” narrative.

Regarding human rights, the U.S. with its laissez-faire policy, favored by transnational capital, lost over one million lives to COVID-19. China has a larger population, denser urbanization, a developing healthcare system, and a family structure where three generations often live under one roof. Had China opened up early, when the virus was most virulent, its death toll could have been higher than the U.S.’s.

If China, urged on by the corporate media, followed the U.S. example then this press, full of schadenfreude, would have vilified China’s governing system which could have faced a crisis for valuing market interests above the democratic interest to protect all life. Ironically, transnational interests would have further leveraged misunderstandings, concerning China’s socialist market economy and the nature of class contradictions in the developmental process, to depict China’s system as aping imperialism.

However, China ignored maligning forces demonstrating that socialist market economies act in the interests of the people and the world. China’s strict COVID-19 prevention measures were pragmatic for the long-term health needs of all rather than for merely capital. Its measures gave the U.S. and its partners more preparation time. However, this was not reported on, and at any rate, there was little preparation taken.

In light of China’s low COVID-19 death rate, attempting to delegitimize China’s system, the corporate media continued to focus on inconveniences related to China’s measures. Narrow human rights issues were superimposed upon China’s human rights concerns for the democratic whole. The principle remained that China’s complex story would not get reported and, through decontextualization, China’s measures would always be spun as faulty.

Left out of the spin is that China’s COVID-19 measures, over the last three years, have been in service of its developmental plans, which, placing people first, occur over timescales exceeding business and election cycles. In the short term, China gave itself time to conduct medical research into drugs and vaccines. In the long term, as a national medical disaster was averted, China gave itself breathing space to continue the needed improvements in its healthcare system which is striving to meet its “Healthy China 2035” goal.

Many of the old, who have resisted vaccination, have been saved from the virulent early strains of COVID-19. This is important in light of China’s cultural and material reality. China’s Confucian culture, which revers the elderly, is in opposition to the culture of market relations, which hyper-emphasizes youthfulness to generate desire and insecurity for profit generation.

In line with Confucian tradition, it is more common for the elderly to live with their older children and partake in rearing their grandchildren. The parents of rural migrant workers commonly raise their grandchildren. Had there not been strict measures then the old living with the young would have been particularly vulnerable. The loss of an aged family member, aside from being a devastating personal loss, would have stolen a crucial moral force and informal economic household provider.

Now, after three years, in part due to shifting public opinion, China’s COVID-19 response is being adjusted. Testing will be less stringent and more public spaces will open. Quarantine time for inbound travelers is being reduced. In light of this new reality, public information campaigns will push vaccination for the elderly and provide different forms of vaccines.

The changes allow for a more focused response. Being a continental-sized country, Chinese provinces will take measures suited to their specific needs. In some spaces, such as hospitals and schools, testing for negative results within 48 hours will continue. In actual fact, though billed as change it is a continuation of the dynamic COVID-19 strategy which seeks to achieve an opening up that balances public opinion and economic needs with health concerns.

Predictably, these changes have already been pounced upon by the corporate media who now, making an abrupt turn, warn that opening up will endanger public health. In light of lockdown propaganda, equated with human rights abuse, this concern for China’s health is just a continuation of using the media to delegitimize China to Western domestic audiences and stir up class divisions in China. Incredulously, these divisions, devoid of analyzing social contradictions as a whole, are palmed off as democracy.

Can we expect things to change over the next three years? If the last three years of China’s COVID-19 measures, based on the democratic health needs of all, as well as China’s values and material reality, are left unreported or distorted, then so will China’s next three years of COVID-19 measures.

However, this must change. Transnational capital’s opposition to China is alarming because global concerns, like COVID-19, need global solutions. This requires the cooperation of all social classes and nations, especially powerful ones like China.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/12/15/a ... nd-beyond/

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Image
Epidemic control workers wear PPE to prevent the spread of COVID-19 as they stand next to equipment for cold weather in an area where some communities are under lockdown on Nov. 29, 2022, in Beijing, China.

Zero COVID: Don’t be deceived by U.S. reports on the protests in China
Originally published: Struggle-La Lucha on December 11, 2022 by Scott Scheffer (more by Struggle-La Lucha) | (Posted Dec 18, 2022)

The opportunism of the major U.S. media was on full display in late November over the protests against China’s anti-COVID lockdowns. The protests began in the Xinjiang city of Urumqi after a terrible fire took the lives of 10 people on Nov. 24. People in the district responded to the tragedy by protesting the lockdown that had gone into effect after a COVID outbreak in late summer.

The protests occurred in somewhere between 15 and 20 cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. The numbers reported by the U.S. press were purposely vague. The liberal PBS claimed thousands in a Nov. 29 headline and then “tens of thousands” in the article. Some reports indicated hundreds in Shanghai, and many pieces didn’t estimate crowd size at all.

For context, there are about 60 cities of a million people or larger in China, and about 20% of the world lives in China. So even if the claim by PBS of “tens of thousands” is true, this brief series of protests was not the mass uprising against the leadership of China that the U.S. capitalist class and their loyal media salivate over.

Hoping the protests would mark the beginning of their long-desired “color revolution” in China, the U.S. media’s elation got the best of them and led to the overblown coverage. But the hyperventilating reportage wasn’t limited to slander. There are reports of Western journalists using Telegram channels to guide “activists” from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the locations of some of the protests.

When the “color revolution” failed to materialize, their giddy predictions gave way to another distortion of the facts. They claimed the CCP is being pushed by the momentum of the protests to ease its COVID policy, which they claim is the result of Xi’s authoritarianism and his desire to always be correct regardless of consequences.

Zero COVID
Their omission of the fact that President Xi Jinping had already signaled a relaxation of the “Zero COVID” measures a full two weeks before the protests broke out was not an error. It was imperialist media policy.

The decision to announce adjustments to the Zero COVID policy in a major speech by President Xi on Nov. 11 is only one indication that the national leadership of China was cognizant of the fact that people’s patience was exhausted.

Even before the Nov. 11 speech, it was clear that national authorities were trying to address a gap between the thinking of national health officials and the officials in some provinces using a one-size-fits-all approach to lockdowns. The website of Friends of Socialist China reports that national officials reminded “authorities in Henan’s capital Zhengzhou … of the exceptions that need to be made to stay-home orders” and rebuked “police in Anhui for over-strict enforcement of quarantine.”

Moving toward a relaxation of quarantine times and lockdowns shows that China’s battle against COVID is based on not only physical science but also social science. From the beginning of the outbreak, it was meant to be a dynamic approach that would adjust based on the ever-changing characteristics of the virus and even on differences between locations.

Even if greatly exaggerated by the U.S. press, the tragedy in Urumqi brought frustrations to the surface after three years of dealing with the pandemic. But that doesn’t mean there is broad dissatisfaction with the leadership of the campaign against COVID.

Just 5,000 COVID deaths
On the contrary, what was smeared in the Western media as extreme has limited the number of deaths in China to just over 5,000. Moreover, the success of the “People’s War” against COVID, with widespread testing, lockdowns, and quarantines as essential elements, is nothing short of astounding compared to major capitalist countries. With quadruple the population, the Chinese death toll is 200 times less than the more than 1 million deaths in the U.S.

China’s sustained policy of lockdowns was unique in the world. It was borne out of necessity and likely saved millions or tens of millions of lives. After more than a hundred years of being ravaged by colonizers and then imperialist countries, the physical health of Chinese people was among the priorities of the 1949 revolution.

China was weak and sick. When Mao Zedong declared that “the Chinese people have stood up!” foremost on his mind must have been bringing the health of a giant, poverty-stricken nation up to par. Britain and France had waged war to force opium on the Asian giant, and opium addiction was widespread. Diseases that were inexpensive to treat and, in many cases, eradicate were rampant at the time of the revolution.

China’s campaign of “barefoot doctors” headed to the countryside. Hospitals were constructed. But bringing a nation of hundreds of millions of people back to health isn’t an overnight process.

A developing country
While China is now on its way to achieving a higher GDP than the U.S., it is still a developing country, and building a complete healthcare system is an ongoing process. When COVID emerged, China still had only 4 ICU beds per 100,000 people.

Even though health care has improved dramatically over the seven decades, the availability of ICU beds was, and is, inadequate for dealing with COVID. During February 2020, the severe symptoms of the original Delta variant quickly overwhelmed hospitals. That hurdle had to be overcome, and China’s leadership and people swung into action.

Some 10,000 volunteer medical workers from all over the country traveled to the areas hit hardest by the virus. Emergency, makeshift hospitals were constructed at speeds the world had never seen. Given the highly transmissible feature of the virus, and as-of-then unavailable treatment, widespread testing, quarantine, and lockdowns emerged as the best plan to prevent catastrophic death rates. Early on, China’s scientists shared the DNA of the virus with the world and then developed vaccines that protect from severe symptoms and death. The campaign to continue vaccination—especially among the elderly—is ongoing.

COVID-19 has tested the world’s healthcare capabilities more than anything in living memory. Socialist planning and science saved tens of millions of lives in China and will keep China on the right path as the virus ebbs and flows. Socialism must be the future.

https://mronline.org/2022/12/18/zero-covid/

******************

What is China's eco-redline?
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-12-18 15:21

(Video at link.)

With its vast space and complex ecology, how does China protect its national ecological security? China's innovative eco-redline and five-sphere monitoring system provides a solution. Working together, they safeguard the ecology in a high precision, all-round and swift way.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20221 ... a4eb7.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 23, 2022 3:42 pm

Zero COVID: Don’t be deceived by U.S. reports on the protests in China
December 11, 2022 Scott Scheffer

Image
Epidemic control workers wear PPE to prevent the spread of COVID-19 as they stand next to equipment for cold weather in an area where some communities are under lockdown on Nov. 29, 2022, in Beijing, China.

The opportunism of the major U.S. media was on full display in late November over the protests against China’s anti-COVID lockdowns. The protests began in the Xinjiang city of Urumqi after a terrible fire took the lives of 10 people on Nov. 24. People in the district responded to the tragedy by protesting the lockdown that had gone into effect after a COVID outbreak in late summer.

The protests occurred in somewhere between 15 and 20 cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. The numbers reported by the U.S. press were purposely vague. The liberal PBS claimed thousands in a Nov. 29 headline and then “tens of thousands” in the article. Some reports indicated hundreds in Shanghai, and many pieces didn’t estimate crowd size at all.

For context, there are about 60 cities of a million people or larger in China, and about 20% of the world lives in China. So even if the claim by PBS of “tens of thousands” is true, this brief series of protests was not the mass uprising against the leadership of China that the U.S. capitalist class and their loyal media salivate over.

Hoping the protests would mark the beginning of their long-desired “color revolution” in China, the U.S. media’s elation got the best of them and led to the overblown coverage. But the hyperventilating reportage wasn’t limited to slander. There are reports of Western journalists using Telegram channels to guide “activists” from Hong Kong and Taiwan to the locations of some of the protests.

When the “color revolution” failed to materialize, their giddy predictions gave way to another distortion of the facts. They claimed the CCP is being pushed by the momentum of the protests to ease its COVID policy, which they claim is the result of Xi’s authoritarianism and his desire to always be correct regardless of consequences.

Zero COVID

Their omission of the fact that President Xi Jinping had already signaled a relaxation of the “Zero COVID” measures a full two weeks before the protests broke out was not an error. It was imperialist media policy.

The decision to announce adjustments to the Zero COVID policy in a major speech by President Xi on Nov. 11 is only one indication that the national leadership of China was cognizant of the fact that people’s patience was exhausted.

Even before the Nov. 11 speech, it was clear that national authorities were trying to address a gap between the thinking of national health officials and the officials in some provinces using a one-size-fits-all approach to lockdowns. The website of Friends of Socialist China reports that national officials reminded “authorities in Henan’s capital Zhengzhou … of the exceptions that need to be made to stay-home orders” and rebuked “police in Anhui for over-strict enforcement of quarantine.”

Moving toward a relaxation of quarantine times and lockdowns shows that China’s battle against COVID is based on not only physical science but also social science. From the beginning of the outbreak, it was meant to be a dynamic approach that would adjust based on the ever-changing characteristics of the virus and even on differences between locations.

Even if greatly exaggerated by the U.S. press, the tragedy in Urumqi brought frustrations to the surface after three years of dealing with the pandemic. But that doesn’t mean there is broad dissatisfaction with the leadership of the campaign against COVID.

Just 5,000 COVID deaths

On the contrary, what was smeared in the Western media as extreme has limited the number of deaths in China to just over 5,000. Moreover, the success of the “People’s War” against COVID, with widespread testing, lockdowns, and quarantines as essential elements, is nothing short of astounding compared to major capitalist countries. With quadruple the population, the Chinese death toll is 200 times less than the more than 1 million deaths in the U.S.

China’s sustained policy of lockdowns was unique in the world. It was borne out of necessity and likely saved millions or tens of millions of lives. After more than a hundred years of being ravaged by colonizers and then imperialist countries, the physical health of Chinese people was among the priorities of the 1949 revolution.

China was weak and sick. When Mao Zedong declared that “the Chinese people have stood up!” foremost on his mind must have been bringing the health of a giant, poverty-stricken nation up to par. Britain and France had waged war to force opium on the Asian giant, and opium addiction was widespread. Diseases that were inexpensive to treat and, in many cases, eradicate were rampant at the time of the revolution.

China’s campaign of “barefoot doctors” headed to the countryside. Hospitals were constructed. But bringing a nation of hundreds of millions of people back to health isn’t an overnight process.

A developing country

While China is now on its way to achieving a higher GDP than the U.S., it is still a developing country, and building a complete healthcare system is an ongoing process. When COVID emerged, China still had only 4 ICU beds per 100,000 people.

Even though health care has improved dramatically over the seven decades, the availability of ICU beds was, and is, inadequate for dealing with COVID. During February 2020, the severe symptoms quickly overwhelmed hospitals. That hurdle had to be overcome, and China’s leadership and people swung into action.

Some 10,000 volunteer medical workers from all over the country traveled to the areas hit hardest by the virus. Emergency, makeshift hospitals were constructed at speeds the world had never seen. Given the highly transmissible feature of the virus, and as-of-then unavailable treatment, widespread testing, quarantine, and lockdowns emerged as the best plan to prevent catastrophic death rates. Early on, China’s scientists shared the DNA of the virus with the world and then developed vaccines that protect from severe symptoms and death. The campaign to continue vaccination — especially among the elderly — is ongoing.

COVID-19 has tested the world’s healthcare capabilities more than anything in living memory. Socialist planning and science saved tens of millions of lives in China and will keep China on the right path as the virus ebbs and flows. Socialism must be the future.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... -in-china/

*******************

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Why Chinese “debt trap diplomacy” is a lie
This useful and comprehensive article by Amanda Yee, originally published in Liberation News, discusses the accusation that China is engaged in “debt trap diplomacy”; that it imposes predatory loans on countries of the Global South with a view to taking control of their resources.

Amanda details the most-cited putative examples of this phenomenon – the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka and the Entebbe International Airport in Uganda – and in both cases demonstrates incontrovertibly that the accusations of “debt trap diplomacy” are false. There is not a single case of China pressuring countries to take unsustainable loans; nor does China use national assets as collateral. The author points out that, in fact, China’s loan conditions are typically far less onerous than those of the West, and that the infrastructure projects it invests in “are determined by the recipient country, not China, based on their own economic and political interests.”

It’s the IMF and World Bank loans, not China’s, that are “granted on conditions of privatizing public sectors, gutting social welfare programs, and trade liberalization to enrich Western capitalist interests.” Thus a debt trap does exist; it was invented by, and continues to be used by, the imperialist powers. Accusations of China employing “debt trap diplomacy” are sheer projection and New Cold War propaganda.
U.S. politicians and corporate media often promote the narrative that China lures developing countries into predatory, high interest loans to build infrastructure projects as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. As the story goes, China anticipates that the borrowing country will default on that loan, so that it can then seize that asset in order to extend its military or geostrategic influence—evidence of China’s so-called colonizing of the Global South.

The concept of Chinese “debt trap diplomacy” finds its origins in a 2017 academic article published by a think tank in Northern India describing China’s financing of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port. The concept was then picked up by two Harvard graduate students in 2018, when they published a paper accusing China of “debtbook diplomacy” and “leveraging accumulated debt to achieve its strategic aims.” This paper was then widely cited by media publications, the idea of Chinese “debt traps” seeped into Washington and intelligence circles, and a short time later, by November 2018, a Google search of the phrase “debt trap diplomacy” generated nearly two million results.

By now the “debt trap diplomacy” accusation has become a bipartisan one: both the Trump and Biden administrations have peddled it, and it’s been further advanced by organizations such as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, and corporate media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Hill.

In one egregious instance, BBC News even edited an interview with Deborah Bräutigam—a scholar known for her work challenging the validity of the Chinese “debt trap diplomacy” myth—to only include her explanation of the myth itself, omitting all evidence she cited against it, leading listeners to believe that Bräutigam was, in fact, claiming the concept was true.

Problems with the “debt trap diplomacy” myth

Generally, there are three problems with this “debt trap diplomacy” myth.

The first problem is that this myth assumes China unilaterally dictates Belt and Road Initiative projects to lure other countries into taking on these predatory loans. In reality, Chinese development financing is largely recipient-driven, through bilateral interactions and deals. Infrastructure projects are determined by the recipient country, not China, based on their own economic and political interests.

The second problem with the narrative is that it relies on the assumption that it is Chinese policy to advance predatory loans with onerous terms and conditions to ensnare countries into debt. In reality, China often advances loans at fairly low interest rates, and is often willing to restructure the terms of existing loans to be more favorable to the borrowing country, or even forgive loans altogether. In fact, in August of 2022, the Chinese government announced it was forgiving 23 interest-free loans in 17 African countries. Prior to that, between 2000-2019, China had also restructured a total of $15 billion of debt and forgiven $3.4 billion in loans they had given to African countries.

And lastly, the third problem with this debt trap diplomacy narrative is that despite what it claims, China has never seized an asset because a country defaulted on a loan.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port was one of the first instances of so-called Chinese “debt trap diplomacy.” The conventional story goes that Sri Lanka wanted to build a port on their southern coast in the village of Hambantota, as part of BRI. Chinese banks then granted Sri Lanka these predatory loans to build the port with the assumption the government would default, allowing China to seize the port in exchange for debt relief and create a Chinese naval outpost there.

As Chinese development financing is usually recipient-driven, the port was proposed by the Sri Lankan government, not by China, and the port was a plan that the country had for several decades, long before BRI. In fact, the Sri Lankan government had first approached India and the U.S. to finance the port. After both countries said no, it then approached China A Chinese construction company, China Harbor Group, won the contract and a Chinese bank agreed to fund it. So not only was the Hambantota Port not a Chinese proposal to begin with, this all occurred in 2007—six years before BRI was even launched.

Another issue with framing this as Chinese “debt trap diplomacy” is that Sri Lanka’s debt burden was due only in small part to Chinese lending. In 2017, Sri Lanka had over $50 billion in external debt—only 9% of which was owned by China. In fact, Sri Lanka’s debt was primarily incurred through borrowing of Western loans—the government owed more to the World Bank and Japan than to China. And due to Sri Lanka falling into debt, the government arranged a bailout through the International Monetary Fund. The Hambantota Port by that time turned out to be a commercial failure, so the Sri Lankan government also decided to lease it out to an experienced company in order to use that money to pay off its debt. The government of Mahinda Rajapaksa, president at that time, first approached Indian and Japanese firms, all of whom rejected the offer. It then negotiated with China Merchants Ports Holdings, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, to lease the port for 99 years in exchange for $1.12 billion dollars, which it used to pay off other debts.

In other words, there was no debt-for-asset swap here, as the story states—what happened to the port was not a “seizure” at all, but rather a fire sale to raise money allowing Sri Lanka to pay off other debts and deal with other issues.

Lastly, many claim that China seized the Hambantota Port for military purposes. Then-Vice President Mike Pence even expressed fear that the port would “soon become a forward military base for China’s growing blue-water navy.” This never happened. Sri Lankan diplomats and politicians have insisted that China using the port as a naval base was never featured in their talks with Beijing, with Karunasena Kodituwakku, the ambassador of Sri Lanka to China, even bluntly stating in an interview, “China never asked us. We never offered it.” Chinese naval ships are not permitted to use the port—it is for Sri Lanka’s naval command only.

More recently, starting in March of 2022, Sri Lanka saw mass protests as people took to the streets frustrated over fuel shortages and the rising cost of essentials. Once again, Western media outlets such as The Washington Post, CNBC, The Associated Press, among many others, took the opportunity to blame Chinese lending for plunging Sri Lanka into economic crisis.

Diverting blame away from the role of the IMF, The Wall Street Journal even called China “Sri Lanka’s largest creditor” and that its lending policies “helped create” the crisis to begin with. But again, this is false. As of 2021, 81% of Sri Lanka’s debt was owned by Western financial institutions and Western allies like Japan and India. Less than 10% is owned by Beijing. In fact, at that time, the IMF alone had granted loans to Sri Lanka 16 times, continually restructuring them at times of economic crisis to the benefit of its creditors. There is no Chinese “debt trap” here—it is Western financial institutions’ lending and attendant forced austerity and neoliberalization of the economy that has created Sri Lanka’s crisis.

Entebbe International Airport in Uganda
In November of 2021, Uganda’s national newspaper, the Daily Monitor ran a story with the headline, “Uganda surrenders key assets for China cash”. The article claimed that unless some provisions in the contract to expand Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport were re-negotiated, the country was at risk of being forced to hand it over if the loan was not repaid. The loan in question was worth $207 million at 2% interest from the Export-Import Bank of China granted to Uganda for expansion of the airport, which is a project under BRI.

The headline went viral, with The Daily Show even airing a segment covering the story as the latest supposed example of China’s “debt trap diplomacy,” and it was also picked up by The Wall Street Journal and India’s Economic Times, with the former claiming that “a clause in an agreement with the African nation has stirred a flap over whether the country signed away financial control of Entebbe International Airport.”

But according to analysis by AidData, who obtained a copy of the contract, the airport was not even a source of collateral that the lender could seize in the first place! What the conditions of the agreement did require was that cash collateral be placed in a separate escrow account which could then be seized in the event of default—a fairly standard clause for international projects financing.

The viral story even led to Vianney M. Luggya, spokesperson for the Uganda Civil Aviation Authority, to deny allegations of Chinese plans to seize the airport.


Despite all evidence to the contrary, that has not stopped media sources from spinning their own narratives.

The real debt trap

It is clear that Chinese “debt trap diplomacy” is a U.S. narrative advanced to obscure its own imperialist policies, to distract from the IMF and World Bank’s own practice of pushing predatory loans with exorbitantly high interest rates onto Global South countries. Chinese loans are granted toward infrastructure projects, which are critical to a country’s development—they are not tied to privatization projects and structural adjustment the way IMF and World Bank loans are.

Indeed, IMF and World Bank loans are granted on conditions of privatizing public sectors, gutting social welfare programs, and trade liberalization to enrich Western capitalist interests. The predatory interest rates ensure that these loans can never be paid back, keeping the borrowing countries poor and locking them into a state of underdevelopment, to ensure further plunder and resource extraction at the hands of these same Western capitalists. This is the real debt trap.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/12/20/w ... -is-a-lie/

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Trade unions in the ‘new economy’
In his report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, held in October, General Secretary Xi Jinping said that China would do more to protect the rights and interests of those in flexible and new forms of employment. The following short article, which we reprint from Global Times, illustrates one way in which this is happening. It reports that all of China’s top 100 internet companies have formed trade unions and explains:

“In response to the diverse needs of the employees of internet enterprises, labor unions at all levels should actively implement targeted services, such as building special rooms for nursing mothers, providing childcare services, arranging matchmaking and dating events, sponsoring psychological lectures, and offering healing activities to take care of employees’ social lives and physical and mental wellbeing.”

It notes that with the rapid development of the platform economy, the number of workers engaged in new forms of employment, such as online-hailing cab drivers and internet marketing, has greatly increased.
All of the top 100 Chinese internet companies, including Meituan, JD.com and NetEase, have formed labor unions, a move aimed at protecting the legitimate rights and interests of internet industry workers and promoting the high-quality development of the industry, according to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).

The ACFTU has demanded that internet companies build the labor unions into the “homes of employees” that focus on protecting the most direct and realistic interests of the employees of internet enterprises.

The ACFTU urged the labor unions to take the initiative to participate in dispute mediation and settlement involving overtime payments and other labor issues, and guide and urge internet enterprises to further standardize employment management.

In response to the diverse needs of the employees of internet enterprises, labor unions at all levels should actively implement targeted services, such as building special rooms for nursing mothers, providing childcare services, arranging matchmaking and dating events, sponsoring psychological lectures, and offering healing activities to take care of employees’ social lives and physical and mental wellbeing.

More internet platforms in China have been helping workers to establish unions under the guidance of the national labor union since 2021, as the country is making every effort to mobilize its platform-based economy and ensure that no one is left behind on the road to realizing common prosperity.

In July 2021, China issued a guideline to improve protecting the rights of company workers engaged in new forms of employment, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

The guideline, for the first time, made clear that platform companies should shoulder their responsibilities in protecting the lawful rights and interests of their workers.

With the rapid development of the platform economy, the number of workers engaged in new forms of employment, such as online car-hailing drivers and internet marketing specialists, has increased greatly.

The guideline said that China will carry out pilot programs to offer occupational injury insurance for the flexibly employed in ride-hailing, food delivery and instant delivery platform-based enterprises.

By the end of June this year, 6.87 million employees engaged in new forms of employment had joined labor unions, said the ACFTU.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/12/20/t ... w-economy/

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Taiwan local election shocks US imperialism
The following article from Fighting Words provides a useful summary of the recent local elections held in Taiwan Province. The author, Chris Fry, notes that although local elections are typically about local issues, in this instance Taiwan’s regional leader Tsai Ing-wen of the secessionist Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had explicitly framed the election in terms of opposing the One China policy and “defending Taiwan’s democracy.”

It was, then, a huge blow to the separatists when the DPP was roundly defeated, winning just five seats, compared to the Kuomintang’s 13. The Kuomintang stands against secessionism and in favour of China’s reunification.

Chris observes that the imperialist powers, led by the US, are desperate to leverage Taiwanese secessionism against Chinese socialism. He concludes the article by calling on progressive forces in the West to oppose all such Cold War tactics aimed at containing and encircling China.
On November 26, local elections were held throughout Taiwan, an island that has always been part of China, but since 1949 has been ruled by a fascist leadership driven out of the mainland by the victorious Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Taiwan has since been “protected” by the military U.S. fleet, while Taiwan’s rulers maintained 48 years of martial law and a brutal regime of “White Terror”. In 1987, the regime allowed bourgeois elections.

Before the 2022 elections, Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, had campaigned for her ruling “Democratic Progressive Party” (DPP) candidates with the assertion that Taiwan is an independent nation, and should prepare to wage war. As a Nov. 25th CNN article describes:

Polls opened in Taiwan on Saturday in local elections that President Tsai Ing-wen has framed as being about sending a message to the world about the island’s determination to defend its democracy in the face of China’s rising bellicosity.

The local elections, for city mayors, county chiefs and local councilors, are ostensibly about domestic issues such as the Covid-19 pandemic and crime, and those elected do not have a direct say on China policy.

But Tsai has recast the election as being more than a local poll, saying the world is watching how Taiwan defends its democracy amid military tensions with China, which claims the island as its territory.

China carried out war games near Taiwan in August to express its anger at a visit to Taipei by then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and its military activities have continued, though on a reduced scale.

Taiwan’s main opposition party the Kuomintang, or KMT, swept the 2018 local elections, and has accused Tsai and the DPP of being overly confrontational with China.


Election results a shock to the DPP and Washington

The results of the election were a major defeat for the pro-independence DPP and to Washington’s plans to attack the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As a British newsletter reported:

While Tsai’s personal brand as the quiet yet determined pro-democracy politician standing up to China has been a key component in Taiwan’s strengthening relationships overseas, her latest appeals appeared to fall flat with Taiwanese voters at home. Last Friday, Tsai’s party – the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) – suffered one of its most significant electoral defeats in over thirty years. The more China-friendly rival Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) triumphed by winning 13 of 21 seats at the mayoral and magisterial levels, while the DPP only took five. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), a third party growing in popularity under founder and former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je, won its first mayoral seat in the influential Hsinchu City, dealing another blow to the ruling DPP.

The results were so bad for the ruling DPP that President Tsai Ing-wen resigned her position as head of the party and will not run for reelection in 2024.

Washington has signaled it has no intention of allowing the people of Taiwan to slow down its drumbeat for war. A December 14th article from the U.S. Naval Institute describes U.S. Imperialism’s new aggressive stance:

The U.S. military must be able to deter China from taking over Taiwan by force, a provision in the compromise Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) stipulates.

In accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. must “maintain the ability of the United States Armed Forces to deny a fait accompli against Taiwan in order to deter the People’s Republic of China from using military force to unilaterally change the status quo with Taiwan,” according to the policy bill’s explanatory statement.


Of course, the PRC has always considered Taiwan to be part of China. In 1979, in return for the PRC’s “opening up” of China to U.S. Big Business, the U.S. agreed to the “One China Policy”, clearly agreeing with the PRC position on the status of Taiwan.

But now China has become a powerful force in the world economy. It uses its socialist foundation to technically develop the country to an amazing degree. Through its “Silk Road” initiative, it offers a much brighter future to developing countries than Western Imperialism’s exploitation and weaponizing. That is why it has been targeted by the White House, Congress, and the mad generals at the Pentagon. The Naval Institute article continues:

The NDAA also includes language calling on both the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State, in accordance with the Taiwan Relations Act, to help upgrade Taiwan’s military capabilities and its collaboration with the U.S. military.

The FY 2023 policy bill, which the House passed last week and is awaiting action from the Senate, also calls for the U.S. Navy to invite the Taiwan Navy to the Rim of the Pacific 2024 exercise. Taiwan did not participate in RIMPAC 2022 this summer.


Although the U.S.’ and Taiwan’s corporate media after the election downplayed the role of Taiwan’s relations to Taiwan and Washington’s pressing Taiwan into a new Ukraine-style proxy war against the PRC, it obviously played a key role to Taiwan’s people. An October article in gizmodo.com tells how government officials tried to discount reports that Washington was urging Taiwan to prepare to remove workers to the U.S. from the TSMC computer chip making factory as they spoke to Taiwan’s legislature:

The country’s defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng reportedly said ‘there is no such plot’ for the U.S. to start dropping bombs on TSMC factories if the country were invaded.

National Security Bureau Director-General] Chen further tried to tamp down on fears the U.S. is going to sap Taiwan’s top chipmaking minds from the country, calling those wargaming plans “just scenarios” while adding “If they understood TSMC’s ecosystem better, they would realize that it’s not as simple as they think. That’s why Intel can’t catch up with TSMC.


In fact, an article was written at the U.S. Army War College proposing that the U.S. urge Taiwan’s DPP government to plant bombs around the TSMC facility threatening to blow it up if were to fall into the hands of the PRC. Obviously, Washington’s “wargaming” has grown more and more unpopular among Taiwan’s people.

Statement from the PRC on Taiwan’s election: “Peace, stability and a good life”
A Nov. 27th report from Reuters details the position of the PRC government on the Taiwan election results:

China’s government said on Saturday the results of local elections in Taiwan “revealed that mainstream public opinion in the island is for peace, stability and a good life”, after the ruling Democratic Progressive Party performed badly.

China will continue to work with Taiwan’s people to promote peaceful relations and firmly oppose Taiwan independence and foreign interference, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said in a statement carried by the official Xinhua news agency.


We who live in the “belly of the beast” must mobilize all the anti-war forces to oppose Washington’s push for a new war directed against Socialist China.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/12/21/t ... perialism/

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Our cold warriors say they know what’s best for China as US covid deaths top 1 million
In this commentary on his Edu/Pol blog, veteran US progressive campaigner Mike Klonsky takes issue with the extraordinary hypocrisy of Western news reporting on the Covid situation in China. Since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, the media has, successively: 1) accused China of hatching Covid in a Wuhan lab; 2) attacked China’s dynamic Zero Covid for being authoritarian and/or ineffective; 3) cried copious quantities of crocodile tears over the recent loosening of restrictions, predicting this shift in strategy could result in millions of deaths.

As Mike points out: “The common thread running through all these media stories is that the imperialist mind in the west knows what’s best for China’s health and wealth and has that country’s best interests at heart.”

John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, has stated that the US stands ready to help China in its hour of need. Meanwhile, “US missile cruisers and nuclear submarines, sail into the South China Sea and the White House proclaims that China is enemy number one.” Not to mention the fact that the US is hardly in a great position to be advising other countries on how to manage the pandemic, given that over 300 people a day are still dying from Covid in the US.

Mike concludes with the apt proverb: “Physician, heal thyself.”
Whether it’s about the war in Ukraine or the cold war targeting China, it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish authentic news reports from the cold war propaganda produced daily by western intelligence agencies and willingly regurgitated by compliant reporters and news agencies.

Case in point: The continuing misleading and contradictory stories about China’s battles with Covid. They began, of course with Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that Covid was hatched in a Chinese lab. DT even coined the racist term Kung-flu as an anti-immigration dog whistle.

Then, with Biden, came the next two years, of continuous churn about China’s so-called Zero-Covid strategy which was mocked in the west, but was apparently successful in keeping that country virtually Covid-free while the virus was killing more than a million people here at home.

Not only was Zero-Covid supposedly to blame for China’s and Wall Street’s economic woes, but we were told that the recent anti-lockdown street protests (not unlike those in the west) could even lead to the downfall of China’s President Xi. Instead, the protests actually led to a shift away from Zero-Covid and towards a loosening of many government restrictions.

Latest phase
The latest phase in the propaganda war has wild predictions of Covid sweeping across China possibly killing millions of its citizens.

The common thread running through all these media stories is that the imperialist mind in the west knows what’s best for China’s health and wealth and has that country’s best interests at heart. A tired, old story.

Almost laughable is this we’re-here-to-help story in Reuters:

U.S. ready to help China on COVID-19 surge if Beijing asks – White House

WASHINGTON, Dec 14 (Reuters) – The United States is prepared to help China deal with a surge of COVID-19 infections if Beijing requests assistance, the White House said on Wednesday.

John Kirby, the White House national security spokesperson, told reporters that China has not requested help at this stage.

“We have made that point that we are prepared to help in any way they might find acceptable. That was true back when the pandemic was raging, and that is true today,” Kirby told reporters.


This, as US missile cruisers and nuclear submarines, sail into the South China Sea and the White House proclaims that China is enemy number one.

The topper

There’s a problem with claiming to help others when you can’t even help yourself.

Arianna Johnson at Forbes reports that in the face of Covid, the flu and RSV epidemics, there’s a shortage of drugs for Children in the US.

The Washington Post is telling parents who can’t find meds for their kids to give them lukewarm baths, and lightweight clothes, keep them hydrated and run a fan.


Physician, heal thyself.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/12/22/o ... 1-million/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 27, 2022 3:35 pm

Nationwide vaccination campaign speeds up
By WANG XIAOYU | China Daily | Updated: 2022-12-27 08:00

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An elderly woman receives a shot of COVID-19 vaccine in Shijiazhuang, Hebei province, Dec 12, 2022. [Photo/IC]

China's COVID-19 vaccination campaign has picked up speed in the past week, allowing the country to take the initiative in upgrading its virus-control policies, according to official data and authorities.

The mainland administered 3.1 million doses on Dec 20 and 3.6 million the following day, up from the daily average of less than 1.5 million in the previous two weeks, National Health Commission data shows.

The number of doses administered on Thursday and Friday dipped, but remained relatively high at about 2.27 million for each day.

China's vaccination rates have increased as the country ramps up efforts to expand immunization of the elderly and other vulnerable people. These groups are lagging behind in being vaccinated due to a lack of understanding of the virus' threat and concerns over adverse reactions, experts have warned.

Following the rollout of 10 measures that changed the focus from preventing infections to treating infected patients, the State Council's Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism on Dec 7 released two documents to accelerate mass immunization of seniors and to administer a second booster shot to people at high-risk and vulnerable groups.

"The action plan on elderly vaccination clarified contraindications for the elderly, and we have organized training to urge localities to correctly identify seniors eligible for vaccines," Xia Gang, an official with the National Administration of Disease Prevention and Control, said at a recent news briefing.

Vaccination stations should be equipped with first aid workers and emergency medication to comfort those who are fearful of adverse effects from the vaccines, Xia added.

Health authorities in Xining, capital of Qinghai, said on Thursday that the city had become the first in the province to achieve vaccination targets for seniors and the elderly, which were set by the State Council's Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism on Dec 6.

By the end of the month, 95 percent of people aged between 60 and 79 should be fully vaccinated or get an additional booster shot. The rates for those aged 80 and above should be over 90 percent.

By Dec 20, Xining officials said they had fully vaccinated nearly 93.7 percent of seniors aged 80 and above who can be safely vaccinated. A first booster shot has also been given to about 93 percent of them.

The city has allocated vehicles to transport elderly people who are having difficulties moving, and provided door-to-door services. Each county or district has also surveyed and cataloged the immunization status of seniors in their area.

Zheng Zhongwei, head of the country's vaccine development task force, said that strict containment of domestic outbreaks in the past two years has won precious time for advancing mass immunization.

"We called on all the elderly, especially those aged 80 and above, to get vaccinated and booster shots," he said at a recent news conference, adding that expediting immunization among the elderly would facilitate future efforts to upgrade its COVID-19 control strategy.

Wang Yuxia, a 71-year-old resident in Beijing's Haidian district, obtained her second booster dose — an inhaled vaccine made by CanSino Biologics — on Dec 20.

"The country has devoted huge resources and manpower to develop vaccines and promote vaccination, and I believe in its efficacy and safety," she said. "I've been looking forward to the second booster shot for a long time and made an appointment with the community healthcare center on Dec 16 immediately after seeing the notice."

wangxiaoyu@chinadaily.com.cn

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202212/ ... a64a7.html

Scientists crack virus evolution code
By ZHANG ZHIHAO | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-12-22 06:51

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Pharmacists package drugs to treat fever and relieve pain at a community health service center in Shanghai's Huangpu district on Tuesday. LIU YING/XINHUA

Chinese scientists have discovered the mechanism behind the convergent evolution of the Omicron strains of COVID-19, a feat that could help researchers develop broad-spectrum COVID-19 vaccines and drugs, according to a study published in the journal Nature on Monday.

Convergent evolution is the phenomenon in which different species of an organism independently evolve similar traits in response to shared selective pressures. Scientists suspect this may be one of the reasons that so many Omicron subvariants exhibit high levels of immunity escape, causing breakthrough infections.

The Omicron family of viral strains is rapidly evolving. However, despite divergent evolutionary paths for Omicron subvariants, mutations on the receptor-binding domain of their spike protein, which acts as the key for the virus to enter cells, actually converge at several hot spots, according to the study by scientists from Peking University.

"We demonstrate that these convergent mutations can cause striking evasion of neutralizing antibody drugs and convalescent plasma, including those from BA.5 breakthrough infection, while maintaining sufficient ACE2 binding capability," the researchers wrote.

The most antibody-evasive strains tested, BQ.1.1.10, BA.4.6.3, XBB, and CH.1.1, are all Omicron offshoots. XBB and another strain, BQ.1.1, are driving up new cases worldwide, including in the United States, Europe and Asia.

The researchers also found that XBB and BQ.1.1 exhibited the most resistance to existing monoclonal neutralizing antibody treatments among the tested variants.

The newly emerged CH.1.1 variant has the international scientific community concerned, since it carries the Delta variant's signature P681R mutation. This means it is potentially more pathogenic, though more research is needed to confirm its virulence.

In the study, scientists identified SA55 and SA58, a pair of neutralizing antibodies that have promising levels of neutralizing efficacy against multiple Omicron subvariants. However, SA58 is relatively less effective against the BJ.1/XBB and BA.2.75 strains.

SA55 is the only neutralizing antibody demonstrating high potency against all tested Omicron subvariants. The SA55+SA58 antibody cocktail is still in preclinical development.

"These results suggest current herd immunity and BA.5 vaccine boosters may not efficiently prevent the infection of Omicron convergent variants," the study concludes.

Qi Hai, a medical professor at Tsinghua University, said the work analyzed multiple Omicron strains and examined how they escape herd immunity. This will allow scientists to craft new models to more accurately predict how the virus could evolve in the future.

He said it also enables researchers to more efficiently create broad-spectrum COVID-19 vaccines and drugs.

Wang Xiangxi, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Biophysics, said the findings will enable scientists to predict and prepare for emerging Omicron subvariants, which will save valuable resources and time in future epidemic prevention and control efforts.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202212/ ... a58b1.html

China identifies over 130 sublineages of Omicron
By Wang Xiaoyu | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-12-20 17:12

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Xu Wenbo, head of the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention [Photo/china.com.cn]

China has detected over 130 sublineages of Omicron in the past three months, including the highly watched BQ.1 and XBB strains, but their pathogenicity remains unchanged, an expert said on Tuesday.

Xu Wenbo, head of the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that nine provincial-level regions have reported 49 cases of the BQ.1 strain, and three provincial-level regions have registered 11 XBB cases, but the dominant strains on the mainland remain BA.5.2 and BF.7.

"The BQ.1 and XBB strains have higher transmissibility and are more capable of evading immunity, but their pathogenicity has not risen," he said during a news conference. "As they become dominant in some foreign countries, there is no report pointing to rising rates of severe cases and deaths caused by these two strains."

Xu added that 50 of the 130-plus sublineages have triggered local infection clusters.

"These sublineages, along with the current dominant strains of BA.5.2 and BF.7, will likely co-circulate in the country in the future," he said.

Xu said that the Chinese CDC will continue to monitor pathogenicity and genome sequencing of new variants.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202212/ ... a5507.html

COVID patients positive again, but not contagious
By Li Wenfang in Guangzhou | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-12-12 16:07

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[Photo/IC]

People who tested positive again after they had been treated for COVID-19 and discharged from the hospital were not contagious, a study has found.

No live virus was detected in those people, and no transmission occurred to any of their close contacts in their communities, Hu Fengyu, a researcher at Guangzhou Eighth People's Hospital affiliated with Guangzhou Medical University, told the media recently.

Hu cited research conducted jointly by a team from the hospital and a team under Zhong Nanshan, a prominent respiratory expert. The report on the study was published in China's National Science Review in October.

The study was based on 837 people who had acquired the Delta variant — either locally or overseas — and who were treated at the hospital last year.

Of the total, 514 patients retested positive after they were discharged. The virus found in those who retested positive was inactive — dead or just viral fragments — Hu said.

The patients had recovered from pneumonia or were in the recovery process. The majority of them had no symptoms. A small number said they felt unwell in the throat or nose but did not need to be hospitalized again, said Li Feng, another researcher at the hospital.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202212/ ... a3fc9.html

Will the armed forces take over Shanghai communities?
By Cao Chen | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-04-08 11:46

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Rumor: Shanghai will undergo militarized management. Two soldiers will stand guard outside every residential compound. No one will be allowed to enter or exit the premises.

Fact: The armed forces will not take over Shanghai communities. The soldiers currently assisting with the city's anti-pandemic efforts are military medics involved in the mass testing of the population and treatment of COVID-19 patients.

Jiang Ziyi contributed to this story.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202204/ ... 55d08.html

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Chinese videos(in English) concerning covid:

https://covid-19.chinadaily.com.cn/5e61 ... 821727cf8f

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China ends quarantine for those entering the country

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China reclassified the pathology from A to B, a sign the country is one step closer to putting the pandemic behind it. | Photo: Xinhua
Posted December 27, 2022 (1 hour 36 minutes ago)

The National Health Commission of China announced that it will withdraw the requirement of quarantines at the entrance to the country on January 8.

China will eliminate the mandatory quarantine for those who travel to the country on January 8, the health authorities reported on Tuesday, a measure that adds to the lifting of restrictions announced for early December.

According to a statement published this Tuesday on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, travelers bound for China are advised to undergo a PCR test within 48 hours prior to their departure.

In case the result is positive, it is recommended that they postpone the trip until it is negative again.


Travelers no longer need to request a health code from Chinese diplomatic and consular missions. According to the statement, they must declare their state of health on the customs card.

China will remove restrictions on international passenger flights, gradually increase the number of flights and optimize route distribution, according to the statement.

The airlines will continue to carry out disinfections on board, and passengers must wear face masks when they fly, according to official information.

China will continue to optimize arrangements for foreigners traveling to China for work, business, study, family visits and meetings, and will facilitate visas accordingly, according to the statement.

The changes are in line with the optimized nationwide epidemic prevention and control measures.

From January 8, China will downgrade disease management from Class A to Class B under the country's law on the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases and remove it from quarantine infectious disease management in a change part of its epidemic response policies.

Chinese authorities stressed today that downgrading the level of management of Covid-19 does not mean abandoning all disease control measures and assured that they are ready to deal with any risk.

According to Liang Wannian, director of the National Health Commission, the reclassification of the pathology from A to B as of next January 8 is a sign that the country is one step closer to leaving the pandemic behind.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/china-co ... -0006.html

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 29, 2022 3:31 pm

Why has China decided to relax COVID restrictions?
CGTN reporter Li Jingjing talks about why this decision has come now, why the Chinese government enforced such strict curbs for so long, and what can be expected now that the COVID policy is changing.

December 29, 2022 by Peoples Dispatch



The Chinese government has recently announced its decision of relaxing the country’s zero-COVID policy and easing various restrictions meant for containing the spread of the virus. CGTN reporter Li Jingjing talks about why this decision has come now, why the Chinese government enforced such strict curbs for so long, and what can be expected now that the COVID policy is changing.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/12/29/ ... trictions/

What is up with the new Covid variants and how dangerous are they?
Immunologist Dr. Satyajit Rath and NewsClick’s Editor-in-Chief Prabir Purkayastha discuss reports of new COVID-19 variants and what it means for public health authorities across the world

December 28, 2022 by Newsclick



China and the US are among the countries that have been affected by the new COVID variant. NewsClick Editor-in-Chief Prabir Purkayastha talks to immunologist Dr. Satyajit Rath about these variants, their impact, and what it means for public health authorities.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/12/28/ ... -are-they/

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China's COVID-19 Response Shift is Correct, NHC says

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Chinese COVID-19 patients in a health center, Dec. 2022. | Photo: Twitter/ @InsightGL

China will downgrade its management of COVID-19 from Jan. 8, 2023, treating it as a Class B infection, rather than a more serious Class A infection.


China's latest policy adjustment on COVID-19 response is appropriate, scientific and law-based, and suits the country's epidemic prevention and control realities, said Liang Wannian, head of the COVID-19 response expert panel under the National Health Commission.

China will downgrade its management of COVID-19 from Jan. 8, 2023, treating it as a Class B infection, rather than a more serious Class A infection.

The shift in no way means letting go of the virus, but requires directing more resources to the most important epidemic control and case treatment tasks in a more scientific and accurate manner, Liang said.

Over the past nearly three years, China has based its COVID-19 response on three factors, namely the pathogenicity of the virus, the immunity level of the Chinese people and the defense capability of the national health system against the disease, as well as public health intervention, Liang said at a press conference held by the State Council Information Office.


Faced with the pandemic, China has tried its best to strike a balance between these factors and kept improving its COVID-19 response measures, said the expert, adding that China's constantly evolving policy adjustments precisely embody such a balance.

Liang said China's epidemic prevention and control efforts will focus on protecting health and preventing severe cases following the downgrading of COVID-19 management.

However, the purpose of China's COVID-19 response will remain unchanged, which is to control the epidemic spread, protect people's lives and health to the greatest possible extent and coordinate epidemic prevention and control with social and economic development to the maximum, said Liang.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Chi ... -0006.html
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