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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Jun 27, 2022 3:38 pm

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Deciphering the Chinese economic miracle: lessons for the developing world
We are pleased to publish this important article by Associate Professor Efe Can Gürcan, which sets out what he describes as the ‘Chinese miracle’, “that China has enjoyed unprecedented economic success in world history despite enormous historical, demographic, geographical and geopolitical adversities.” Despite this, he notes, “China has developed an exemplary model of economic development that inspires much of the developing world.” Therefore, “to decipher the formula behind China’s historic economic success” is to “offer fundamental hints to guide developing countries in their endeavours to reach an advanced stage of economic development.”

Professor Gürcan surveys the various stages of China’s socialist development under Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, noting that “the roots of the Chinese economic miracle can be traced back to the early phase of the Chinese revolution under the leadership of Mao,” who he sees as the real originator of the concept of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Deng Xiaoping developed this, including by digging deeper into Mao’s work, for example his, ‘A Critique of Soviet Economics’, and he highlights Deng’s view of the essence of socialism lying in the “liberation and development of the productive forces, elimination of exploitation and polarisation, and the ultimate achievement of prosperity for all.”

Professor Gürcan concludes by stating that: “In contrast to Western capitalism, the Chinese economic miracle does not originate from forced accumulation, wars, and colonialism. On the contrary, it springs from peaceful development and international cooperation. Understood as such, China’s model also constitutes the living example of the rising relevance and superiority of socialism over the capitalist system.”

This is an extremely important article that is worthy of careful study. It was originally published in Volume 3 Issue 2 of the Turkish journal Belt and Road Initiative Quarterly (BRIQ) and is reproduced with thanks. The article can be also be read/downloaded in PDF form.
https://briqjournal.com/sites/default/f ... %20EFG.pdf
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Abstract

Despite enormous historical, demographic, geographical, and geopolitical adversities, China has enjoyed unprecedented economic success in world history. This article aims to decipher the formula behind China’s historic economic success and distill policy lessons for developing countries in their endeavors to reach an advanced stage of economic development. Based on descriptive case study and statistics, the article suggests that the Chinese economic miracle can be explained by a four-fold formula: a) devising an autocentric economic model aspiring to improve national autonomy and cushion the impact of foreign interference, b) insisting on socialism and the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which allows for strategic coherence and long-term planning to overcome free-market anarchy, c) creating a state-driven industrial base fueled by national science and technology policies, and d) adopting a balanced approach to development centered on attaining a higher sociocultural and ecological quality of life. The findings also help to debunk the myths surrounding the Chinese miracle, particularly the “cheap labor thesis”, the “technology theft thesis”, the “foreign investment and capitalist integration theses”, the “imperialism thesis”, and the “Mao-the-monster thesis”.

Keywords: Chinese miracle,economic development, Mao Zedong Thought, socialism with Chinese characteristics, Xi Jinping Thought

Deciphering the Chinese Economic Miracle: Lessons for the Developing World

The “Chinese miracle” has become a widely used term in development studies, inspiring developing countries to achieve high levels of prosperity, living standards, and stability over the last decade. The popularity of this term can be explained in large part by the fact that China has enjoyed unprecedented economic success in world history (Zakaria, 2011; Gürcan 2021a), despite enormous historical, demographic, geographical, and geopolitical adversities. China was one of the world’s poorest countries before the socialist revolution in 1949. In the early revolutionary era, China struggled much to overcome its crippling semi-colonial legacy characterized by the medieval conditions of an agricultural economy and the weakness of its industrial base. History aside, China is the largest country by population size, which currently accounts for 22% of the world’s population. This goes hand in hand with China’s resource scarcity problem as a 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. Furthermore, only 19% of its surface area is suitable for human habitation, and 65% of its surface area is rugged. This severely cripples China’s farming capabilities and facilitates ethnic heterogeneity as a potential impediment to political cohesion (Morton, 2006; Naughton, 2018). Another adversity threatening China’s economic development concerns geopolitical circumstances. Cases in point are how China’s membership in the United Nations was stalled until 1971, and the US resorted to military interventions in China’s neighboring regions to suffocate the revolution. The current geopolitical circumstances find their sharpest expression in the current US containment strategy and the US-led trade and technology war against China (Gürcan, 2019; Gürcan, Kahraman & Yanmaz, 2021).

Despite such adversities, China has developed an exemplary model of economic development that inspires much of the developing world. Since 1979, China is the only country that has remained untouched by any economic crisis. The 1979-2018 period testified to an average economic growth rate of 9.4% in the lead of the CPC, making 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 producing higher-value added products in the computer, aviation, and medical technology sectors, among others. One should also note that China has risen to the world’s largest lender to the developing world, second-largest investor in foreign direct investment (FDI), and top leader in green bonds and credits. China’s contributions to green finance also bring to mind China’s global leadership in sustainable development. China has recently emerged as the world’s top leader in green transportation as the largest producer of electric buses and the largest market for electric vehicles and bikes. Similarly, China’s status as the world’s top producer of solar, wind, and hydroelectric power is closely related to its reputation as the world’s top investor in sustainable energy technology (Gürcan, 2021a). Besides China’s historic success in economic and environmental development, one should also note that the Chinese economic miracle is credited for 70% of global poverty eradication between 1990 and 2015 (Gardner, 2018).

This article aims to decipher the formula behind China’s historic economic success and offer fundamental hints to guide developing countries in their endeavors to reach an advanced stage of economic development. This article suggests that the Chinese economic miracle can be explained by a four-fold formula: a) devising an autocentric economic model aspiring to improve national autonomy and cushion the impact of foreign interference, b) insisting on socialism and the leadership of the CPC, which allows for strategic coherence and long-term planning to overcome free-market anarchy, c) creating a state-driven industrial base fueled by national science and technology policies, and d) adopting a balanced approach to development centered on attaining a higher sociocultural and ecological quality of life. This formula is derived using the method of descriptive case study, which is a research method that consists of an intense historical study of “a single instance of an event or phenomenon” by “get[ing] the history down for the possible benefit of later policymakers” and drawing “memorable analogies that later practitioners use to identify… strategies that work” (Odell, 2001: 162). The present article provides an intense study of the phenomenon called the “Chinese economic miracle” by distilling policy lessons for developing countries. It is structured in three sections. The first sheds light on the Mao Zedong era, which was characterized by a centrally planned economy and a big push strategy, whereas the second addresses the Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin eras with a special focus on reform and opening-up. The subsequent section shifts the focus to the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping eras by revisiting the success of China’s social development strategies. It also points to the leading role of the state in China’s economic development and its contribution to innovation and technology.

The Legacy of Mao Zedong’s “Big Push” Strategy

The roots of the Chinese economic miracle can be traced back to the early phase of the Chinese revolution under the leadership of Mao (1949-1976). Mao’s leadership adopted what might be called a “big push strategy” for rapid industrialization to rapidly catch up with Western powers that once succeeded in turning China into a semi-colony. This strategy relies on central planning, by which the state “channel[s] the maximum feasible investment into heavy industry” and “mobilize[s] saving and investment, sacrificing consumption today in order to benefit future generations” (Naughton, 2018: 65). Indeed, the big push model as an economic term that can be generalized to other countries found its sharpest expression in the Chinese context under the name “Great Leap Forward”, which was part of China’s Second Five Year Plan (1958-1962). This being said, the general trend that characterized the period between the First Five Year Plan and the Fifth Five Year Plan (1953-1980) complied with the Big Push Model for the most part:

In 1953, the central government launched its first FYP (1953-1957), which aimed at turning China from a agricultural country into an advanced industrial country with a focus on the development of the heavy industry. The next five FYPs put emphasis on agricultural and industrial development. The second FYP (1958-1963) carried on the industrial development centered on heavy industry. The major tasks of the third one (1966-1970) were to develop agriculture and strengthen basic industries. The fourth (1971-1975) set goals for output of agriculture and industry and investment in infrastructure. The fifth FYP (1976-1980) set up a goal of building up an independent and relatively complete industrial system (CGTN, 2020).

A word of caution is warranted at this point before proceeding further. History as an academic discipline provides us with a powerful tool to learn from humanity’s past struggles and successes (Gürcan, 2008). However, judging past actions by today’s moral standards would nullify the scientific value of history, setting the ground for misleading analogies. The case of China under Mao’s leadership is not immune to this principle. As Barry J. Naughton argues, therefore, “at the time of the birth of the PRC, many people believed that this [big push strategy] was the best approach to development”, despite human costs (Naughton, 2018: 65). Nevertheless, the ultimate result of this strategy was a historic economic success, which can inform today’s policymakers about the use of public-driven or state-guided economic development models to be redesigned in conformity with today’s moral standards. One should also note that China’s current economic policies are still grounded on Mao’s legacy of big-push industrialization.

Mao’s strategy of economic development draws its strength from the principles of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (有中国特色的社会主义). These principles proceed from the assumption that universal models or widely accepted standards “must be combined with specific national characteristics and acquire a definite national form if it is to be useful” (Mao, 1967: 61), which also applies to the usefulness of economic development strategies. With these principles in mind, Mao calls for abandoning dogmatic and bookish interpretations by “seeking truth from facts” while learning from past mistakes and successes. Mao’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is thus a call for integrating socialist principles with China’s historical peculiarities and changing realities (Mao, 1971; Gürcan, 2008). This framework later encouraged Chinese policymakers to create an endogenous economic model based on socialism (Naughton, 2018; Currie-Alder, 2014; Harrison, 2020).

Mao’s big push strategy encouraged heavy investments in both physical and human capital, which led not only to significant scientific, technological, and industrial advances but also to the inclusion of a majority of the Chinese population in the public health and education systems for the very first time in China’s history. Scientists and engineers were mobilized under a centralized science and technology system, providing the human capital necessary for big push industrialization (Naughton, 2018; Currie-Alder, 2014; Harrison, 2020). China’s First Five-Year Plan was launched in 1953. Before implementing this plan in 1952, China was predominantly an agricultural country, and the contribution of industry to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was only 20%, which used to take the smallest share of the economy. In the 1952-1978 period, the Chinese economy grew by 6% on average, whilst the average growth rate of industrial output was 11.5% (Naughton, 2018; Chan, 2018; Dollar, Huang & Yao, 2020). By the second half of the 1970s, the big push strategy and its policy of high savings and limited individual consumption resulted in industry overtaking agriculture and the service sector becoming the largest sector with a share of 46% in the economy (Dollar, Huang & Yao, 2020). As a result of social advances in public health and education, China’s average life expectancy rose from 25 in 1931 to 63-66 by 1956 (Kiely, 2015).

The Reform and Opening-Up Strategy in the Post-Mao Era

The policymakers of the early phase of the Chinese Revolution were experienced revolutionaries who had successfully carried out a protracted revolutionary struggle, but they lacked experience and knowledge in political and economic statecraft. Mistakes were thus unavoidable in the process of exploration through trial and error. Indeed, it is difficult to over-emphasize the substantial gains from the big push strategy, which served as a springboard for the Chinese economic miracle to build a strong physical and human infrastructure for socialist construction. In the late 1970s, however, it became apparent that policymakers’ tendency towards impetuosity and rash advances for rapid industrialization was not sustainable in the longer term. Moreover, the late 1970s and early 1980s testified to the exhaustion of the Soviet model of development due to a stagnating Soviet economy coupled with the alienating effects of the Sino-Soviet split, which made the Chinese question the feasibility of continuing a Soviet-modeled system. In this context, Chinese policymakers grew a stronger awareness that China is still in the early phases of socialist construction and that this situation will last longer than expected due to several constraints, including the long-term retreat of the international communist movement and the advent of capitalist globalization under the Third Industrial Revolution. Relatedly, China’s new leadership forged around Deng required an entirely novel framework to mobilize the economy by taking advantage of globalization and ensuring the legitimacy of the economic model after the power vacuum created by Mao’s death. According to Chinese policymakers, this was a viable alternative to rapidly surpass the Soviet Union and catch up with the West without sacrificing domestic stability.

In the late 1970s, Deng proposed digging deeper into Mao’s theoretical contributions to “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and preparing a blueprint for China’s modernization by shifting the focus from class struggle to the fundamental task of expanding the country’s productive forces, which are viewed as the “foundation” of Chinese socialism (Deng, 1987: 17; Gürcan, 2021b). As originally conceived, this blueprint proceeds from the argument that “economic development is our primary objective, and everything else must be subordinated to it,” drawing on Mao’s subsequent formula offered in A Critique of Soviet Economics (Deng, 1987:116; Mao, 1977). Worthy of note here is that this formula provides an earlier framework for state capitalism and modernization: “In addition to modernizing industry and agriculture, science and culture, we have to modernize national defense” (Mao, 1977: 65). Following Mao’s teachings on the Four Modernizations, Deng’s blueprint consists of “one focus” (economic construction centred on the development of agriculture, industry, defence, and science and technology, otherwise known as the “Four Modernizations”) and “two basic points”, i.e. (a) upholding the “four cardinal principles” (upholding socialism, the people’s democratic dictatorship, the CPC leadership and Mao Zedong Thought) and (b) the policy of reform and opening towards a system of market socialism integrated with the world economy (Deng, 1984: 187-188; Wu, 1996; CPC, 1991; Gürcan, 2021b).

It is important to emphasize that Deng’s reform strategy does not stem from a neoliberal perspective of market fundamentalism. With common prosperity and the state’s guidance of the economy in mind, Deng rather advocated for the acceleration of “foreign investment capital in a planned way… [by] serving the development of the socialist economy as a whole” (Deng, 1984: 96). He thus followed Mao’s (1961: 413) motto “only modernization could save China, only learning from foreign countries could modernize China.” Similarly, he refuted the idea “that the market is capitalist and only planning is socialist” (Deng, 1984: 136). Instead, he believed that both planning and markets could be used to serve the socialist system, whose essence lies in the “liberation and development of the productive forces, elimination of exploitation and polarization, and the ultimate achievement of prosperity for all” (Deng, 1984: 243). However, these objectives can only be realized “step by step” despite complexities and contradictions along the way: “Where conditions permit, some areas may develop faster than others; those that develop faster can help promote the progress of those that lag behind, until all become prosperous” (Deng, 1984: 244).

Deng realized that China’s size was too large for central planning to be effectively implemented in every area of the economy, which called for a less centralized system of planning (Naughton, 2018). Within this framework, China initiated the era of reform and opening up by decentralizing agriculture and gradually allowing for the privatization of the industry while “open[ing] up [China’s] industrial base to foreign contractors… [based on] very stringent guidelines that foreign contractors had to follow” (Marino, 2018:42). The idea was to benefit from foreign direct investments to transfer capital and technological knowledge in the longer term by pursuing export-driven strategies (Marino, 2018). As such, reform and opening up were used as vehicles for implementing an autocentric model of state-guided development without giving up to market fundamentalism and economic dependency on the West.

The Jiang era (1993–2002) coincided with a period in which globalization was in full swing and faced with the unipolarization of world politics under the US initiative (Gürcan, 2019; Gürcan, 2021b). According to the KOF Index of Globalisation—which takes into account the economic, social and political aspects of globalization—the world’s globalization scores underwent an almost steady increase from 38.43 in 1970 to 53.37 in 2002 (KOF Globalisation, 2020). In this era, China’s political and economic framework was shaped by Jiang’s “Three Represents” theory, which professes to represent “the requirements of the development of China’s advanced productive forces, the orientation of the development of China’s advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the broadest masses of the Chinese people” (Jiang, 2002: 8). The “advanced productive forces” component of the “Three Represents Theory” takes off from Deng’s vision of modernization (Jiang, 2002: 183). In line with Jiang’s theory, the Chinese economy moved towards a socialist market economy with public ownership as the main form. Here, public ownership encompasses a broader scope than mere state ownership, including not only state-owned enterprises (SOEs) but also collectively-owned enterprises (COEs) and various forms of mixed ownership, such as cooperative enterprises and “equity shares in private and foreign firms that are held by SOEs and (COEs)” (Wang, 2011: 459). In 2000, therefore, China launched a going-out strategy “with the aim of establishing Chinese firms as global players, including SOEs and the state-owned commercial banks” (Yueh, 2018: 114).

Regarding the “advanced culture” component, Jiang envisioned the development of a national culture that “provide[s] spiritual and intellectual support for economic development” in line with such values as self-reliance, competition, efficiency, democracy and innovation (Jiang, 2002:188-189). Finally, when it comes to the “broadest masses” component of the “Three Represents Theory”, Jiang’s vision aimed to “bring the vast fields of society and a growing market under solid and effective Party leadership” (Jiang, 2002: 16). According to Jiang, this vision was to be realized by encouraging “party building in non-state enterprises” and extending these efforts towards “private business owners” (Jiang, 2002: 21-23).

In this period, China witnessed rapid economic growth and industrialization, which allowed for reversing income inequality, remedying environmental damage, and improving social welfare by the end of the 1990s. For one thing, China’s estimated GINI scores had changed from 0.33 in 1980 to 0.35 in 1990 and 0.4 in 2000 (Chen et al., 2010: 20; Gürcan, 2021b). To face such challenges, the Tenth Five Year Plan (2001–2005) targeted regional disparities, improving the quality of education, expanding forest coverage, increasing disposable income, accelerating infrastructure development, and bettering medical services (China Daily, 2011). One should also emphasize that the Tenth Five Year Plan imposed a stronger emphasis on the public sector: “The ownership system needs to be further improved. We need to uphold the dominance of the public sector of the economy, let the state-owned sector play the leading role, develop various forms of collective undertakings, and support, encourage and guide the healthy development of private and individual sectors of the economy (Zhu, 2001).” In the meantime, China targeted a total of 120 strategic corporations for state support. These corporations were conceived of as “national champions” who would soon become “global players”, mostly operating in strategic areas such as electricity, coal, automobiles, electronic appliances, pharmaceuticals, transportation, aviation, and information technology (Kiely, 2015).

From Balanced and All-Round Development to the Chinese Dream of National Rejuvenation: Towards a Higher Phase of Socialism in the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping Eras

When the Hu administration (2002-2012) came into office, China’s productive forces had already attained a degree of maturity that made it possible to focus on the fight against exploitation and polarization. GDP can be used as a basic indicator of the level of development of productive forces, and the data on China’s GDP point to significant achievements in the 2000s (See Figure 1). Formulated in response to the rising tide of social unrest and taking advantage of China’s increased level of economic maturity, Hu’s theory of “harmonious society” provided a policy framework that targets the smoothing of popular unrest. In this context, the 10th Five Year Plan prioritized improving China’s social security system and state-owned enterprises, whilst the 12th Five Year Plan focused on environmental protection as part of Hu’s harmonious development blueprint while also developing education, science, and technology (CGTN, 2020). Hu’s new policy framework had a strong effect on the inauguration of Labour Contract Law (LCL) in 2008 and noticeable increases in the minimum wage by local governments. The LCL ensures registered employment along with contract renewal guarantees, social security funds, and wage standards (Gürcan & Mete, 2017: 12-13).

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According to Hu, “social harmony is an essential attribute of socialism with Chinese characteristics” (Hu, 2007). His vision of social harmony was not limited to promoting “social equity and justice”. It finds its fullest expression in “balance[ing] 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” (Hu, 2007). One cannot help but notice that Hu’s vision strongly echoes Mao’s speech entitled On the Ten Relationships, where he makes a case for balanced development in conformity with the concrete reality of China (Mao, 1974). In achieving social harmony, moreover, Hu brings the “Scientific Outlook on Development” to the centre of his policy framework, which consists of making full use of the guidance of science and education to promote a balanced, all-round, and sustainable model of development that puts people first (Hu, 2007; Gürcan, 2021b). Therefore, Hu’s vision of building a “moderately prosperous society in all respects” led him to emphasize “running the administration for the sake of the people” and “seeking harmony in the midst of differences” (Hu, 2007).

In this context, the Hu administration accelerated social policies, state-guided policies, and large-scale infrastructure investments, which the Xi administration later deepened. The Eleventh Five Year Plan (2006-2010) laid an even stronger emphasis on the public sector. It thus sought to “push the government capital to concentrate in the important industries and key fields critical to the national safety and national economic arteries, optimize state-owned economic distribution, reinforce the controlling force, influence and driving force of the state-owned economy and exert its leading function… develop big company and big enterprise groups with relatively strong competitive power… continue to deepen collective enterprise reform and develop multi-form collective economy (PRC, 2006).” This plan also accentuated building an independent base of manufacturing and innovation abilities (PRC, 2006).

Based on the context depicted above, gross fixed capital formation may be considered a basic indicator for infrastructure development. It includes not only land improvements, plant, machinery, and equipment purchase but also the construction of roads, railways, schools, offices, hospitals, private residential dwellings, and commercial and industrial buildings. Available data indicate that China’s gross fixed capital formation grew by around 7.85 percentage points in 1989-2001. Between 2002 and 2012, this growth was recorded at 9.19 percentage points under the Hu administration. Worthy of note here is that China’s state-guided economic development model allowed the Chinese gross fixed capital formation to outscore imperialist countries such as the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France (See Figure 2).

The expansion of China’s social policies can be assessed by reference to data on “public expenditure on social security and employment”, “government expenditure pension and social welfare”, and “domestic general government health expenditure as a percentage of current health expenditure”. Regarding social security and employment, China’s public expenditure witnessed a significant increase, which amounts to a rate of over 328% (see Figure 3). This situation is no different from China’s expenditure on pension and social welfare, having soared by more than 686% in the period 1995-2006 alone (see Figure 4). Not surprisingly, this is reflected in the increasing labor share of GDP in China, which accelerated in 2010 and reached 51.3% by 2017 (see Figure 5). In 2000, moreover, China was the second-worst performer in our sample of imperialist and developing countries in the area of general government health expenditure. However, the 2000s testified to a spectacular increase in the ratio of China’s general government health expenditure to total health expenditure, which rose by nearly 34.5 percentage points.

It thus seems that China exhibited the highest rate of increase in our sample, only to accelerate under the Hu and Xi administrations. Available data indicate that public health expenditure reached a level above 50% of total health expenditure, starting with the year 2010 (see Figure 6). A similar situation goes for China’s government expenditure on education (as a % of GDP), which rose from 1.88% in 1999 to over 3.75% in 2010 (see Figure 7). An upward trend is also observable in China’s average wages. They rose by almost 237% under low inflation conditions (see Figure 8). All of these developments were reflected in the reduction of the GINI index, or income inequality since 2010, mainly thanks to Hu’s all-round development strategy, as well as Xi’s diligent efforts later. At this point, it bears underscoring that China’s GINI index reveals China’s social advances in the 2000s (see Figure 9). China exhibited similar performance in its Human Development Index (HDI). HDI is a tool that measures human development in health, education, and the standard of living. Overall, there has been a constant increase in China’s HDI in the period 1990-2019, which amounts to an increase of 0.262 points in total (see Figure 10). In the final analysis, one could argue that these socioeconomic achievements clearly demonstrate the success of China’s model of development.

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China’s Government Expenditure: Social Security and Employment
Source: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/gover ... government
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China’s Government Expenditure on Pension and Social Welfare (RMB)
Source: https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/gover ... welfare-ps

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China’s shift to a more people-oriented economic policy framework gained significant pace under the Xi administration. This administration has continued Hu’s vision of core socialist values, deepened the struggle against corruption and inequality, and achieved notable successes in eliminating pro-American elements from the state as a continuation of Hu’s diligent efforts (Martin, et al., 2021; Dorfman, 2018). In a world characterised by the decline of US global hegemony and the multipolarization of global politics (Gürcan, 2019; Gürcan, 2021b), Xi strives to restore China’s self-confidence and wealth, which finds its fullest expression in the notions of the doctrine of “Four Matters of Confidence” and the “Chinese Dream”. The origins of the “Four Matters of Confidence” can be traced back to a speech delivered by Hu at the 18th CPC Party Congress, where he pointed to the importance of maintaining confidence in the future of socialism, the scientific nature of socialism as a theory, and the superiority of socialism as a system. In 2014, Xi added a fourth component, which stresses confidence in the value and vitality of Chinese culture. China’s growing self-confidence, driven by intensifying geopolitical rivalry and the country’s sustained economic success, also finds its expression in the notion of the “Chinese Dream” (Gürcan, 2021b; China Research Center, 2012). Xi describes the Chinese Dream as:

“A dream cherished and aspired to by the Chinese people and nation, a dream of building China into a well-off society in an all-round way and rejuvenating the Chinese nation, a dream for everyone to make his own dream come true, a dream that the whole nation strives for, and a dream to show the world China’s commitment to making a greater contribution to the peace and development of mankind” (Xi, 2014a: 179).

As such, the Chinese Dream calls for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation by further deepening Hu’s vision of equitability and sustainability, without however losing sight of Deng’s modernisation plan:

“We will continue to give top priority to development; put people first; persist in reform and opening up; comprehensively promote economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological progress; and spur coordinated progress of every aspect of the modernization drive” (Xi, 2014b: 8-12).

For what came to be known as Xi Jinping Thought, the keys to such rejuvenation are “better education, more stable jobs, more satisfactory income, greater social security benefits, better medical and health services, more comfortable living conditions and a more beautiful environment” (Xi, 2014b: 16). Worthy of special emphasis in this regard is how Xi frames the working class as the “main force for finishing building a moderately prosperous society” (Xi, 2014b: 56; Gürcan, 2021b).

Under the Xi administration, China’s state-guided economic development model –where the state determines the general course of economic development based on long-term plans and strategies– attained a higher degree of maturity. This level of maturity finds its expression in the Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Some Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening the Reform:

The basic economic system with public ownership playing a dominant role and different economic sectors developing side by side is an important pillar of the socialist system with Chinese characteristics and is the foundation of the socialist market economy. Both the public and non-public sectors are key components of the socialist market economy, and are important bases for the economic and social development of China. We must unswervingly consolidate and develop the public economy, persist in the dominant position of public ownership, give full play to the leading role of the state-owned sector, and continuously increase its vitality, controlling force and influence. We must unwaveringly encourage, support and guide the development of the non-public sector, and stimulate its dynamism and creativity (CPC, 2014).

Therefore, one could deduce that in China’s economic development model, public ownership plays a dominant role with due regard for the balance between economic and socio-environmental development and harmony between the public and non-public sectors.

In this context, it is no coincidence that the Chinese economy and its success continue to heavily rely on state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which accounted for 40% of China’s GDP in 2020 (Guluzade, 2020). The main function of SOEs as the engine of the Chinese economy lies in supporting capital-intensive industries and large undertakings beyond the means of free market actors, contributing to the public goods beyond the sole profit motive, and correcting market failures (Tay, 2013, Lin, et al., 2020; Wu & Fan, 2014: 69). Under reform and opening up, SOEs gained greater autonomy, where the responsibilities of central and local governments were expanded alongside those of outside directors. In the 2010s, greater support was also granted to commercial SOEs operating in strategic sectors that are deemed important for national security (Lin, et al., 2020). Even though the reform and opening up led to a reduction in SOEs from 262,000 in 1997 to 173,000 in 2016, their assets soared from around 12.5 trillion RMB to 155 trillion RMB.

Similarly, their net income witnessed a significant increase, from nearly 79.12 billion RMB to 2.5 trillion RMB (Lin, et al., 2020: 4). An overwhelming majority of revenues by SOEs is derived from the strategic or top-tier sectors comprising defense, electricity, oil, gas, telecommunications, coal, shipping, aviation, and rail. A substantial part of SOE revenues is generated by the pillar or middle-tier industries comprising automobiles, chemicals, construction, electronics, equipment manufacturing, nonferrous metals, prospecting, steel, and technology. Lately, biotechnology and alternative energy manufacturing have also been included in the middle-tier industries (Asia Society Policy Institute, 2021; Pearson, 2015). Moreover, it is also important to note that “private companies, whether individual, small/medium-sized or hi-tech start-ups are not ‘free’, since they are heavily dependent on local party members” (De Rambures, 2014: 4). Equally important is how large private companies such as Huawei enjoy substantial government support and forge organic relations with the People’s Liberation Army (De Rambures, 2014). Such examples reveal that socialism and state-guided development do not necessarily contradict the private sector.

More can be said about the increasing importance of China’s state-guided economic development model despite reform and opening up. In 1995, the CPC launched an initiative called “retain the large; release the small” (fangxiao) through sales and merger and acquisition activity, which resulted in a more limited number of highly mega-firms emerged” with greater economic and political power (Wu & Frazier, 2018: 132; Pearson, 2015). Large SOEs still maintain a dominant position in the economy, e.g. “computers (Lenovo), petroleum (Petrochina, Sinopec), chemicals (Sinochem), public works (Sandy), aerospace (AVIC), shipyards (Ronsheng), steel (Baosteel), appliances (Haier)” (De Rambures, 2014: 34). Furthermore, 19 out of China’s 20 largest companies are state-owned or state-controlled companies that determine the course of the economy. These companies are among the top 150 corporations ranked by Fortune Global 500 and mostly operate in the oil, chemicals, utilities, banking, insurance, construction, telecommunications, and automotive industries (Wu & Frazier, 2018). The world’s four largest banks –as the main engine of China’s economic development– belong to China’s public sector (i.e. the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, the China Construction Bank, the Agricultural Bank of China, and the Bank of China). Therefore, they exert a strong influence on the Chinese economy and global economic change. Worthy of note here is that the number of SOEs listed in Fortune Global 500 witnessed an upward trend in the 2000s, with their number increasing from 49 in 2005 to 102 in 2017 (Wu & Frazier, 2018).

The main characteristic of the Chinese model of economic development lies in that “the market is ‘driven’ by a strong government, and the state sector guides the national economy” (Wu & Fan, 2014: 69). State guidance on the economy allowed China to accumulate large amounts of capital and strategically mobilize this accumulated wealth to support the expansion of a productive economy (Yongding, 2014). As such, China stands out as the top performer in gross savings (as a % of Gross National Income, or GNI) among the leading imperialist and developing countries such as the BRICS grouping (i.e. Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa) and Turkey. China’s performance exceeded 50% of its GNI in the 2007-2010 period (see Figure 11). This is also reflected in the spectacular rise of general government capital stocks, public-private partnership investments, and private capital stocks (see Figures 12-14). In the 2000-2015 period alone, general government capital stocks witnessed an over 374.5% increase (See Figure 12). This led China to develop the largest industry (as a % of GDP) in our entire sample and become the top performer in medium- and high-tech manufacturing (as a % of manufacturing, value added) among developing countries (see Figures 15-16).

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The mere growth of capital stocks does not automatically serve the goals of permanent and long-term economic development unless they are mobilized to trigger technological progress and innovation. For developing countries, the scale of mobilization required to take targeted advances necessitates strong state guidance and strategic planning, given that the spontaneous functioning of free markets cannot satisfy such requirements. This also applies to China, whose national science and innovation system was created at the 1978 National Conference on Science and Technology Work convened by the Central Committee of the CPC. In this conference, Deng declared science and technology as part of productive forces. The 6th Five-Year Plan in 1982 launched China’s first National Program for Science and Technology Projects, which paved the way for the National Technological Transformation Plan in 1982, the National Key Scientific and Technological Breakthrough Plan in 1982, the National Key Laboratory Construction Plan in 1984, the National High-Technology Development Plan in 1986, and the Spark Program (Zheng, et al., 2020). The year 1988 marked the creation of national development zones for new and high-technology industries. An important landmark in developing China’s national science and innovation system is the adoption of the Law on Scientific and Technological Progress in 1993, which promotes the progress of science and technology as foundations of economic construction and social development (Zheng, et al., 2020). This legal environment provided new momentum for implementing national programs in the 1990s and the early 2000s, including the National Basic Research Program, the Knowledge Innovation Program, and the National Science and Technology Innovation Program. Two important landmarks in the late 2000s and the 2010s were the implementation of the National Medium- to Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology and the formulation of the Outline of National Innovation-Driven Development Strategy (Zheng, et al., 2020). The former is a 15-year plan for the period 2006-2020, which calls for “indigenous innovation” (zizhu chuangxin) based on a strong synergy between firms, universities, and research institutes. It encourages indigenous innovation through government-funded R&D and state-guided megaprojects in strategic industries (Naughton, 2018). The latter provides a strategic roadmap for China’s scientific and technological development in three steps:

Step 1, China should become an innovative country by 2020 to give strong support for building a moderately prosperous society in all respects;

Step 2, China should move to the forefront of innovative countries by 2030 to lay a solid foundation for building China into a major economic power and a society of common prosperity;

Step 3, China should become an innovation power by 2050 to support the building of a prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, modern socialist country and the realization of the Chinese dream of national renewal (Minister of Science and Technology, 2016).


This outline identifies strategic areas to include smart and green manufacturing and energy technologies, humanlike machine intelligence, natural interaction and virtual reality, microelectronics and optoelectronics, broadband mobile Internet, cloud computing, the Internet of things, Big Data, high-performance computing, mobile intelligent terminals, independent hardware and software products and network security technology, modern agricultural technology, and marine, space, and medical technologies (CSET, 2019).

China views science and technology as a complementary pillar of its economic development. This is the main reason why China’s industrial strategies also reflect a science- and technology-driven approach. A case in point is Made in China 2025, China’s national strategic plan for industrial policy as part of “Industry 4.0”. Launched in 2015, this plan calls for integrating new technologies into the economy and developing a national industrial base led by indigenous innovation. It thus provides a general framework to mobilize state support for key industries such as information, technology, robotics, green energy, sustainable transportation, aerospace technology, ocean engineering and high-tech ships, railway equipment, new materials, and pioneering medical and agricultural technologies. High-tech companies operating in these industries are to be supported through tax incentives, subsidies, low-interest loans, R&D funding, and assistance for acquisitions of foreign technology companies (Huimin, et al. 2018; US Chamber of Commerce, 2017). Another plan launched in 2015 is an action plan called Internet Plus, which aims to use, through fiscal and tax policies, state resources to encourage the application of mobile and digital technologies into the economy, particularly to manufacturing, commerce, finance, medical sectors, government, and agriculture. This plan brands mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data, and the Internet of Things as the driving technologies of the Chinese economy (China Daily, 2015).

Within such policy frameworks, China has devoted its efforts to increase its R&D expenditure (as a % of GDP), which rose from 0.56% in 1996 to 2.14% in 2018. This makes China one of the world’s top performers in R&D expenditure, which is mainly driven by government funds (see Figure 17; Zheng, et al., 2020). Moreover, China’s strong state guidance and strategic planning yielded significant results in its performance related to several important indicators, including the publication of scientific and technical articles, the number of researchers engaged in R&D, and patents, trademarks, and industrial applications by residents. For one thing, available data reveals that China has become the world’s leading country in scientific publications, having overtaken the United States in 2016 (see Figure 18). In a similar vein, the number of researchers engaged in China’s R&D rose by almost 200%, from around 437 million persons in 1996 to 1.3 billion persons in 2018 (see Figure 19). China also witnessed impressive growth in the number of patents, industrial design, and trademark applications by residents. This points to an increase of over 12308% for patent applications and 9040% for industrial design applications between 1992 and 2019. In the period 2004-2019, China’s increase in trademark applications amounted to 1337%. Consequently, 2019 data show that China has become the world’s leading nation in patent, industrial design, and trademark applications (e.g. See Figures 19-21). Eventually, the mobilization of capital stocks to support technological progress and innovation under strong state guidance has transformed China’s international trade. 2019 data reveal that China is now a country with the world’s largest share of informational and communication technology (ICT) goods exports in total goods exports and high technology exports in total manufactured exports (see Figure 22). Here, ICT goods include information and technology goods, such as computers, communication equipment, consumer electronic equipment, electronic components, whereas high-technology exports involve a longer list of items that supplement ICT goods, including aerospace, pharmaceuticals, scientific instruments, and electrical machinery.

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A final word is needed regarding the relationship between the Chinese economic miracle and the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). Eventually, the success of the Chinese economic model has allowed China to gain the status of an “agenda-setter” and “norm-maker” in international politics with the rise of China-led initiatives such as the BRI. The BRI focuses on five primary areas: intergovernmental political cooperation and consensus building, infrastructural and technological connectivity, commercial connectivity, financial integration, and people-to-people exchange for cultural cooperation. While the term “belt” indicates land pipelines, roads, and railways, the term “road” is used to define offshore lines, harbors, and other maritime facilities. Launched in 2013 on China’s initiative, the BRI aims at establishing broad networks related to infrastructure, natural resources, and investments in more than 152 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas. Today, the BRI covers over 70 countries, corresponding to more than 65% of the world population, one-third of the global GDP, and a quarter of world trade. This suggests that the BRI has become the most comprehensive development and trade cooperation scheme in history (Gürcan, 2020).

Two crucial observations are worth highlighting at this point. First, the BRI itself reflects China’s state-guided economic approach. For example, Chinese state-owned banks and the Silk Road Fund, created by the collective efforts of these banks, constitute the engine of the BRI’s financial integration and infrastructure investments. Second, the BRI encourages participant countries to adopt a state-guided economy that values infrastructure development and environmental sustainability. A case in point is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as the BRI’s financial locomotive, which started to operate in 2016 under China’s initiative as “the world’s first multilateral development bank (MDB) dedicated to infrastructure” (Wilson, 2017). In the Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, moreover, the BRI publicly announced its principles for green investment, which later led to the creation of several initiatives for sustainability, such as the International Coalition for Green Development, Sustainable Cities Alliance, Climate Change Cooperation Initiative, Environmental Technology Exchange and Transfer Center, Environmental Big Data Platform, and Green Investment Fund. As part of the Green Belt project, the BRI thus promotes green finance, sustainable energy, green agriculture, eco-urbanization, and social sustainability (Gürcan, 2021a).

Conclusion: Debunking the Myths about the Chinese Miracle

The “cheap labor thesis”, i.e. the myth that China owes its economic success mainly to the supply of cheap labor, is often used to derogate China’s historic success. In many respects, this article serves to debunk this myth by evincing the Chinese economic miracle and how it has been achieved based on empirical evidence. The findings are hoped to provide developing countries with considerable insights into how advanced levels of economic development can be attained through a socialist market economy understood as an early phase in the construction of socialism. This phase consists of building a state-guided economy that leads the market forces, where public ownership is used to fuel techno-industrial development and a sustainable autocentric economy, albeit closely integrated into the global economy. The leadership of a revolutionary party ensures not only strategic coherence and long-term planning, but also correction of market failures and protection from foreign political interference and economic manipulations.

The “cheap labor thesis” is not the only derogatory term to describe the Chinese economic miracle from a Western-centric perspective. Such biased approaches include Mao’s so-called “brutal” legacy, the role of foreign investments and integration into global capitalism, China’s “technology theft”, and “Chinese imperialism”. First and foremost, the evidence suggests that China’s long-term success greatly owes to Mao’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, which laid the foundations for human and physical capital necessary for economic development. Indeed, foreign investments do not choose any destination where labor is cheap, given that attracting foreign investments requires a sound physical and human capital infrastructure in the first place. This being said, it would be equally misleading to reduce China’s economic success to merely attracting foreign investment. Quite the contrary, the Chinese miracle is postulated on an autocentric model. It follows that China’s secret lies in attracting foreign investments and using state power to maximize technology transfer and strengthen the socialist system. Moreover, based on the foreign investment thesis, some argue that the Chinese miracle mostly emanates from China’s renunciation of socialism and integration into global capitalism. In their view, China has developed a shared interest with Western capitalists in joining so-called “global imperialism”. However, the intensification of a new Cold War between the United States and China, which insists on improving its socialist system, rather invalidates such arguments (Gürcan, 2019).

One cannot also equate China’s technology transfer with technology theft. Technology theft is often deployed as a “stigma” to denigrate China and diffuse Sinophobia. At this point, it would be helpful to recall that even the US economy greatly owes its previous success to state-sponsored and systematic technology theft. In his book Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy and the Origins of American Industrial Power, Doron S. Ben-Atar depicts the chief role of spies in launching the American industrial revolution “by illicitly appropriating mechanical and scientific innovations from Europe” (Macleod, 2005: XXI). He describes the systematic technology theft by the US as part of “policies relating to intellectual property played in promoting the appropriation of smuggled technology which led to the emergence of the United States as the premier industrial power in the world” (Macleod, 2005: XXI).

Finally, the globalization of Chinese SOEs is often misinterpreted as a sign of China becoming an imperialist power. Capitalism and imperialist policies inevitably lead to wars. Western capitalism is strongly predicated on systemic wars such as the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and World War II. Moreover, the so-called Western economic success greatly owes to the forced accumulation of wealth through colonialism and slavery rather than the miracle of free markets (Wallerstein, 2002; Williams, 2021; Beckert, & Rockman,2016). In contrast to Western capitalism, the Chinese economic miracle does not originate from forced accumulation, wars, and colonialism. On the contrary, it springs from peaceful development and international cooperation. Understood as such, China’s model also constitutes the living example of the rising relevance and superiority of socialism over the capitalist system.

Copious References to be found at link.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/06/24/d ... ing-world/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Jun 28, 2022 2:54 pm

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China’s long war on poverty
This article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez provides a detailed analysis of China’s ongoing war against poverty. In addition to discussing the recently-concluded targeted poverty alleviation program, in which the government achieved its goal of ending extreme poverty, Carlos discusses the anti-poverty measures taken during the various phases of the Chinese Revolution, including land reform in the liberated areas in the 1930s and 40s; the period of initial socialist construction from 1949; Reform and Opening Up from 1978; and the more recent measures aimed at building common prosperity. He concludes that poverty alleviation, and more broadly the improvement of people’s living standards, is foundational to the entire Chinese socialist project and constitutes a key theme of each of its stages.
In late 2020, the Chinese government announced that its goal of eliminating extreme poverty by 2021 (the centenary of the founding of the Communist Party of China) had been met. At the start of the targeted poverty alleviation program in 2014, just under 100 million people were identified as living below the poverty line; seven years later, the number was zero.

To eradicate extreme poverty in a developing country of 1.4 billion people – which at the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 was one of the poorest countries in the world, characterised by widespread malnutrition, illiteracy, foreign domination and technological backwardness – is without doubt “the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history”, in the words of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.1

What does it mean to not suffer extreme poverty in China? The most easily measurable aspect is having a daily income higher than the World Bank-defined international poverty line of 1.90 USD per day. But according to the Chinese government’s definition, a person can be considered to have left extreme poverty only if the “two assurances and three guarantees” have been met.2 The two assurances are for adequate food and clothing; the three guarantees are for access to medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and at least nine years of free education. Meanwhile, the land ownership system in China means that the rural poor have rent-free access to land and housing – putting them in a very different category to the rural poor elsewhere in the world.

Hence ending extreme poverty is far more than simply ensuring that everyone’s income is greater than the international poverty line; it means their overall basic needs are adequately met; that they enjoy sufficient access to food, clothing, housing, clean water, modern energy, education and healthcare. As Fudan University professor Zhang Weiwei has pointed out, “the concept of poverty in most other developing countries means lack of basics for life like food, electricity and housing. This is not the case with the poor or the poor regions of China.”3

While the achievements of the targeted poverty alleviation program are unprecedented, the Communist Party of China’s preoccupation with poverty alleviation begins not in 2013 but in 1921. The pursuit of common prosperity and ensuring the fundamental human rights of the Chinese people is a thread that runs throughout the history of the Chinese Revolution and of the People’s Republic of China.

The Chinese communists’ first major steps towards poverty alleviation were taken in the liberated zones, starting with the Jiangxi–Fujian Soviet in 1931. Under the prevailing social order, the Chinese peasantry (the vast majority of the population) endured atrocious conditions, regularly suffering famines. A century of foreign domination and warlord rule had only deepened the brutal inequality of the feudal system, with the peasantry having to provide both foot soldiers and grain surpluses.

Land reform was the starting point for addressing this monstrous poverty. In their classic book about the land reform process in a small village in Hebei, Ten Mile Inn, Isabel and David Crook describe the situation prevailing in 1937:

Seventy percent of the people of the village lived in the most dire circumstances. For much of the year they subsisted on husks, wild herbs, and watery gruel ‘so thin you could see the reflection of the moon in it’… Landlords and peasants alike were pitifully poor. Nevertheless there was a profound difference between them. In times of famine, it was the members of the poor families who died or emigrated, who were forced by poverty to kill or sell children whom they could not feed, who were driven by hunger to join the warlord armies, who were imprisoned for the nonpayment of taxes or lost their meagre property by default for nonpayment of debts.4

Land reform acquired different dimensions in different places and at different times, but its essence was “the uncompensated division of landlords’ fields among the peasants and outright cancellation of all accumulated rural debt – that is, the destruction of feudalism.”5 Rural collectivisation in the liberated zones allowed for the entire village population to share both the work and the fruits of the land.

Village collectives established public health and education for the first time. Edgar Snow observed that for example, in the Chinese Soviets, “the Reds attained a higher degree of literacy among the populace in three or four years than had been achieved anywhere else in rural China after centuries.”6

William Hinton wrote in Fanshen about the extraordinary impact that the land reform process had on the rural poor, and particularly women: “For the first time in their lives they felt some measure of control over their destiny. They slept under their own roofs, walked on their own land, planted their own seed, looked forward to harvesting their own crops and, what was perhaps best of all, owed neither grain nor money to any man.”7

This newly-democratised countryside would form the core support base for the Chinese Revolution in the ensuing decades. As Peng Dehuai (who would later become China’s Defence Minister) commented, “tactics are important, but we could not exist if the majority of the people did not support us.”8 The social and economic progress was deeply intertwined with the military resistance against Japanese aggression and, later, the reactionary nationalist armies. Hinton observes that the CPC and its allies “mobilised tens of millions of hard-pressed peasants for resistance, and that resistance, by reaching out to all strata of society, laid the groundwork for the social revolution to come.”9

During the war against Japanese aggression (1937-45), land expropriation in the liberated zones was paused in the interests of building the broadest possible united front to defend Chinese sovereignty. In this period, the CPC and its armies worked with village committees to reduce rents, reduce interest on loans, and mitigate some of the gross injustices of feudal life.

Following the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the land reform program that had been trialled in the liberated areas was expanded throughout the country. Within a few years, landlordism was eliminated and almost the entire peasantry was organised in collective farms. This was, in the words of Xi Jinping, “the most extensive and profound social reform in Chinese history.”10

Bourgeois history tends to regard the period from 1949 until 1978 (the start of Reform and Opening Up) as a failure in economic terms. According to the standard narrative, the Chinese people discovered to their own cost that common ownership and equality run counter to human nature. And yet in terms of improving the wellbeing of the Chinese people, the period of initial socialist construction was an overwhelming success, in spite of setbacks, mistakes, excesses and an adverse external environment. So much is conceded even by Adrian Wood, principal economist on the team that compiled the first World Bank report on China in 1983, who commented that “the previous 30 to 40 years of Chinese development had been remarkably successful.”11

The curse of famine had finally been lifted. There was unprecedented progress in public health, leading to an increase in life expectancy from 36 to 67 in the first three decades following liberation. It’s true that life expectancy increased globally during this period, but in China’s case the increase was particularly steep – from several years below the global average to several years above it. Access to education was universal, and young adult illiteracy was wiped out. China broke out of perennial underdevelopment, building a broad industrial base.

While poor in comparison with most people in the advanced capitalist countries, Chinese people lived significantly better than their counterparts in most other developing countries. In neighbouring India for example, the rural poor continued to face famine, widespread malnutrition, and lack of access to healthcare, education, modern energy and clean water.

Thus it is important to recognise that the period of initial socialist construction played an essential role in China’s long march to end poverty.

A bigger cake

The period of Reform and Opening Up, starting in 1978 with a set of economic policies introduced by the Deng Xiaoping leadership, is not typically discussed in terms of poverty alleviation. And yet it was conceived in precisely those terms: “to rid our country of poverty and backwardness.”12 Professor He Ganqiang of Nanjing University has described the basic goals of the reforms as: “release and develop the social productive forces, boost scientific development, and promote common prosperity for the people.13

China in 1978 was still very much a poor country. Thirty percent of the rural population – around 250 million people – lived below the poverty line. Millions experienced inadequate nutrition. While basic industrialisation had been achieved, productivity was still low, a long way behind the advanced capitalist countries. Per capita food production had only grown 10 percent since 1952, although its distribution was now of course far more equitable.14 Conditions in the countryside were infinitely better than they had been before the revolution, as a result of land reform and the deployment of social welfare; however, the fast-track program of industrialisation placed a heavy demand on the peasantry to provide a grain surplus that would subsidise the country’s overall development.

Kang Bing, former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily, wrote a moving personal account of his childhood growing up in Xi’an:

Growing up in 1960s and 1970s, my childhood memory is closely connected with hunger. Unable to provide enough food to feed its ever-increasing population which almost doubled in about 30 years, the People’s Republic had to adopt a food rationing system to ensure equal distribution of food… In my home city of Xi’an, the monthly quota for one urban resident was 100 grams of cooking oil, half a kilogram of meat, half a dozen eggs and 100 grams of sugar. As for milk, that was given only to families with newborns. Many families today consume the entire monthly quota of oil, meat, eggs and sugar in one day. Although the ration system ensured everybody had a share of the available food and prevented starvation deaths, it led to malnutrition among children, adolescents, adults and the elderly alike.15

Chen Yun, one of the CPC’s foremost economic strategists from the early 1940s onwards, and a leading architect of Reform and Opening Up, warned in 1979: “Our country has more than 900 million people, 80 percent are peasants. The revolution has been won for 30 years and the people are demanding improvements in their lives. Have there been improvements? Yes. But many places still do not have enough to eat, this is a big problem.”16 Significant numbers in South China were migrating to Hong Kong in search of a better life. Prominent Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin puts the case bluntly:

By 1978 Japan had basically caught up with the United States, and South Korea and Taiwan, China, had narrowed the income gap with developed countries. China, although boasting a complete industrial system, an atomic bomb, and a man-made satellite, had a standard of living a far cry from that of the developed world. The new leadership had to improve national economic performance and make its people as rich as their neighbours, or it might lose support and its legitimacy for rule.17

The CPC leadership concluded that scientific and technological development were the crucial factor in pushing forward the evolution of the Chinese Revolution and raising the living standards of the people. To a considerable degree then, Reform and Opening Up was part of a longer-term strategy of catching up with the West. Mao himself placed great emphasis on the value of catching up:

America has 170 million people, we have several times that number, plentiful resources, and a similar climate; catching up is possible. Should we catch up? Of course we should, or else what are you 600 million people doing? … In another 50 or 60 years, we should be ahead of them. This is a responsibility, we have this many people, this much territory, this many resources, and a socialist society. If in 50 or 60 years you still can’t catch up to America, what’s the matter with you? You deserve to have your membership in the human race revoked!18

Lenin wrote in his 1918 article The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government that “socialism calls for a conscious mass advance to greater productivity of labour compared with capitalism.”19 Yet three decades after the establishment of the PRC, China’s labour productivity remained far behind that of the US. Part of the reason for this is that China had been cut off from technological developments in the capitalist world as a result of a near-total blockade imposed by the Truman administration. In the same article, Lenin had opined that “the possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism.” But these up-to-date achievements of capitalism were beyond China’s reach during the 1950s and 60s.

The improvement in relations with the US – starting with Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in 1971 and President Nixon’s visit the following year – opened the way for China to acquire capital goods, attract investment and learn from the West’s scientific, technological and managerial innovations. With the formal establishment of US-China bilateral relations in 1979 and the US granting China most favoured nation in 1980, China also gained access to a global market.

Concurrently, the Chinese leadership was developing a deeper understanding of the situation in the countryside and the need to urgently improve living standards. Isabella Weber writes in her 2021 book How China Escaped Shock Therapy that, somewhat ironically, many of the young economists pushing for reform in the rural economy were urban intellectuals that had been ‘sent down’ to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution: “The experience of rural poverty was the starting point for a movement of young intellectuals who were dedicated to rural reform after their return to the urban centres.”20

Xi Jinping, himself a ‘sent-down youth’ in the 1970s, made a similar point in 1990, while working as party secretary in Ningde, Fujian: “Many Party members are sent to extremely remote, impoverished areas, where they learn about the people’s suffering firsthand… Upon their return, Party members always say that they have developed more empathy for the people, and they feel a stronger sense of responsibility to serve them.”21

Solving the problem of rural poverty thus was the starting point for the reform process, which emphasised productivity, science and technology as means of generating greater social wealth. That process has been spectacularly successful in its poverty reduction aims. Indeed the UN Development Program in 2010 described China as having achieved “the most rapid decline in absolute poverty ever witnessed.”22

Between 1978 and 2013, the number of people living below the World Bank threshold of absolute poverty dropped from 80 percent to 9 percent of the population.23 While China’s per capita GDP was approximately the same as India’s in 1978, by 2020 it was five times higher. Per capita GDP figures are partially misleading here since, in the pre-reform era, many essential goods and services were provided freely to the population (hence the Chinese peasantry enjoyed a far higher standard of living than the Indian peasantry, in spite having a similar income). Nonetheless, the vast majority of Chinese people experienced a dramatic improvement in living standards in the decades following the adoption of Reform and Opening Up.

Food production increased substantially, such that “China finally produced enough grain to abolish grain rationing altogether.”24 People also benefitted from a much more varied diet. In the 1980s, key consumer goods such as refrigerators and washing machines went from being relatively rare to being almost universal. The rate of access to clean water and modern energy also increased dramatically.

British economist John Ross judges that “the most comprehensive criteria for judging the overall impact of social and environmental conditions in a country is average life expectancy – as this sums up and balances the combined effect of all positive and negative economic, social, environmental, health, educational and other trends.”25 Average life expectancy in China in 1975 was 62 – impressive for a large developing country at the time, certainly when compared with India’s 49. However in the US it was 71. By 2021, life expectancy in both China and the US was 77.

Infant mortality rate is another important poverty indicator. Colin Mackerras notes that infant mortality in China “fell from 37.6 deaths per 1,000 live births around the late 1970s to 5.4 per 1,000 in 2020, just lower than the United States, where it was 5.69 per 1000 live births the same year.”26

Arthur Kroeber writes that between 1988 and 2008, average per capita income in China grew by 229 percent – “ten times the global average of 24 percent, and far ahead of the rates for India (34 percent).”27 Noting that this increased income was by no means limited to the wealthy, Kroeber points out that whereas in 1994 a Chinese factory worker made only a quarter of the wage of their counterpart in Thailand, by 2008, the Chinese worker was earning 25 percent more than the Thai worker.28

Thus it is beyond dispute that economic reforms have been tremendously impactful in terms of reducing poverty in China. What is also beyond dispute is that inequality has grown at a startling rate. While the cake is much bigger – China’s GDP rose from 150 billion USD in 1978 to 17.7 trillion USD in 2021 – it has been divided very unequally.29 But even the smallest slices are much larger than they were. The late Egyptian political scientist Samir Amin, who was by no means uncritical of Chinese socialism, pointed out that “the growth of income has been a reality for almost all the population even if that growth has been much higher for some than it has been for the others.” Therefore in China, “growing inequality has been accompanied by reduction of poverty”, unlike in the vast majority of countries of the Global South, where “growth – and in some cases significant high growth – has benefited only a minority.”30

The Italian Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo made a profound analysis of the inequalities introduced as a result of China’s market reforms. He pointed out that there are two types of inequality to consider: “1) inequality existing on the global scale between the most and least developed countries; and 2) the inequality existing within each individual country.” Losurdo states that China’s rise constitutes a most extraordinary contribution to the fight against global-scale inequality. He also points to the existence of an “absolute inequality that exists between life and death” which Chinese socialism has addressed with extraordinary success, “eliminating once and for all the absolute qualitative inequality inherent in starvation and the risk of starvation.”31

None of which is to say that inequality in China is not a problem. It is a serious problem, and is recognised as such by China’s government, which has been actively working to reduce inequality for the last two decades. Kroeber notes that since 2000, Beijing has launched “a host of policies specifically designed to reduce urban-rural inequality and inequalities between poor and rich regions. Programs to boost rural incomes have included: a relaxation of rules requiring farmers to grow grain, enabling them to increase production of more profitable cash crops; the easing and finally abolition of taxes and fees on agricultural production; a major push to build farm-to-market roads, helping farmers gain access to richer urban consumers; and stepped-up investments in food processing industries.”32

All this has been combined with vast infrastructure development programs, particularly in the poorer Western and Central regions. Kroeber observes that the urban-rural income gap started to shrink from 2009. In addition to the urban-rural gap, inequality between lower-income groups and higher-income groups has also been waning since 2010. Compulsory free 9-year education was established in 2007, and the rural cooperative medical insurance system was set up in 2003. The dibao rural minimum living standard guarantee (dibao) program, first introduced in Shanghai in 1993, is “one of the largest minimum income cash transfer schemes in the world.”33 These and other steps to restore a functioning social welfare system aim to address the inequality and unfairness associated with the market economy.

In sum, it should be clear that four decades of market reforms and the expansion of private capital, while introducing a level of inequality that would have been unimaginable in pre-1978 China, have nevertheless played an indispensable role in reducing poverty. Indeed eliminating poverty was the central motivating force of reform and opening up. As Deng Xiaoping said in 1987: “to uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty.”34

Targeted poverty alleviation

At the 18th National Congress of the CPC in 2012, General Secretary Xi Jinping announced the two centenary goals: “realising a moderately prosperous society by the centenary of the CPC in 2021 and in turning China into a prosperous, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious modern socialist country by the centenary of the People’s Republic of China in 2049.”35 The most important component of becoming a “moderately prosperous society” was to eliminate absolute poverty. Towards this goal, in 2014, China’s government embarked upon the largest systematic poverty alleviation program in history.

Researchers at the Tricontinental Institute have published a dossier about the targeted poverty alleviation program, Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China, based on extensive research, case studies and interviews, carried out by a small team on the ground in China. The dossier describes the four questions that guided implementation of the program: “Who should be lifted out of poverty? Who carries out the work? What measures need to be taken to address poverty? How can evaluations be done to ensure that people remain out of poverty?”36

To help answer the first question, that is, to identify those living in extreme poverty, the dossier notes that 800,000 CPC cadres, community workers and volunteers were mobilised to “visit and survey every household across the country, identifying 89.62 million poor people in 29.48 million households and 128,000 villages.” Having identified those living below the poverty line, the cadres worked with each family and community to identify specific measures to improve their situation.

As noted in the introduction to this article, the Chinese government’s definition of extreme poverty is not based solely on income level, but also includes the two assurances (for adequate food and clothing) and three guarantees (access to medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and at least nine years of free education).37 As such, permanently ending extreme poverty is not a unidimensional problem that can be solved simply by transferring cash to poor families.

To create specific, family- and community-specific solutions to poverty has required an extraordinary mobilisation. “Three million carefully selected cadres were dispatched to poor villages, forming 255,000 teams that reside there. Living in humble conditions for generally one to three years at a time, the teams worked alongside poor peasants, local officials, and volunteers until each household was lifted out of poverty… By 2015, all poor villages had a resident team, and every poor household had an assigned cadre to help in the process of being lifted, and more importantly, of lifting themselves out of poverty.”38

The targeted poverty alleviation campaign used a wide array of methods. Millions of jobs were created through the development of local production units (with the corresponding access to funding, training, equipment and markets), and also through the innovative use of technology, for example using e-commerce to connect small rural businesses with China’s vast online market. A report by China’s State Council Information Office discusses the launch of e-commerce projects throughout the countryside: “All 832 poor counties have been included in the initiative… The number of e-businesses in these counties grew from 1.32 million in 2016 to 3.11 million in 2020.”39

As part of the poverty alleviation program, many industries have been transferred from the urban coastal areas to the rural inland zones, with more than 300,000 industrial bases having been built in the last decade. The government “has facilitated the transfer of food processing, clothes manufacturing, and other labour-intensive industries from the east to the west. With the growth of such specialty industries, poor areas have gained economic momentum.”40 Thus while working to eliminate poverty, China is also making progress towards the vision outlined by Marx and Engels 150 years ago of “abolishing the antithesis between town and country”.41

The poverty alleviation program is also connected to China’s bid to create an ‘ecological civilisation’, protecting ecosystems, reducing pollution and getting to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. For example, millions of people have been employed in the restoration and protection of forests and grasslands.42

Education also plays an important role in poverty alleviation, and in recent years several million teachers have been dispatched to the poorer Central and Western regions.43 In the decade from 2010 to 2020, the average number of years of education for Chinese adults increased from nine to ten, and the number of people with tertiary education nearly doubled, from 8,930 to 15,467 per 100,000.44 Remote learning techniques have also been widely deployed in impoverished areas, greatly aided by improvements in communications infrastructure: over 98 percent of poor villages now have access to optical fibre communications and 4G technology, up from less than 70 percent in 2017.45

The authors of the Tricontinental dossier note that, “for families who are living in extremely remote areas or exposed to frequent natural disasters, it is near impossible to break the cycle of poverty without moving to more habitable environments.” As such, almost 10 million people were voluntarily relocated from remote zones to newly built urban communities, which included schools, hospitals, childcare facilities and cultural centres.

As noted at the beginning of the article, the targeted poverty alleviation program succeeded in reducing the number of people living in absolute poverty from just under 100 million people to zero. As Xi Jinping observed, “thanks to the sustained efforts of the Chinese people from generation to generation, those who once lived in poverty no longer have to worry about food or clothing or access to education, housing and medical insurance.”46

What’s more, the goal of eliminating extreme poverty was fulfilled while the country was concurrently battling a pandemic which has driven millions into poverty throughout the world. The success of this campaign should be considered as testament to China’s socialist system: no state with a capitalist ruling class has ever made such a comprehensive and systematic effort to provide people’s most basic human rights. The orientation of government policy towards the needs of the poor; the strong institutional and infrastructural framework; and the willingness of millions of cadre to participate in the campaign: all these are reflections of a vibrant Chinese socialism.

Towards common prosperity

With the completion of the targeted poverty alleviation campaign and the accomplishment of the first centenary goal, China has scored an important victory; but the long war on poverty continues, and the second centenary goal has now come into sharper focus. Building a great modern socialist country in all respects implies taking on relative poverty, improving per capita GDP, revitalising rural areas, and reducing inequality between regions and groups. It is time for “making the cake bigger and better and sharing it fairly through rational institutional arrangements.”47

In an article entitled Making Solid Progress Toward Common Prosperity, based on a speech at the 10th meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Affairs Commission on 17 August 2021, Xi Jinping explained that the success of the targeted poverty alleviation campaign had “created conditions conducive to bringing about prosperity for all,” and that China was now advancing into “a historical stage in which we will make solid steps toward common prosperity.”48

In a detailed analysis of the concept of common prosperity, British academic Michael Dunford notes that the phrase first appeared in an article in People’s Daily on 25th September 1953, and was posed as a key goal of China’s socialist construction.49 Deng Xiaoping talked frequently about common prosperity, highlighting that the principle of “letting a few get rich first” was only a means of accelerating the advance of the entire population, and that the basic aims and structures of socialism should not be thrown out with the introduction of certain elements of capitalism:

Wealth in a socialist society belongs to the people. To get rich in a socialist society means prosperity for the entire people. The principles of socialism are: first, development of production and second, common prosperity. We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster.50

Jiang Zemin also often invoked the idea of common prosperity: “We will ensure that our people will reap the benefit of continued economic growth and gradually achieve common prosperity.”51 In his report to the Eighteenth National Congress of the CPC, Hu Jintao described common prosperity as “the fundamental principle of socialism with Chinese characteristics”, adding that the government must “adjust the pattern of national income distribution, tighten its regulation by secondary distribution and work hard to narrow income gaps so that all the people can share in more fruits of development in a fair way and move steadily toward common prosperity.”52

Thus each generation of the leadership of the People’s Republic of China has actively promoted the concept of common prosperity. However, with the completion of the targeted poverty alleviation program, common prosperity becomes a major policy priority. In a speech given in January 2021 at a seminar for provincial and ministerial level officials on studying and implementing the guiding principles of the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, Xi Jinping said:

Realising common prosperity is more than an economic goal. It is a major political issue that bears on our Party’s governance foundation. We cannot allow the gap between the rich and the poor to continue growing… We cannot permit the wealth gap to become an unbridgeable gulf… We must be proactive about narrowing the gaps between regions, between urban and rural areas, and between rich and poor people. We should promote all-around social progress and well-rounded personal development, and advocate social fairness and justice, so that our people enjoy the fruits of development in a fairer way. We should see that people have a stronger sense of fulfilment, happiness, and security and make them feel that common prosperity is not an empty slogan but a concrete fact that they can see and feel for themselves.53

In the above-cited article, Making Solid Progress Toward Common Prosperity, Xi Jinping put forward various targets and timelines: to make “solid progress toward bringing prosperity to all”, reducing income inequality by the end of the 14th five-year plan in 2025; ensuring equitable access to basic public services by 2035; and “basically achieving” common prosperity by 2049, with “gaps between individual incomes and actual consumption levels narrowed to an appropriate range.” Xi called for an action plan to be formulated with these targets in mind. And since the Chinese government is not in the habit of making empty promises, the action plan should include “rational and workable systems of targets and methods of evaluation.”

The renewed emphasis on common prosperity also sends a message about maintaining the primacy of the public sector of China’s economy, since it is the role of the state-owned companies, government planning and macroeconomic regulation which ensures the country’s overall economic activity serves the people as a whole. As the influential Chinese academic Cheng Enfu pointed out in 2014: “If the public economy is not treated as dominant in the socialist economy, government’s adjustment function will be weakened greatly, which will greatly hinder the implementation of the economic and social development strategy of the country and the country will lack the economic basis that will guarantee the fundamental interest of the masses and common prosperity.”54

Hu Leming, Deputy Director of the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, makes a similar point about the relationship between the public economy and the pursuit of common prosperity: “Without the leading position of the public economy, there will be no solid economic basis and powerful material means and basis for governance by the Communist Party, nor for the whole socialist superstructure, and we will have no means to prevent growing income disparity and will not be able to realise common prosperity.”55

Deng Xiaoping often insisted that “predominance of public ownership and common prosperity are the two fundamental socialist principles that we must adhere to.”56 The renewed emphasis on common prosperity is an important step in the ongoing attempts to “strike a proper balance between efficiency and fairness”,57 to impose limits on the influence of the owners of capital, to reassert the primacy of the state-owned economy and the interests of the working class, and to reiterate that the CPC will never “take the evil road of changing our flags and banners.”58

While the common prosperity campaign is in its early stages, there have already been a number of important developments, including a regulatory crackdown on the private education sector,59 a set of measures to prevent gaming addition among children,60 the imposition of stricter rent controls,61 and several laws and regulations to protect the rights of workers in the “gig economy”. Tech companies “must now sign labour contracts with their gig workers, and provide them with the insurance coverage of state-run insurers”62; furthermore, China’s Trade Union Law has been revised to enable and encourage unionisation of gig economy workers.63

China’s success in eliminating extreme poverty is “far from a full stop” and we can expect the Chinese party and government to continue “consolidating and expanding poverty alleviation achievements,”64 deepening the campaign to end relative poverty and achieve common prosperity.

Meanwhile in the advanced capitalist countries, where the capitalist class is the ruling class, and where neoliberal economic theory has dominated for the last four decades, we are seeing an alarming rise in poverty and inequality. Rather than pursuing common prosperity, the US and its allies are drifting towards mass destitution. This disparity highlights that China’s continuing achievements in poverty alleviation are a function of its socialist system. As Deng Xiaoping said in 1987, ultimately, “only the socialist system can eradicate poverty.”65

https://socialistchina.org/2022/06/19/c ... n-poverty/

Extensive references at link.

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Big Power Competition in the post-pandemic world order and the Belt and Road Initiative
As part of its Friends of the Silk Road Series, the Pakistan China Institute organised a webinar on the theme, ‘Big Power Competition in the Post-Pandemic World Order and the Belt and Road Initiative’ on June 20th. Co-Editor of Friends of Socialist China Keith Bennett made a presentation on ‘What to Expect in big power competition – how the Global South Should Respond’. We print his remarks below.

The event was chaired by Tehmina Janjua, former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan. The other speakers were Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, Chairman of the Defence Committee of the Pakistan Senate and of the Pakistan China Institute; Mustafa Hyder Sayed, Executive Director of the Pakistan China Institute; Jayanath Colombage, former Foreign Secretary of Sri Lanka and former Commander of the Sri Lankan Navy; Suos Yara, Member of the Central Committee of the Cambodia People’s Party, Spokesperson and Vice-Chair of its Commission for External Relations, as well as member of the National Assembly of Cambodia and Chairman of its Commission of Foreign Affairs, International Cooperation, Media and Information; Wang Wen, Executive Dean of the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Beijing’s Renmin University; and William Jones, Senior Non-Resident Fellow of the Chongyang Institute.

The full event stream is also embedded below.



Dear Friends

Thank you to the Pakistan China Institute for your invitation to speak at this important and timely webinar. And thank you for your consistent and sincere support to Friends of Socialist China which we greatly value.

It is nearly 33 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And nearly 31 years since the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin and the USSR ceased to exist. Such was the air of triumphalism that one political philosopher was even moved to declare the end of history.

In return, we were promised a peace dividend. But for the peoples of the Global South, in particular, there was no dividend. And there was no peace. For the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and a number of other countries there was only starvation sanctions and devastating war.

Regarding the bigger countries outside the imperialist camp, Russia was treated as a humiliated and defeated nation. Its people impoverished. The promise that there would be no NATO expansion broken not once but five times. An essential background for anyone wishing to understand Russia’s current special military operation in Ukraine.

In the case of China, the People’s Republic was not yet the economic, political and military power that it is today. It was still appropriate to follow Deng Xiaoping’s maxim of not taking the lead, biding one’s time and concealing one’s strength. And, despite the defeat of the attempted counter-revolution in 1989, there were still many in the west who pinned their hopes on an evolution, peaceful or otherwise, to capitalism and on the demise or transformation of the Communist Party of China.

How different the situation looks in 2022.

Under President Putin, Russia stabilised its society, rebuilt its economy and restored the country’s self-respect.

The transformation of China, particularly since the 18th Party Congress in 2012, has of course been completely phenomenal. China is now the world’s second largest economy, the largest by some methods of calculation, extreme poverty has been eliminated, and the country is well on the road to becoming a great, modern, democratic, prosperous, civilised and beautiful socialist country.

And China is, as Comrade Xi Jinping said at the 19th Party Congress, “moving closer to centre stage and making greater contributions to humanity.” Socialism with Chinese characteristics, he further pointed out, “offers a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.”

Today, no major problem in the world is capable of solution without the active involvement of China.

For its part, the US has seemingly ripped up decades of the Kissinger and Brzezinski playbooks, which, with it must be said considerable success, had sought to shore up US hegemony by ensuring that Moscow and Beijing remained divided and exacerbating that division to the greatest possible extent.

Instead, determined, with just a slight blip under President Trump, to promote aggressive, hostile, and confrontational policies towards both these great powers, the US, together with a handful of followers, has succeeded only in driving Russia and China closer together, to the extent that they now describe themselves as closer than allies and affirm that their friendship has no limits.

For the other countries of the Global South, whilst they are still gravely challenged and threatened by the imperialist powers, and still face manifold difficulties, these developments open up a range of opportunities and possibilities.

A key example is the decisive military action taken by Russia at the request of the Syrian Arab Republic to defend that country from fundamentalist terrorism and its external backers.

On the diplomatic level, one could cite the repeated joint vetoes cast in the United Nations Security Council by Russia and China in support of Syria and the very welcome recent first joint China/Russia veto, countering the US move to impose further sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

On the economic front, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the greatest investment and infrastructure programme and opportunity in history, holds out the possibility of development of the national economy, enhanced connectivity, and improvement of people’s living standards in countries across the Global South and even beyond.

On my visit to Pakistan in 2017, from Karot to Gwadar, I was able to see the transformative potential and reality of the BRI’s flagship China Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Indeed, the all-weather friendship and iron brotherhood between China and Pakistan is a true model for relations between developing countries and neighbouring countries with different social systems.

That this relationship is not hostage to domestic political circumstances can be seen from Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari making China the destination for his first official bilateral visit.

Faced with both the challenges and opportunities presented by the current global situation the countries of the Global South need above all to reinforce and strengthen their unity and solidarity – politically, diplomatically, economically, militarily, culturally, scientifically, and socially.

This entails strengthening and further consolidating the regional and wider organisations created over the years, including the BRICS, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Eurasian Economic Union, Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, African Union, the Bolivarian Alliance ALBA, Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), Caribbean Community (Caricom), and so on.

Particular importance should be attached at this stage to economic cooperation, for example through increased trade, mutual investment and joint ventures, the creation of free trade areas, regional integration, and so on. A key link is to break the international hegemony of the US dollar. The introduction of currency swap arrangements, new international payments systems and mechanisms, the internationalisation of the RMB, the creation and development of sovereign digital currencies, such as that initiated by China, non-dollar pricing and trading of key commodities, and moves to develop regional common currencies, such as the recent such initiative by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), are all vital to economic development and especially to overcome the truly genocidal use of unilateral sanctions, along with the freezing and outright theft of foreign exchange and gold reserves, property and other assets that, from Afghanistan to Venezuela to Russia, are being increasingly used to blackmail, bully, threaten, cajole, punish and economically cripple both sovereign states and their nationals.

The Global South needs to put up the banner of collective self-reliance. In this regard, the Non-Aligned Movement needs to be further revived and strengthened as a universal organisation of the Global South. Non-alignment is not neutrality. It is the collective independent space in world affairs created by the countries of the Global South themselves. In this regard, we commend, in particular, the work of the immediate past chair of the NAM, Bolivarian Venezuela, and its current chair, Azerbaijan, and attach positive significance to last week’s visit to Baku by Venezuelan President Maduro.

The countries of the Global South of course vary widely – in size, population, level and stage of economic development, social and political system, religious belief, culture and so on. But they all share a legacy of imperialist or colonial bullying and oppression, and they all also share the common tasks of maintaining their independence, developing their national economies, and improving their people’s livelihood. The differences between the countries of the Global South should not be used or allowed to divide them. Unity is strength.

Thank you for your attention.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/06/21/b ... nitiative/

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Chinese aid gives a lift to Pacific island countries
By KARL WILSON in Sydney | China Daily | Updated: 2022-06-27 09:21

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China hands over a new hospital in the province of Enga to the government of Papua New Guinea on June 20. [Photo/pg.china-embassy.gov.cn]

China has always been supportive of Pacific island countries, serving as an important development partner for their needs, experts say.

China handed over a new hospital in the province of Enga to the government of Papua New Guinea on June 20 which will help improve medical services for local people. China's Belt and Road Initiative programs have brought varied tangible fruits to people on these islands.

Addressing the handover ceremony in the Engan capital, Wabag, PNG Prime Minister James Marape thanked China for its support for the high-quality project, saying the PNG government is willing to deepen collaboration with China in all areas, according to a report by Xinhua.

Peter Ipatas, governor of Enga Province, said it was a dream for the people of Enga and PNG to have a medical center with advanced technologies, and thanks to China's help the dream had come true.

China's ambassador to PNG, Zeng Fanhua, called the project the latest outcome of bilateral collaboration in health and said such collaboration demonstrates friendship as well as mutual support and trust.

Inia Batikoto Seruiratu, Fiji's minister for defense, national security and policing, said recently that China is a "key development partner" in the Pacific. Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, he said: "That is a known fact, and that is accepted as well in the region."

The Pacific islands region respects what China has done in terms of cooperation.

Speaking of the creation of fear about the region through disinformation and misinformation, Seruiratu said: "We all have the sovereign right to make our own decisions."

Bringing prosperity

China is bringing prosperity to some of the world's most disadvantaged people, be it through providing scholarships, building hospitals and schools, or other vital infrastructure, observers say.

Leon Perera, chairman of Spire Research and Consulting in Singapore, said Pacific island states are benefiting from closer relations with China. "A point of reference would be how China has deepened ties with African states; Central Asian states through the Belt and Road Initiative; and other regional states such as Laos," he told China Daily.

Ying Zhu, director of the Australian Centre for Asian Business at the University of South Australia, said China wants to help Pacific island countries to develop their economies.

"This means building the infrastructure needed to bring goods to markets and offering loans. China also helps in social development such as education and health. …This is where the Belt and Road Initiative is so important."

Perera said one area of infrastructure "clearly on the minds of Pacific island leaders" involves coastal defenses against sea-level rise due to climate change.

Chinese tourists have been a boon to many countries worldwide, he said, and China has provided COVID-19 support such as vaccines.

Among other areas, China can help provide financial support and expertise to Pacific island governments in the field of security, as was seen in the recently announced China-Solomon Islands security pact, he said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 68b2d.html

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The US conducted 105 nuclear tests in the Pacific, mainly in the Marshall islands, between 1946 and 1962. Image: Wikipedia

The United States- the Pacific bully
Originally published: The United States- the Pacific bully on Jun 24, 2022 by Brian Toohey (more by The United States- the Pacific bully) (Posted Jun 25, 2022)

The US dominates the Pacific Islands to an extent China can never hope to achieve. With Australia’s support, the US is now engaged in an arms build-up in its Pacific territories and de-facto colonies in a little known boost to its containment of China.

The US has three self-governing territories in the Pacific: Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Guam hosts some of the US’s most important bases the world. After a large scale military expansion on one of the main islands in the Northern Marianas, Tinian is expected to rival Guam in importance in coming years.

The US also has Compacts of Free Association with three countries covering thousands of islands in the Pacific – the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau and the Marshall Islands. The compacts are a de-facto form of colonialism which gives the US exclusive military access to these countries’ land and maritime surrounds in return for defence guarantees and financial assistance.

The Federated States of Micronesia has a population of around 100,000. It has a land area of 702 square km on 607 islands amid 2,600,000 square km of ocean. The US will build a new base there. The residents are concerned about the impact of the base as their islands are often tiny and the landscape important to their identity. The US is also establishing a new military base on Palau, which has 340 islands and a total population of just over 18,000. The Marshall Islands landmass is 181 square km amid 466,000 square km of ocean. Although the Kwajalein atoll is only 15 square km, it is exclusively a military base with an extraordinary array of US activities; including a key role in US testing interceptors aimed ballistic missiles.

The Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi recently visited seven South Pacific countries and signed various agreements in some, including the provision of infrastructure and police training , but he failed to get support for a 10-country trade agreement. He did not seek permission to build a navy base in the Solomon Island or anywhere else. Nevertheless, some saw the visit as an act of Chinese aggression. It is an odd view of aggression compared to the damage done by US, British and French testing of thermonuclear (also called hydrogen) bombs on Pacific islands, or when Australia helped invade Iraq.

The US conducted 105 nuclear tests in the Pacific, mainly in the Marshall islands, between 1946 and 1962, as part oftits program to develop thermonuclear bombs. Operational weapons were sometimes tested, including a submarine-launched war head. One test in 1952 completely vaporised the island of Eluglab. In 1954, a thermonuclear bomb tested on Bikini atoll exploded with force of 15 megatons – over 1,000 times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The radioactive cloud engulfed a Japanese fishing boat about 80 miles away in a white powder that poisoned the crew. One died from the exposure seven months later and 15 more in following years.

The radioactivity affected the drinking water and food. Children played in the ash-like powder. Some ate it. Marshall Islanders over a wide area were subject to abnormal radiological doses. In 2005, the US National Cancer Institute reported that the risk of contracting cancer for those exposed to the fallout was over one in three.

Nevertheless, in 1946, a US Navy Commodore had asked 167 people living on Bikini atoll to re-locate so their home could be used use “for the good of mankind”. They were resettled in 1969, but had to be evacuated again after high radiation levels were detected.

There has been some increase in the pathetically low initial compensation. But it is hard to compensate for the environmental damage and loss of cultural heritage, traditional customs and skills. In 2014, the Marshall Islands attempted to sue the US and eight other nuclear armed nations, for failing to move towards nuclear disarmament as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. A US Court dismissed the suit in 2017.

Britain tested 40 thermonuclear bombs on an islands in the Kiribati group between 1957 and 1962. Troops from Britain , Fiji (then a British colony), and New Zealand worked on the tests. Many were harmed by radiation and other causes. As usual, the locals were treated badly and their water and lands polluted.

France conducted 41 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1966 and 1974 in French Polynesia. It then conducted 140 underground, primarily of thermonuclear bombs, until 1996. One of the islands used was subject to cracking. In an act of state terrorism, French secret service frogman killed a photographer when they bombed a Green Peace protest ship in Auckland harbour on its way to the French nuclear testing area.

Labor’s defence minister, Richard Marles now refers to France as a Pacific county, despite the fact that it is a European country with a tenuous justification for holding onto its colonial possessions in the Pacific – New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Labor used to oppose colonialism. Now it seems it’s good if the colonial power opposes China.

The South Pacific Forum comprises 18 members: Australia, Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, French Polynesia, Kiribati, Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Republic of Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Not all are normally considered to be in the South Pacific. The inclusion of three countries with Compacts of Free Association with the US and two French possessions basically guarantees they will vote for what the US or France wants.

However, the legacy of the contemptuous disregard for the indigenous residents during massive hydrogen bomb tests ensures that nuclear issues, including the passage of nuclear submarines, remain sensitive.

At the time of the negotiation of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty in 1985 Paul Malone wrote that it was for a “partial nuclear free zone”, as it did not prohibit the “passage of nuclear-armed ships or aircraft through the region”. Malone reported that some Pacific Island countries wanted to be Treaty to prohibit access to nuclear-armed warships. The then Prime Minister Bob Hawke insisted on that omission which reflected the wishes of the US. However, nuclear issues have been revived by the creation of the 2021AUKUS pact in which Australia is committed to buying nuclear powered submarines.

A journalist and researcher based in the Pacific, Nic Maclellan says, “Any hope that Australia’s island neighbours will welcome further nuclearisation of the region is folly. Within days of the UKUS announcement, statements from Pacific leaders, community elders and media organisations highlighted the persistence of the deep antinuclear sentiment.

The general secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwa tweeted

“Shame Australia, Shame.” The Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare told the UN General Assembly his nation “would like to keep our region nuclear-free . . . We do not support any form of militarisation in our region that could threaten regional and international peace and stability.”

The Kiribati President Taneti Maamau told the ABC, “Our people are victims of nuclear testing. We still have trauma. With anything to do with nuclear, we thought it would be a courtesy to discuss it with your neighbours”. He said he was especially concerned about Australia developing nuclear powered submarines which he said “puts the region at risk”

Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama tweeted that his father was among the Fijian soldiers the British sent to help with their nuclear bomb tests. He said, “To honour the sacrifice of all those who have suffered due to these weapons, Fiji will never stop working towards a global nuclear ban.”

The New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern repeated that nuclear submarines “can’t come into our internal waters”. New Zealand and nine South Pacific Forum countries have ratified the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Australia hasn’t. The Samoa Observer wrote, “It is a relief seeing Prime Minister Ardern continuing to maintain the tradition of her predecessors by promoting a nuclear-free Pacific; probably she is the only true friend of the Pacific Islands.”

https://mronline.org/2022/06/25/the-uni ... fic-bully/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Jun 30, 2022 2:21 pm

China refuses to be a strategic "challenge" for NATO

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The spokesman for the Chinese Mission to the European Union believes that NATO's new strategic concept has a huge ideological bias. | Photo: EFE
Published June 30, 2022

China also warned that it will respond in a coordinated manner to those who undermine its interests.

China on Wednesday rejected NATO's new strategic concept of the Asian giant, labeling it a challenge to Western interests, values ​​and security, only for the purpose of malicious and smear attacks.

The spokesman for the Chinese Mission to the European Union (EU) said that the so-called strategic concept is full of Cold War thoughts and ideological bias and indicated that from his Government "We firmly oppose".

“NATO is a remnant of the Cold War and the largest military alliance in the world. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, it has still not abandoned its thinking and practice of creating "enemies" and engaging in bloc confrontation. The Strategic Concept states that other countries pose challenges, but it is NATO that is creating problems around the world,” he remarked.


Likewise, he questioned the proclamation of the Atlantic Alliance of being a defensive organization that "defends the international order based on norms", since this instance bypasses the Security Council of the United Nations Organization (UN) and has waged war against sovereign states.

“NATO claims its defense zone will go no further than the North Atlantic, but it has flexed its muscles in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years and has sought to provoke a bloc confrontation here, as it has in Europe. . Who is challenging global security and undermining world peace? Are there any wars or conflicts over the years that NATO is not involved in?” she stressed.

In this way, China reaffirmed its independent foreign policy of peace, standing out as "a force for world peace, a contributor to global development and a defender of the international order."


“China has never started a war or invaded an inch of other countries' land. We do not interfere in the internal affairs of others or export ideology, much less engage in long-arm jurisdictions, unilateral sanctions, or economic coercion,” she remarked.

Likewise, he guaranteed that the Asian giant defends the international system with the UN at its center, on the basis of international law and the basic norms of international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

"We urge NATO to stop provoking confrontation by drawing ideological lines, abandon the Cold War mentality and zero-sum game approach, and stop spreading disinformation and provocative statements against China," he added.

Similarly, he warned that, "given that NATO positions China as a "systemic challenge", we must pay close attention and respond in a coordinated manner that undermine China's interests, we will give firm and energetic responses," he concluded.

The Alliance updated this Wednesday, within the framework of its summit in Madrid, the Spanish capital, its Strategic Concept and for the first time pointed to China among the red alerts for the boost in its military development, nuclear capacity, the eventual reunification of Taiwan and regional territorial disputes.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/china-re ... -0013.html

Google Translator

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NATO's Asia-Pacific move a triple trap
By Han Zhuoxi/Zhai Kun | China Daily | Updated: 2022-06-30 08:52

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SHI YU/CHINA DAILY

The heads of state or government of Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and Japan have been invited to attend the ongoing three-day NATO Summit in Madrid which concludes on Thursday, signaling the military alliance's move to expand to the Asia-Pacific region with the aim of helping the United States contain China. It seems some NATO members are trying to shift NATO's focus to check China's peaceful rise and create chaos in an era of peace and development.

Madrid is hosting the NATO Summit for the second time since Spain joined the transatlantic military alliance in 1982. The first time Madrid played host to the summit in 1997, NATO member states discussed the organization's eastward expansion, with Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joining the bloc the same year.

NATO's decision to hold the summit in Madrid again reflects its intention to expand, by admitting not only Sweden and Finland that have already applied to join the bloc but also paving the way for Japan, the ROK, New Zealand and Australia to participate in NATO's activities. Yet the participation of the Asia-Pacific countries in the summit is not in line with the geographical scope of the NATO agreement, and the security issues in Europe and the Asia-Pacific are being forcibly linked together.

It is clear that NATO's eastward expansion is aimed at encircling Russia, however its expansion into the Asia-Pacific is designed to contain China's development, as NATO has been hyping up the "China challenge" in recent years. For example, in 2019, NATO issued the "London Declaration" which for the first time described China as a country that presents "both opportunities and challenges". Since then, NATO has increased vigilance against China, and mentioned China in its annual report for four consecutive years.

It is also clear that the US is driving NATO's expansion. On April 21-22, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman and European External Action Service Secretary General Stefano Sannino co-chaired the third "EU-US Dialogue on China" and the second EU-US consultation on the "Indo-Pacific".

The main purpose of Sherman's visit to Europe then was to meet with NATO's and Washington's European allies to discuss issues such as the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the "China challenge", and the expansion of NATO and the European Union into the "Indo-Pacific" region. Actually, US Senator Ben Sasse has been urging the US to create a "NATO for the Pacific" in response to China's "offensive". Indeed, the US is pushing for NATO's expansion in order to reduce the cost of its own "strategic competition" with China.

Taking advantage of the developments in the West, NATO announced that a new strategic concept-that China's rise poses a challenge to NATO's security-will be adopted at the Madrid summit. On June 17, NATO's official website posted an update on its ties with Asia-Pacific partners, saying "relations with like-minded partners across the globe are increasingly important to address cross-cutting security issues and global challenges". Hence, its four Asia-Pacific partners were invited to attend the Madrid summit.

However, NATO may be caught in a triple trap if it expands into the Asia-Pacific, leading to its inevitable decline. First is the security trap. With the disputes between China and the US intensifying, many experts have urged the two sides to avoid the Thucydides trap. Yet, ignoring sage advice, the US pressed ahead with NATO's eastward expansion, which triggered the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which will also heighten tensions in the Taiwan Straits, and intensify the competition between Beijing and Washington. As such, contrary to its claim of guaranteeing security, the US-led NATO has made the world more insecure.

Second is the democratic trap. NATO's expansion into the Asia-Pacific means even small European countries have to pay for the military undertakings in a region with which they have no geographical relation. This in turn could affect European coalition. More important, NATO claims to safeguard "human rights, rule of law and democracy", but despite that the US is desperate to maintain its global hegemony. So, with the US at its helm, how can NATO safeguard democracy?

The third is the order trap. According to sociologist Charles Tilly's theory "war made the state and the state made war." The anxiety and insecurity created by NATO's expansion highlight the shortcomings of the world order based on the Western concept of sovereign states. Hence, in the long run, NATO's expansion will upset the West-dominated world order.

In his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the BRICS Business Forum on June 22, President Xi Jinping said that certain countries, in their attempt to expand military alliances to pursue absolute security, have coerced other countries to choose sides and created confrontations. In doing so, they have violated other countries' rights and interests, he said.

Driven by the US, NATO's expansion has amplified regional and global security issues, resulting in a waste of resources, public panic and out-of-control policies. That could slow down global development, and if global development stagnates for long, the triple trap around NATO will tighten, eventually leading to its decline.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 696b3.html

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U.S. Marines participate in amphibious assault exercise in 2020 (Shutterstock)

US AND NATO ESCALATE TENSIONS WITH ASIA-PACIFIC WAR GAMES

Civil society opposition to U.S. militarization of the Pacific is growing.
By Ann Wright | June 29, 2022

While the world’s attention is focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, halfway around the world in the Pacific Ocean, U.S. and NATO confrontation with China and North Korea is increasing dramatically.

Ever since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia,” which was created in part to take the spotlight off the decision to surge troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the failed U.S. war policies in the Middle East, U.S. military naval and air presence in the Western Pacific has been steadily increasing. During the Obama administration, Washington used “freedom of navigation”—an integral part of the Law of the Seas treaty that the United States has failed to ratify—to send large numbers of U.S. naval ships into contested areas in and around the South China Sea. Under the Trump administration, freedom-of-navigation armadas sailed in an even more confrontational manner.

Now, during the Biden administration, NATO countries have joined in the armadas as British, French, and German navies have sent ships to join with U.S. aircraft carrier groups of more than 20 ships. For the first time, the UK’s only aircraft carrier, the Queen Elizabeth, sailed into the Pacific to participate in war maneuvers off the coast of China.

The Trump administration ramped up confrontation with China by sending the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat to visit Taiwan in the history of the 40-year-old U.S. policy of “One China,” according to which Washington does not recognize Taiwan diplomatically. Trump’s actions deeply angered Beijing.

The Biden administration has dramatically increased the number of high-level diplomats visiting Taiwan. Its encouragement of congressional delegations to visit has infuriated the Chinese even more. The Chinese response to U.S. actions has been to send over 50 military aircraft across the narrow Taiwan Strait to the edge of Taiwan’s air defense zone in a show of potential military action.

The confrontation over Taiwan expanded in mid-June 2022. After China claimed that the Strait does not qualify as international waters, that Beijing has sovereignty over the zones extending from both Taiwan’s and China’s shores to the middle of the Strait, the United States said it would not stop conducting military operations there.

Although the United States does not have a defense agreement with it, Taiwan has always purchased U.S. weapons and U.S. military trainers regularly visit Taiwan. President Biden has responded to media questions about the prospect of an invasion by China with statements such as “We will defend Taiwan,” statements that his advisors have had to walk back. Since 2010, the United States has announced more than $23 billion in arms sales to Taiwan. In 2022, U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan so far total $1 billion and are for Patriot missiles and howitzers.

RIMPAC War Games

Adding to the tensions in the region, NATO countries and “partners” are joining the massive Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval war exercises. Held every two years since 1971, 2022 RIMPAC will feature 38 ships from 26 countries, four submarines, 170 aircraft, and 25,000 military personnel practicing naval war maneuvers in the Hawaiian waters from June 29 to August 4. Additionally, ground units from nine countries will come ashore on the islands of Hawai’i in amphibious landings.

Forty-five percent of RIMPAC participants are either in NATO or have NATO ties. Eight of the 26 RIMPAC countries are NATO members—Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The four other participating countries are Asia-Pacific “partners” of NATO: Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. The other countries participating in 2022 RIMPAC are Brunei, Chile, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Tonga. With participation of India for the first time in RIMPAC, all four members of the Quad—U.S., Japan, Australia and India—will be war gaming in the Pacific.

In previous RIMPAC war exercises, both China and Russia have been invited to participate, but neither is invited this year. Russia participated in RIMPAC for the first time in 2012, but after issues in Ukraine in 2014, Russia was not invited back, but China did receive a 2014 invitation. China had four ships in RIMPAC in 2014 and five ships in 2016. Congress passed the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act in December, 2021, which included a provision that Taiwan would be invited to participate in future RIMPAC exercises, but ultimately no invitation was extended for the 2022 RIMPAC.

RIMPAC military war exercises have dangerous, intended or unintended, consequences that put the Pacific region at ever increasing risk of military confrontation and destruction. Major cities in Asia—Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, and Pyongyang— could be destroyed in an exchange of ballistic missiles. The same holds true for major U.S. cities.

Civic Opposition to RIMPAC

Many citizens of the 26 RIMPAC countries do not agree with their country’s participation in the war games, calling them provocative and dangerous for the region.

The Pacific Peace Network, with members from countries/islands across the Pacific including Guåhan, Jeju Island, South Korea, Okinawa, Japan, Philippines, Northern Mariana Islands, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Hawai’i and the United States, demand that RIMPAC be cancelled, calling the naval armada “dangerous, provocative and destructive.”

The network’s petition states that

RIMPAC dramatically contributes to the destruction of the ecology system and aggravation of the climate crisis in the Pacific region. RIMPAC war forces will blow up decommissioned ships with missiles endangering marine mammals such as humpback whales, dolphins and Hawaiian monk seals and polluting the ocean with contaminates from the vessels. Land forces will conduct ground assaults that will tear up beaches where green sea turtles come to breed.

The petition rejects “the massive expenditure of funds on war-making when humanity is suffering from lack of food, water and other life-sustaining elements. Human security is not based on military war drills, but on care for the planet and its inhabitants.”

Other citizen groups in the Pacific region are adding their voices to the call to cancel RIMPAC.

In its statement about RIMPAC, the Hawai’i-based Women’s Voices, Women Speak declared that “RIMPAC causes ecological devastation, colonial violence and gun worship. RIMPAC’s ship sinking, missile testing, and torpedo blasting have destroyed island ecosystems and disturbed sea creatures’ wellbeing. This convening of military personnel promotes toxic masculinity; sex trafficking and violence against local populations.”

In a June 14, 2022 opinion piece in the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the only state-wide newspaper in Hawai’i where the headquarters of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is located, three local activists with the Hawai’i Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines wrote:

We are one with the people of Hawaii in opposing the U.S.-led wars, for which Balikatan (US-Philippine ground war maneuvers) and RIMPAC are warmups. As it is, our governments bring together the people of Hawaii and the people of the Philippines to prepare for war, death and destruction. Military posturing in the Asia-Pacific also risks nuclear war and the potential extinction of the human species. We must instead work toward global cooperation to address the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss; to build toward peace, life and coexistence.

The “No to NATO” organization, with membership in all the NATO countries, challenges NATO war policies through public outreach by webinars and community events in the cities where NATO meetings occur, the latest being in June 2022 in Madrid, Spain.

Together, these efforts decry the preparations for war and work instead for a more peaceful world.

https://fpif.org/us-and-nato-escalate-t ... war-games/

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Politics and language
June 30, 9:24 am

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POLITICS AND LANGUAGE: CHINESE INTELLECTUALS PROPOSE TO REWRITE THE NAMES OF SOME WESTERN COUNTRIES

Following the developments in Ukraine, the confrontation between China and the West is becoming more and more aggravated not only in the economic and political spheres. Events are taking place in Chinese society that should fundamentally change the national identity of the Chinese and their attitude towards the West. True, in the Russian Federation they prefer not to talk about this, implicitly promoting the idea “China has ten times more trade with the West than with the Russian Federation” and filling news feeds with messages about China's confrontation with the United States over Taiwan.

Watching the events of the current year, it is hard not to agree that the unipolar world is finally coming to an end and that a new world order is emerging before our very eyes. And if Russia, which had been looking for compromises for a long time, was nevertheless forced to enter into an open confrontation with the United States, then the Chinese leadership is still trying to find a peaceful way to solve all the problems that have accumulated in relations with the collective West. But this is only at the diplomatic level. Judging by the mood in society, processes are emerging in the country that may affect how China will build relations with the West in the near future.

Tensions with the United States, as the main Western power, became visible as early as 2018, when the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the tech giant Huawei. Then the actions of the American president caused a wave of indignation, which logically led to the rise of patriotism and the unity of Chinese society unprecedented over the past forty years. Things got to the point that the people began to jokingly call the head of an unfriendly state Trump the Unifier of China, referring to his actions that forced all the citizens of the country to unite. But thenthe patriotic fervor grew into “puffy empty talk”, which, at the suggestion of the media, turned the heads of ordinary citizens to such an extent that in January 2021, the online edition of the central newspaper “People’s Daily” had to criticize the “pompous and arrogant manner of writing” of many online publications and blogger publications . Articles criticizing the capriciousness, arrogance and populist sentiments of some journalists and bloggers seem to have made sense: noisy headlines and bravura articles have become less. Hat-throwing vanished and gave way to traditional pragmatism and a rethinking of the history of China's relations with European powers, the legacy of which, according to many intellectuals, can still be found in modern Chinese.

For example, the publicist Sima Nan, referring to the publications of a well-known mathematician who appears on social networks under the pseudonym Shanzhen Azhi, says that China's colonial and semi-colonial past is reflected in the way some Western countries are called in modern Chinese. In his recent video posted on Chinese social networks, Sima Nan, talking about the history of China, points out that "once the Chinese gave up, caved in under pressure from the West and consciously or unconsciously began to exalt overseas oppressors" and select semantically positive characters for the names of countries - conquerors.Without going into the hieroglyphics and phonetic features of the Chinese language, let us explain that, for example, two hieroglyphs used by the United States are translated as "Beautiful State", England - "Outstanding State", France - "State of Law", Germany, respectively, - " State of virtue. The euphonious names of some European powers and the United States, which once subjugated the decrepit imperial China, were reflected in the minds of the Chinese.

According to Shanzhen Azhi, England, which imposed the opium trade on China, was called Outstanding, but it should be called Opium, leaving the sound, just change the hieroglyph. Rename virtuous Germany into the Land of Knives, based on the crimes committed by the "mustache artist" in the middle of the twentieth century. It is necessary to discard the incorrectly attributed "legitimacy" of the French statehood, which until recently participated in the bombing of Libya, Iraq and Yugoslavia, and assign to it the homonymous hieroglyph "fu" - which has an emotionally colored negative meaning.

“American statehood, built on lands taken from the indigenous population, would also be nice to start writing differently ,” argues Sima Nan, who questions the “beauty” of American history and the virtues of all Western civilization. Of course, the above is difficult to understand for a foreigner who is not experienced in the intricacies of Chinese hieroglyphics, but for the Chinese all this has deep meanings, i.e., speaking in a language that is more understandable to us - "whatever you call a boat, so it will float" -the change in the names of some countries in Europe and the United States may be followed by a reassessment by the Chinese of the entire Western civilization.

Since the middle of the 19th century, with the defeat in the Opium Wars, China found itself under political, economic, and, consequently, cultural dependence on the West. Global changes on the political map of the world at the end of the 20th century expanded China's economic ties with the West, but again forced it to maneuver politically. All this, coupled with the increased mobility of the population and the advent of the Internet, by the beginning of this century only increased the alien influence on the culture of China, which, it seems, has recently begun to cause open concern of thinking and patriotic people. There are many examples of a reassessment of values ​​and a cleansing of the national culture from alien things in China.

At the end of May, publications appeared in the Chinese segment of the Internet about educational materials published by the People's Education Publishing House in 2013 and republished many times in subsequent years. Textbooks on native speech, which Chinese schoolchildren have been using for almost 10 years, turn out to contain a lot of “ideological sabotage”, in short: children with an Asian appearance in the pictures of textbooks have clear signs of Down syndrome, while blond children are cheerful, red-cheeked, dressed beautifully and neat. In textbook texts, goodies have foreign names, and bad kids are called Chinese names. Heroic deeds are committed in stories set in the West, and all the bad things give clear references to Chinaetc. According to many, the “malicious textbooks” scandal is a manifestation of a sharp struggle between the warring forces in China itself and foreign forces interested in a change of power in the country.

After a proper investigation, the textbooks will certainly be replaced, but it is still difficult to say whether the proposals to rename some Western countries put forward by Chinese intellectuals have a future. But the talk about renaming, and the scandal with textbooks of native speech - all this reflects certain moods of the thinking, and therefore, passionate part of Chinese society. Watching heated discussions on the Internet, one can talk about the beginning of the cleansing of the Chinese from the cultural expansion of the West, about the emergence of a new national identity. China is freed from political and cultural influence from outside.

It is noteworthy that, apart from small historical periods, there is not and never was any anti-American or anti-Western sentiment in China. The Chinese have always treated the West, if not with subservience, then certainly as an example to follow. But times are changing. China, remaining a peace-loving power and a pragmatic nation, declares its readiness to develop trade and economic relations with all states of the world, including the West. But judging by the discussions on the Internet, the number of people in the country is still growing who no longer want to follow the so-called Western values ​​and globalist dogmas imposed from Washington. It seems that with the beginning of the events in Ukraine, China's confidence in the need to pursue a cultural and educational policy independent of Western trends is only increasing.

https://sinologist.livejournal.com/657620.html - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7709616.html

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"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 02, 2022 4:52 pm

China is a threat to our security
July 2, 5:34 am

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China is a threat to our security (c) the NATO summit in Madrid. Summer 2022

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7714168.html

Google Translator

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NATO officially adds China to its list of enemies
Sameena RahmanJune 30, 2022
Download PDF flyer https://flyer-generator.herokuapp.com/? ... sts/106901

Leaders of the member countries of the imperialist NATO military alliance concluded their annual summit in Madrid today. This summit was a clear display of NATO’s commitment to continuously fuel the fire of international conflict as the major capitalist powers drag the world back into a Cold War-style period of global confrontation.

In preparation for the summit, NATO members prepared a new “Strategic Concept” document that described the alliance’s key goals moving forward. The Strategic Concept’s principal target is Russia, which it labels “the most significant and direct threat” to NATO. Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg promised even more support for Ukraine’s military in its war with Russia.

But the Strategic Concept also included a new and highly notable addition to NATO’s official enemies list: China.

The document labeled China a “systemic challenge.” While hostility to China has been NATO’s de facto approach for years, this announcement is a notable escalation. In essence, the NATO members are publicly announcing that China poses an existential threat to the world order that they dominate. China is pursuing a “no limits partnership” with Russia as it aims to fundamentally change the global political landscape such that the Pentagon and Wall Street no longer reign supreme. This is unacceptable to NATO.

Many NATO states like Britain have called for increasing arms shipments to Taiwan, which is rightfully claimed by China as part of its national territory. The United States has been the principal military and political backer of Taiwan since the island was seized by the defeated dictator Chiang Kai-shek at the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.

NATO — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization — pretends to be a defensive alliance where all states come to the aid of any member that is attacked. But as NATO’s own documents show, their ambitions are certainly not limited to the North Atlantic. It is in fact an instrument for the maintenance of an imperialist-dominated world order, threatening unthinkable violence against any country that dares to challenge it.

On Tuesday, Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations Zhang Jun expressed deep concerns and urged NATO to “learn its lessons and not to use the Ukraine crisis as an excuse to stoke worldwide bloc confrontation or provoke a new Cold War, and not to look for imaginary enemies in the Asia-Pacific or contrive disputes and divisions.”

Although NATO’s Strategic Concept hides behind the language of democracy, peace and independence, NATO’s actions before and during the summit are aimed at triggering a new Cold War with China and Russia. NATO countries and their strategic goals only fuel the danger of catastrophic global war as they ignore the economic, social and environmental toll of their military buildup. The working class across the world already is suffering greatly with the start of another Cold War and has every interest in the end of imperialist escalations.

https://www.liberationnews.org/nato-off ... rationnews

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US arms sales designed only to sacrifice Taiwan in a war it cannot hope to win
Drago Bosnic, independent geopolitical and military analyst

As proxy conflicts around the world rage on, America is poised to continue proliferating further instability across the globe, particularly in the vicinity of near-peer adversaries, Russia and China, neither of which want escalation, as they need peace and stability to fulfill their development goals. Washington DC (and lately Brussels as well) is determined to prevent that and force the (Eur)Asian giants to bleed cash and resources on new weapons, which in turn helps drive demand from America's massive Military-Industrial Complex.

In the last 30+ years, the imperialist thalassocracy has tried to redefine its role, going from a self-styled "sole superpower" and "global policeman" to an increasingly isolated great power in decline, losing wars to AK-wielding insurgents in sandals. A string of military failures forced America to rethink its policy of "strategic containment". Unwilling (or unable) to directly engage even smaller regional powers, the US has relegated most of its interventionist policies to numerous client states, whose sole purpose is to harass US rivals, be it China, Russia, Iran, Syria, etc. America's role is to provide weapons, logistics, critical information, particularly its extensive ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) capabilities, etc.

The vassals are to do all the dirty work, including getting killed or maimed for the imperial metropole. To do this more effectively, they need weapons. One such client entity is Taiwan, China's breakaway island in the increasingly contested Asia-Pacific region. In recent years, Taipei has been forced to play a sort of (geo)political zigzag game, where the US would promise to supply weapons, mostly outdated, despite the island's requests for modern systems, and then either reduce the order or outright cancel it. While America is trying to portray this as an attempt to "reduce the risk of escalation", the excuse can only be described as comically disingenuous. If the US really wanted to avoid escalation, it would've never promised any arms shipments in the first place. The more practical reason is America's wish to enrich its Military-Industrial Complex while getting rid of rusty tanks, howitzers, jets, etc.

Taiwan expressed interest in the MH-60R "Seahawk", an anti-submarine version of the "Blackhawk" helicopter. However, the US refused, claiming they are "too expensive" and "fine for peacetime operations, but would not survive an all-out assault from the mainland". Instead, Taipei is being told to "learn from Ukraine and invest in smaller, mobile systems such as drone swarms, 'Stinger' and 'Javelin' missiles, which are less vulnerable to China’s advanced weapons". Taipei officials regularly express frustration due to delays and cancelations of US weapons deliveries. M109A6 "Paladin" self-propelled howitzers and FIM-92 "Stinger" MANPADS orders are being held up "due to a crowded production line", as the US is now trying to arm both the Kiev and Taipei regimes.

Reportedly, Washington DC is urging Taiwan to invest in "more cost-efficient capabilities" such as "command and control systems, ISR, air defenses, and naval sea mines". America also suggested the M142 HIMARS MLRS for "a similar capability with a faster delivery schedule". The US insists Taiwan needs "more asymmetrical capabilities".

"These are not regular times. If you’re going to spend money, it should be on naval sea mines and anti-ship missiles. These are the kinds of things that we have indicated to industry and to Taiwan. President Tsai gets it," an unnamed US official told Politico.

The US is telling Taiwan to "watch the war in Ukraine closely", claiming "many civilians in Taiwan are expressing a greater desire to learn how they can play a role in defending their island and resisting Chinese forces, but it’s not yet clear how far the Taiwanese military will go to help prepare the civilian population." Such statements clearly show America wants to galvanize civilians in vassal entities to wage wars against its rivals, regardless of the consequences, as Taiwan obviously cannot hope to win against China's vastly superior forces.

Another strategic hurdle is the looming uncertainty of what the US is capable and willing to do to assist Taiwan in case of a conflict. Unlike Ukraine, which has an extensive land border with NATO, Taiwan is far away, making it incomparably more difficult to supply its forces or even provide ISR capabilities on a scale similar to Ukraine. Additionally, the US claims a Chinese naval blockade is also a possibility. Even if it had any forces in the vicinity in such a scenario, America wouldn't be able to break through without starting a war with nuclear-armed China. It's quite unclear how the US would explain to its population they should risk a world-ending conflict with China just so it could keep controlling a Chinese breakaway island 11,000 from America's shores.

“We’re going to have a lot of challenges if China decides to blockade the island,” the US official said. “People have to start thinking hard... ...The trickiest part may be figuring out how to help Taiwan prepare without leaving Beijing feeling as if it must react. We could provoke the attack that we’re seeking to deter,” he concluded.

Such schizophrenic statements clearly indicate that the US foreign policy is a runaway train which nobody in the imperialist thalassocracy's establishment is trying to stop. On the contrary, it seems whoever is at the helm is speeding up. This is also a clear message to populations in America's satellite states – "Be ready to die fighting when we decide to sacrifice you for 'freedom and democracy', 'rules-based international order' and 'the greater good.'"

Source: InfoBrics

http://infobrics.org/post/36076/

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The United States contests the Chinese Belt and Road with a private corporation

The US has launched another private initiative in an attempt to counter China’s rapidly growing infrastructure development and investment project, Belt and Road

July 01, 2022 by Vijay Prashad

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At the G7 Summit in Germany, on June 26, 2022, US President Joe Biden made a pledge to raise $200 billion within the United States for global infrastructure spending. It was made clear that this new G7 project—the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII)—was intended to counter the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Given Biden’s failure to pass the Build Back Better bill (with its scope being almost halved from $3.5 trillion to $2.2 trillion), it is unlikely that he will get the US Congress to go along with this new endeavor.

The PGII is not the first attempt by the US to match the Chinese infrastructure investment globally, which initially took place bilaterally, and then after 2013 happened through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In 2004, as the US war on Iraq unfolded, the United States government set up a body called the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which it called an “independent US foreign assistance agency.” Before that, most US government development lending was done through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was set up in 1961 as part of then-President John F. Kennedy administration’s charm campaign against the Soviet Union and against the Bandung spirit of non-alignment in the newly assertive Third World.

Former US President George W. Bush said that USAID was too bureaucratic, and so the MCC would be a project that would include both the US government and the private sector. The word “corporation” in the title is deliberate. Each of the heads of the MCC, from Paul Applegarth to Alice P. Albright, has belonged to the private sector (the current head, Albright is the daughter of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright).

The word “challenge” in MCC refers to the fact that the grants are only approved if the countries can show that they meet 20 “policy performance indicators,” ranging from civil liberties to inflation rates. These indicators ensure that the countries seeking the grants adhere to the conventional neoliberal framework. There are also great inconsistencies among these indicators: for instance, the countries must have a high immunization rate (monitored by the World Health Organization), but at the same time they must follow the International Monetary Fund’s requirements for a tight fiscal policy. This essentially means that the public health spending of a candidate country should be kept low, resulting in the required number of public health workers not being available for the immunization programs.

The US Congress provided $650 million to the MCC for its first year in 2004, as a US government official told me; in 2022, the amount sought was more than $900 million. In 2007, when Bush met with Nambaryn Enkhbayar, the former president of Mongolia, to sign an MCC grant, he said that the Millennium Challenge Account—which is administered by MCC—“is an important part of our foreign policy. It’s an opportunity for the United States and our taxpayers to help countries that fight corruption, that support market-based economies, and that invest in the health and education of their people.” Clearly, the MCC is an instrument of US foreign policy, but its aim seems to be not so much to tackle the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (on hunger, health and education), as Bush said, but to ensure extension of the reach of US influence and to inculcate the habits and structures of US-led globalization (“market-based economies”).

In 2009, then-US President Barack Obama developed a “pivot to Asia,” a new foreign policy orientation that had the US establishment focus more attention on East and South Asia. As part of this pivot, in 2011, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave an important speech in Chennai, India, where she spoke about the creation of a New Silk Road Initiative. Clinton argued that the United States government, under Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” policy was going to develop an economic agenda that ran from the Central Asian countries to the south of India, and would thereby help integrate the Central Asian republics into a US project and break the ties the region had formed with Russia and China. The impetus for the New Silk Road was to find a way to use this development as an instrument to undermine the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. This US project floundered due to lack of congressional funding and due to its sheer impossibility, since Afghanistan—which was the heart of this road project—could not be persuaded to submit to US interests.

Two years later, in 2013, the Chinese government inaugurated the Silk Road Economic Belt project, which is now known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Rather than go from North to South, the BRI went from East to West, linking China to Central Asia and then outward to South Asia, West Asia, Europe and Africa. The aim of this project was to bring together the Eurasian Economic Community (established in 2000) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (set up in 2001) to work on this new, and bigger project. Roughly $4 trillion has been invested since 2013 in a range of projects by the BRI and its associated funding mechanisms (including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund). The investments were paid for by grants from Chinese institutions and through debt incurred by the projects at rates that are competitive with those of Western infrastructure lending programs.

The US government’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” (2019) notes that China uses “economic inducements and penalties” to “persuade other states to comply with its agenda.” The report provides no evidence, and indeed, scholars who have looked into these matters do not see any such evidence. US Admiral Philip S. Davidson, who previously commanded the US Indo-Pacific Command, told the US Congress that China is “leveraging its economic instrument of power” in Asia. The MCC, and other instruments, including a new International Development Finance Corporation, were hastily set up to give America an edge over China in a US-driven contest over the creation of infrastructure investment globally. There is no doubt that the MCC is part of the broad Indo-Pacific strategy of the United States to undermine Chinese influence in Asia.

Only a handful of countries have thus far received MCC grants— starting with Honduras and Madagascar. These are often not very large grants, although for a country the size of Malawi or Jordan, these can have a considerable impact. No large countries have been drawn into the MCC compact, which suggests that the United States wants to give these grants to mainly smaller countries, to strengthen their ties with the United States. Nepal’s accession to the MCC must be seen in this broader context. Although the discovery of uranium in Nepal’s Upper Mustang region in 2014 seems to play an important role in the pressure campaign on that country.

In May 2017, Nepal’s government signed a BRI framework agreement, which included an ambitious plan to build a railway link between China and Nepal through the Himalayas; this rail link would allow Nepal to lessen its reliance on Indian land routes for trade purposes. Various projects began to be discussed and feasibility studies were commissioned under the BRI plan. These projects, more details for which emerged in 2019, were the extension of an electricity transmission line and the creation of a technical university in Nepal, and of course, construction of a vast network of roads and rail, which included the trans-Himalayan railway from Keyrung to Kathmandu.

Read more: Nepal approves US’ Millennium Challenge Corporation grant amid protests. What’s next?
During this time, the United States entered the picture with a full-scale effort to disparage the BRI funding in Nepal and to promote the use of MCC money there instead. In September 2017, the government of Nepal signed an agreement with the United States called the Nepal Compact. This agreement—worth $500 million—is for an electricity transmission project and for a road maintenance project. At this point, Nepal had access to both BRI and MCC funds and neither of the parties seemed to mind that fact. This provided an opportunity for Nepal to use both these resources to develop much-needed infrastructure, or as former Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal told me in 2020, his country could get new loans from the Asian Development Bank.

After both deals had been signed, a political dispute broke out within Nepal, which resulted in the split of the Communist Party of Nepal and the fall of the left government. One major issue on the table was the MCC and its role in the overall Indo-Pacific strategy of the United States, which seems to be targeted against China.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/07/01/ ... rporation/

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China stands with progressive Latin America
Two recent events served to underline the close and developing relations between China and progressive Latin America.

As part of a regional tour, Special Representative of the Chinese Government on Latin American Affairs, Qiu Xiaoqi, visited Nicaragua from June 25-27.

Meeting Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada on June 25, Qiu said that since the resumption of diplomatic ties more than six months ago, bilateral relations have been developing rapidly and flourishing with all-round progress. China, Qiu noted, “firmly supports Nicaragua in safeguarding its sovereignty, independence and national dignity and independently choosing its development path and governance model.”

For his part, Moncada said that Nicaragua “is willing to be a trustworthy brother and partner of China. The Nicaraguan side thanked China for its selfless help and is ready to seize the huge opportunities brought by China’s development and create more benefits for the Nicaraguan people. The Nicaraguan side thanked China for speaking up for Nicaragua in the international arena and will work with China to safeguard international fairness and justice as well as the rights and interests of developing countries.”

Meanwhile, on June 28, State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a phone conversation with his Venezuelan counterpart Carlos Faria, coinciding with the 48th anniversary of the two countries’ establishing diplomatic relations.

Wang Yi said that the Chinese side thanks Venezuela for standing firmly with China and speaking out for justice. China will, as always, firmly oppose external forces’ interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs under any pretext, firmly support Venezuela in safeguarding national sovereignty and social stability and support the Venezuelan people in choosing a development path suited to their national conditions. He added that the trend toward a multi-polar world, economic globalisation and greater democracy in international relations is irresistible. China is ready to work with Venezuela to stand on the right side of history, uphold international fairness and justice, safeguard the common interests of developing countries and jointly build a community with a shared future for humanity.

For his part, Faria extended warm congratulations on the forthcoming 101st anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, hailing the CPC as a great political party that holds high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics and has always been committed to serving the Chinese people.

The following reports were originally carried on the website of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada Meets with Special Representative of the Chinese Government on Latin American Affairs Qiu Xiaoqi

From June 25 to 27, 2022, Special Representative of the Chinese Government on Latin American Affairs Qiu Xiaoqi visited Nicaragua. On June 25, Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada met with visiting Special Representative Qiu Xiaoqi in Managua. The two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on bilateral relations and international and regional issues of common concern. Chinese Ambassador to Nicaragua Chen Xi attended the meeting.

Qiu Xiaoqi said that since the resumption of China-Nicaragua diplomatic ties more than six months ago, bilateral relations have been developing rapidly and flourishing with all-round progress in political, economic and trade, and cultural cooperation. China firmly supports Nicaragua in safeguarding its sovereignty, independence and national dignity and independently choosing its development path and governance model. China is ready to strengthen synergy with Nicaragua and promote fruitful practical cooperation across the board. In the face of global challenges, the two countries should take the implementation of the Global Development Initiative and Global Security Initiative as an opportunity to strengthen coordination and cooperation in international affairs and jointly build a more peaceful, secure and prosperous world.

Moncada said, the rapid development of bilateral relations since the resumption of diplomatic ties more than six months ago fully proves that the resumption of diplomatic ties between Nicaragua and China is a correct decision that accords with the historical trend and serves the fundamental interests of the two countries and two peoples. Nicaragua will unswervingly abide by the one-China principle and is willing to be a trustworthy brother and partner of China. The Nicaraguan side thanked China for its selfless help, and is ready to seize the huge opportunities brought by China’s development and create more benefits for the Nicaraguan people. The Nicaraguan side thanked China for speaking up for Nicaragua in the international arena, and will work with China to safeguard international fairness and justice as well as the rights and interests of developing countries.

Wang Yi Speaks with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Carlos Faria on the Phone

On June 28, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a phone conversation with Venezuelan Foreign Minister Carlos Faria at the latter’s request.

Wang Yi said that today coincides with the 48th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Venezuela, and our phone conversation is just at the right time. Since the establishment of diplomatic ties, China-Venezuela relations have remained rock-solid regardless of changes in the international landscape. The leaders of the two countries have established solid mutual trust and friendship, providing important political guarantee and strategic guidance for the development of the China-Venezuela comprehensive strategic partnership. China is ready to continue to deepen political mutual trust, pass on the traditional friendship and enhance mutually beneficial cooperation with Venezuela.

Wang Yi said that the Chinese side thanks Venezuela for standing firmly with China and speaking out for justice on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and human rights issues. China will, as always, firmly oppose external forces’ interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs under any pretext, firmly support Venezuela in safeguarding national sovereignty and social stability, and support the Venezuelan people in choosing a development path suited to their national conditions. The Chinese side will continue to provide assistance within its capacity to the Venezuelan side in fighting the pandemic.

Wang Yi pointed out that China and Venezuela should continue to strengthen solidarity and coordination in multilateral affairs, safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of the two countries, practice true multilateralism, and safeguard the international system with the United Nations at its core and the international order underpinned by international law. China appreciates Venezuela’s active support for President Xi Jinping’s Global Development Initiative (GDI) and stands ready to strengthen cooperation with Venezuela to jointly forge a global development partnership and well implement the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The trend toward a multi-polar world, economic globalization and greater democracy in international relations is irresistible. China is ready to work with Venezuela to stand on the right side of history, uphold international fairness and justice, safeguard the common interests of developing countries and jointly build a community with a shared future for mankind.

Faria said that under the guidance of the two heads of state, the Venezuela-China comprehensive strategic partnership has made great progress and is full of vitality. He thanked China for providing strong support to Venezuela in its fight against the pandemic. Venezuela firmly supports the one-China principle and the principle of “one country, two systems”, firmly supports China in safeguarding national sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity, and stands ready to work with China to deepen mutually beneficial cooperation in innovative ways. China is playing an increasingly important role in the international arena. The Venezuelan side speaks highly of President Xi Jinping’s GDI and other initiatives and is ready to deepen communication and coordination with China within the frameworks of the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative and the Group of Friends in the Defense of the Charter of the United Nations to jointly uphold multilateralism. In particular, Faria extended warm congratulations on the 101st anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in advance, hailing the CPC as a great political party that holds high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics and has always been committed to serving the Chinese people.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/07/01/c ... n-america/

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Comparing the response to Covid-19 in China and the US
The following article by John V Walsh, republished from Popular Resistance, debunks various misconceptions about China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and contrasts China’s performance with that of the US. Walsh observes that the deaths per million figure in the US currently stands at 3,042; for China the figure is 3.7. So on this metric – surely the most meaningful in terms of assessing a given country’s public health response to a pandemic – China has outperformed the US by a factor of over 800. Anticipating the usual cries of “you can’t trust the Chinese numbers”, Walsh links to numerous articles in the scientific literature confirming the validity of China’s statistics.

While China clearly pursued a strategy that prioritized human life over corporate profits, the author notes that, ironically, China’s economy has also fared far better than the US’s since the start of the pandemic. Walsh concludes that the Chinese experience “should not be lightly dismissed let alone be the subject of mean-spirited attacks” since the measures taken “may be a means of saving millions of lives when the next variant or the next pandemic strikes”.
Covid Deaths In The US (Over 1 Million) And China (About 5000).

“History Should Judge Us” – and it will.


In May and June of 2022 two milestones were passed in the world’s battle with Covid and were widely noted in the press, one in the US and one in China. They invite a comparison between the two countries and their approach to combatting Covid-19.

The first milestone was passed on May 12 when the United States registered over 1 million total deaths (1,008,377 as of June 19, 2022, when this is written) due to Covid, the highest of any country in the world. Web MD expressed its sentiment in a piece headlined: “US Covid Deaths Hit 1 Million: ‘History Should Judge Us.’”

Second, on June 1, China emerged from its 60-day lockdown in Shanghai in response to an outbreak there, the most serious since the Wuhan outbreak at the onset of the pandemic. The total number of deaths in Mainland China since the beginning of the epidemic in January 2020 now stands at a total of 5226 as of June 19,2022.

To put that in perspective, that is 3042 deaths per million population in the US versus 3.7 deaths in China due to Covid. 3042 vs. 3.7! Had China followed the same course as the US, it would have experienced at least 4 million deaths. Had the US followed China’s course it would have had only 1306 deaths total!

The EU did not fare not much better than the US with 2434 deaths per million as of June 19.

When confronted with these numbers, the response of the Western media has all too often been denial that China’s numbers were valid. But China’s data have been backed by counts of excess deaths during the period of the pandemic as the New York Times illustrated in a recent article. Actually this is old news. The validity of China’s numbers, as shown by counts of excess deaths, was validated long ago in a February 2021 study by a by a group at Oxford University and the Chinese CDC. This was published in the prestigious BMJ (British Medical Journal) and discussed in detail here.

What about the economy?

Clearly China put the saving of lives above the advance of the economy with its “dynamic zero Covid policy.” But contrary to what was believed in the West at the time, saving lives also turned out to be better for the economy, as shown in the following data from the World Bank:

During the first year of the pandemic, 2020, China’s economy continued to grow albeit at a slower rate. In contrast the US economy contracted dramatically, dropping all the way back, not simply to 2019 levels, but to pre-2018 levels!

Interestingly the plot also shows the year that the Chinese PPP-GDP surpassed that of the United States, 2017, heralding a new era for the Global South.

The World Bank has not yet released data for 2021, but the IMF has PPP-GDP data for 2021 shown here. The U.S. economy grew at 5.97 percent and China’s at 8.02 percent. Unlike the World Bank data shown in the graph above for the years up to 2020, these data for 2021 are not corrected for inflation which for 2021 ran at 4.7% in the U.S. whereas China’s was 0.85%. So China’s growth would be even greater in comparison to the US, were inflation taken into account.

The bottom line is that for the first two years of the pandemic through 2021, China’s growth was always positive and greater than that of the US. China’s policy not only saved lives but protected the economy. Win-win, one might say.

Is China’s dynamic zero Covid policy “sustainable”in the face of the Omicron variant? The Shanghai Lockdown.
The period of the recent Shanghai lockdown which we can date from April 1, 2022, ended on June 1, and was the second largest outbreak in China since the original outbreak in January, 2020, in Wuhan. Each resulted in major lockdowns, the first in Wuhan lasted about 76 days and the second in Shanghai about 60 days. The first in Wuhan was due to the original variant and the second was due to the much more infectious Omicron.

During the recent lockdown in Shanghai, the Western press was awash with proclamations, all too many laced with an unseemly Schadenfreude, that China’s dynamic Zero Covid policy was not sustainable. This is all too reminiscent of decades of predictions that China’s extraordinary success in developing its economy to number one in the world in terms of PPP-GDP was a passing phase, a Ponzi Scheme that was – what else – “not sustainable. Recently the same press has gone silent, always a sign that China has met with success. So what are the results?

The Shanghai Lockdown ended on June 1 and from that day until today, June 19, there have been no deaths due to Covid on the Chinese Mainland. Cases nationwide are also way down to 183 per day from the peak of 26,000 on April 15. That was the largest number of cases in a single day for the entire period of the pandemic in China. For comparison, the peak in the US was 800,000 in a single day.

Both the Wuhan and Shanghai lockdowns demanded sacrifices and patience over the roughly two-month period for each. However, these difficulties are generally exaggerated In the West and based on anecdotes of the worst of the difficulties encountered. Such sordid journalism reached rock bottom in a NYT piece equating China’s hard working health care workers to Adolph Eichmann!

As an antidote to this kind of hit piece and to gain a feeling of life in the cities that were under lockdown during the Wuhan outbreak, Peter Hessler’s March, 2020, account in the New Yorker, “Life on Lockdown in China,” is enlightening and will dispel many misconceptions. Hessler was living and teaching in Chengdu, Sichuan, at the time.

For the moment China’s approach has succeeded although we cannot say what the future holds. But the public health measures that have worked so well in Mainland China should not be lightly dismissed let alone be the subject of mean-spirited attacks. Such measures may be a means of saving millions of lives when the next variant or the next pandemic strikes.

The US Needs a People’s Tribunal On the Handling of Covid-19.

Turning again to the US, what does it say when the US, one of the richest nations in the world, spending over $1 trillion a year on its “national security” budget, could not muster the means to deal with Covid-19 and ended up with more deaths than any other nation on earth? China’s handling of the pandemic certainly shows a completely different outcome is possible. The US death toll was not an inescapable act of nature.

That being so, should there not be a People’s Tribunal to investigate those in charge in the US government over the course of three administrations? That, and not an official white wash, is certainly needed? And should not punishment appropriate for a crime against humanity be meted out? The one million dead deserve no less.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/06/29/c ... nd-the-us/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 07, 2022 2:05 pm

Taiwan and the Making of an “Asian” NATO
Danny Haiphong, BAR Contributing Editor 06 Jul 2022

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(Image: Carlos Latuff)

The United States wants to turn Taiwan into an Asian Ukraine. The goal is to use it as a weapon against a China, a country that has been declared an adversary.

These are amended remarks given by the author at an event held by the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute titled “NATO and Global Empire.” The event can be watched in full here .
https://fb.watch/e1jsIIUPfm/

This year’s NATO Summit took place amid a geopolitical seismic wave crashing upon Eurasia: Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. Contrary to the musings of the U.S. foreign policy establishment and its loyal servants in the West, NATO is not a defensive institution but rather the root cause of the dangerous confrontation developing between the U.S. and Russia. NATO provoked Russia to intervene in Ukraine by sponsoring a right-wing coup in 2014 and facilitating a regime of ethnic cleansing in the Donbas region for the next eight years. NATO is now prolonging the special military operation in Ukraine through massive military aid packages and economic sanctions. True to imperialism, NATO has no intention of stopping with Ukraine. The military alliance not only has plans to expand further into Eurasia to provoke Russia but also has set its sights on China in the Asia-Pacific.

NATO’s ambitions are nothing more than an extension of U.S. foreign policy objectives. The primary objective of U.S. imperialism at this moment in history is the containment of China—a euphemism for war. While U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has denied any intention of creating an “Asian NATO,” U.S. and NATO actions say otherwise. NATO invited Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea to this year’s Summit. NATO’s so-called Strategic Concept which came out of the Summit placed heavy focus on the “threats” posed by China and went so far as to call the socialist country “malicious” in its supposed targeting of “Alliance security.”

Beyond the Summit, the United States has led the way in developing military and political alliances that mirror NATO. In 2020, the Trump administration revived the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad) to bring India, Japan, and Australia further into the anti-China fold. However, members of the Quad are careful not to engage in a united military pact. The Biden administration was thus compelled to launch AUKUS in 2021, a mini-Asian NATO. AUKUS brings the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia into a military alliance which promises to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines and encourage Australia to increase military spending to satisfy its imperialist partners, all in the name of countering the so-called “China threat.” On June 24th, the U.S. announced the formation of the Partners in the Blue Pacific with New Zealand, Australia, and the U.K. in an obvious response to China’s recent security agreement with the Solomon Islands.

The U.S.’s emphasis on building up military alliances in the Asia-Pacific against China can be traced back to former President Barack Obama’s Pivot to Asia strategy. The Pivot to Asia has since morphed into an “Indo-Pacific Strategy” that has garnered only lukewarm results. China’s stabilizing economic presence in the region presents a counterweight to the U.S.’s military ambitions. Even the most unfriendly nations toward China, such as Japan, must carefully negotiate between its loyalties to the U.S. and its need for trade relations with China. For all the talk of an Asian NATO or a stronger military alliance in the region, the United States has been forced up until this point to rely on bilateral relationships to forward its aggressive policy toward China.

Still, NATO’s decision to shift attention on the Pacific is a clear and present threat to world peace. Even the Washington Post-owned Foreign Policy magazine has warned of a “Global Cold War” arising out of NATO’s interest in China. The U.S. government, Northrup Grumman-funded Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has admitted that NATO is returning to a “Cold War posture.” A better term for the strategy is full-spectrum dominance. The alliances that the U.S. is attempting to build in the Pacific are nothing more than an extension of a decade-long militaristic posture toward China which has brought more than half of the U.S.’s military arsenal to the region.

This brings the question of Taiwan into view. It’s clear to anyone paying attention that the U.S. views Taiwan as the single most important flashpoint for its military strategy against China. U.S. President Joe Biden has already approved four different weapons transfers to Taiwan over the course of eighteen months. Biden has also verbalized on three different occasions that his administration is committed to defending the island from a so-called invasion from China.

These moves are dangerous violations of the status quo on the Taiwan question established during the tumultuous latter stages of the Cold War. The recognition of the People’s Republic of China by the United Nations in 1971 and the normalization of relations between the U.S. and China in 1979 affirmed Taiwan as a Chinese province under the One-China principle. However, the United States under successive administrations has moved away from the status quo by providing clear political support to separatist forces in legislation such as the Taipei Act which advocates for Taiwan’s participation within prominent international bodies. Furthermore, the United States has increased arm sales to Taiwan in violation of Article 6 of the 1982 Joint Communiqué between China and the U.S. which states:

“Having in mind the foregoing statements of both sides, the United States Government states that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends gradually to reduce its sale of arms to Taiwan, leading, over a period of time, to a final resolution.”

To get a picture of just how much the U.S. has violated this clause, the U.S. maintains a backlog of weapons transfers to Taiwan worth $14 billion and this number is only set to grow with the announcement of $120 million more in assistance to Taiwan’s naval forces earlier this month.

Taiwan is intimately connected to the U.S.’s overall strategy of developing a NATO-like infrastructure in the Pacific. U.S. military strategists and talking heads have become obsessed with likening Ukraine to Taiwan. Their argument is that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine means that the U.S. must escalate in Taiwan to protect the island from China. The problem with this formulation is two-fold. Ukraine is a sovereign country. Taiwan is a province of China. Where the parallel truly resides is that similar to Ukraine being used as a pawn to forward the NATO encirclement of Russia, Taiwan is being used as a chip in the U.S.’s plans to militarily encircle China.

A key country to watch following the NATO summit is Japan. Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pre-empted the NATO summit by stating that China should be forced to “give up seizing Taiwan.” Japan currently stations more than 120 U.S. military bases and has already made a commitment to increase military spending in a show of loyalty to the U.S.’s anti-China geopolitical strategy. With South Korea’s election of a new pro-U.S. president and Australia’s adoption of a hostile policy toward China, the U.S. will likely seek firmer commitments from its so-called allies on the question of Taiwan.

The U.S. sees in the Taiwan question both a profitable venture for its defense industry and an opportunity to build the case for war with China. But the U.S.’s legitimacy is on the decline and China’s prestige in Asia, the Pacific, and the rest of the world is on the rise. The U.S. doesn’t merely seek alliances; it needs them. Military encirclement and the host of aggressive policies that the U.S. employs against China cannot succeed in isolation, if they can succeed at all. The U.S. understands that any conflict with China over Taiwan would require a level of support in the region similar to the servitude demonstrated by Europe against Russia.

Such a pursuit is incredibly reckless for a host of reasons. First, China presents no tangible military threat and in fact makes peace a fundamental priority in the international arena. China has only a single military base abroad and has not participated in a military conflict in more than four decades. Furthermore, while China seeks peaceful resolution to the issue of reunification with Taiwan, it will not tolerate any attempt by the U.S. to engineer independence or separatism. So-called Taiwan “independence” is China’s red-line, just as Russia’s red-line was NATO expansion into Ukraine and beyond.

The U.S.’s provocations in Taiwan thus risk a hot war with China that would inevitably lead to nuclear exchange. A hot war with China would destroy whatever stability exists around the world and create an economic and human catastrophe far greater than what has occurred over the course of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. Those who dismiss these real and legitimate threats to humanity in favor of Sinophobia, Yellow Peril, and New Cold War talking points are walking in lock-step with the U.S. empire. It is critical that we resist this reactionary defeatism, oppose any and all attempts of the U.S. to form a NATO-like infrastructure in the Pacific, and align ourselves with all global forces, including China, standing on the side of self-determination and peace.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/taiwa ... asian-nato
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Jul 09, 2022 2:12 pm

China wins deep trust with push for shared prosperity
By Khalid Taimur Akram | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-07-08 09:14

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Photo taken on Sept 24, 2015 shows the national flags of China (R) and the United States as well as the flag of Washington DC on the Constitution Avenue in Washington, capital of the United States. [Photo/Xinhua]

The United States has portrayed China as a "threat" to global peace and security. Recently, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a speech to the Asia Society outlining the Biden administration's approach to China. He explicitly targeted China's foreign policy and tried to smear its image with false accusations.

However, there is much historical evidence and facts that can unveil the US' false facade and anti-Chinese propaganda.

In the past two decades, the systematic ambiguity and elite-entrenched political process have had an impact on the US' standing in the world.

The US administration has accused China of posing a long-term challenge to the international order and undermining it. Such an approach is ironic, considering the US' own policies and flawed democratic structure.

The US has violated international law a number of times and intruded on the internal affairs of other countries, targeting sovereignty across continents. Many events depict the US' failed policies and misadventures internationally.

In response to various new global challenges, President Xi Jinping proposed the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative. They represent China's proposals for making the global governance system fairer and more equitable and have received positive responses and wide support from the international community.

The world still remembers how the US and the Western bloc colonized Asian and African countries and plundered resources. The imprints of their barbaric acts and tyranny are still visible.

Pursuing one's own agendas under the false cover of democracy cannot last for long. The world has affirmed support for China and shown a deep trust in China in its role in bringing nations closer by introducing innovative projects for economic development and shared prosperity.

On the contrary, the US has followed the path of negative propaganda against states, including China. The US has always claimed to be a pioneer of democracy. However, it has failed to implement the true spirit of democracy and very essence of cooperation.

Rooted in capitalist characteristics, US strategies have uncovered its dysfunctional system and Cold War mentality. The US' so-called democracy, engulfed in partisan politics, has failed to integrate countries.

China, on the other hand, has emerged as a leader to enhance cooperation and assistance in the crucial time of the COVID-19pandemic. Constant efforts and new proposals for economic cooperation and joint collaboration have made President Xi a visionary and dynamic global leader. China's global outreach cannot be affected by such belligerence and negative rhetoric.

China has followed a "people-centered" philosophy and launched a full range of robust initiatives and projects to achieve the goal of common prosperity and uphold peace, justice, fairness and sustainable development.

Over the past decade, through all the changes in the international system, China has remained firm and emerged as a leader in integrating people to achieve common goals. The important guiding principle "from the people, to the people" has enabled China to remove all obstacles and make a great stride forward.

China is well-rooted in great historical values and culture. Democratic values along with the practical implementation of grand projects are evident in China's rise. Democracy is a shared value and not something claimed by any one state. There is no set model, as it comes in many forms.

Thereby, moves to delegitimize any state will certainly face opposition from all those who value truth, equality and justice.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6b335.html

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The cruel irony of the US obsession with politicizing human rights
Co-editor of Friends of Socialist China Danny Haiphong explains why the US’s obsession with politicizing human rights against China is both baseless in substance and a deflection from its own heinous human rights record in all areas of economic, social, and political development. This article was originally published on CGTN.
The 50th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has entered its last week of deliberation. This particular session of the UNHRC saw the United States immediately politicize the issue of human rights by signing a statement from the Kingdom of the Netherlands and 46 other countries condemning China. The letter expressed “grave” concern over the human rights situation in China, listing the popular talking points in the West regarding the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the Tibet Autonomous Region.

China’s Permanent Representative to the UN Office at Geneva Chen Xu said that “disinformation has become rampant, which seriously runs counter to the original purpose of the Human Rights Council.” Cuba made a joint statement on behalf of 70 countries, stating that “the affairs of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet are China’s internal affairs.”

The U.S.’s politicization of human rights against China is ironic in a cruel way. Washington refuses to acknowledge the mountain of evidence proving that its allegations against China are illegitimate in the eyes of the rest of the world. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) sent a delegation to China and expressed satisfaction with its treatment of Muslims, including Uygurs, in a resolution on their findings. The OIC includes 57 member states and a population of near two-billion people. In 2020, Cuba made a statement on behalf of 45 countries that praised China’s counterterrorism and deradicalization policies in Xinjiang.

From May 23 to 29, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet visited China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The visit came amid intense pressure from the ceaseless propaganda campaign led by the U.S., which accuses China not only of “human rights abuses” against its Uygur ethnic minority, but also of suppressing information about them. Bachelet spoke with Uygurs, Chinese Muslims, and prominent officials. She also visited prisons and workplaces. Her statement following the visit ran counter to the “genocide” allegations made by the U.S. Department of State.

U.S. officials responded by mendaciously pretending that China had somehow compromised Bachelet’s visit. The reality is that dangerous political interests are behind these allegations against China. Human rights have been politicized to wage a new Cold War, which is contrary to the interests of humanity. Human rights are nothing more than an ideological weapon for the U.S geopolitical and imperial ambitions.

This is evidenced by the recent enactment and enforcement of the Uygur Forced Labor Prevention Act in the U.S., which bans all products made in Xinjiang based on fabricated allegations on the use of “forced labor.”

If the U.S. truly cared about human rights, then it would address its own mounting violations. Mass shootings have become a regular occurrence, with another six killed by a gunman in Highland Park, Illinois during this year’s Independence Day celebration. The overturning of Roe V. Wade is a major setback for gender equality.

As for “forced labor,” U.S. companies make an annual profit of $11 billion from prison labor. According to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union, prisoners across the U.S. are paid a miserly $0.13 to $0.52 per hour and are routinely punished when they refuse to work.

The record of the U.S. abroad sheds further light on the cruel irony of its attacks on China. Its wars have cost trillions in taxpayer dollars and have led to enormous casualties, including the death of more than 200,000 people in Iraq during the invasion period of 2003-2011. Moreover, U.S. and NATO-sponsored wars in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine have destabilized entire regions and led to a massive refugee crisis.

To cap it all, U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and dozens of other nations have prevented access to basic necessities, resulting in thousands of unnecessary deaths.

Such is the cruel irony of Washington’s so-called concern over human rights. The world is growing tired of this fraudulent crusade. Human rights are a serious issue, and this concept should be respected. Hunger, poverty, war, racism, climate change, and gender inequality are serious issues.

Behind this hypocritical stance on human rights, however, is the reality that U.S. policies are primarily responsible for human suffering, making it all the more important for U.S. officials to use China as a scapegoat for its many ills.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/07/06/t ... an-rights/

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US ‘forced labor’ allegations in Xinjiang nothing but imperial projection
The following article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Danny Haiphong, originally carried in the Global Times on 3 July 2022, addresses the recent implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, effectively imposing a blanket ban on goods produced in Xinjiang. Danny notes the startling hypocrisy of the US – the global capital of prison labor and modern slavery – slandering China on this basis. He further points to the two central motivations for the ‘China Bad’ narrative: firstly, creating a scapegoat for the steadily worsening problems of contemporary US capitalism; secondly, increasing demand (and thereby profits) for the military-industrial complex. What is abundantly clear is that ordinary people in the US have absolutely nothing to gain from the ruling class’s New Cold War.
US President Joe Biden has begun enforcing the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act that was passed in late 2021. The legislation is comprised of a set of economic sanctions that represent some of the broadest the US has leveled upon China since the normalization of relations between the two countries. This includes a ban on all imported goods from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and a US Department of Commerce review of all goods produced outside of the region that may have connections to economic institutions in Xinjiang. These measures have been justified by Biden and the US political establishment as a measured response to China’s use of “forced labor” in Xinjiang, particularly of its Uygur minority ethnic group. Allegations of forced labor in the region have never been proven and both foreign companies and Uygur workers alike have denied its existence.

That the US would attempt to punish China over forced labor is a clear act of imperial projection. Forced labor is a serious problem in the US. According to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union, US prisoners produce more than $11 billion in profits and services despite being paid an hourly wage of between $0.13 and $0.52. Seven states were found to pay no compensation for prison labor. Prisoners cited that punishment in the form of solitary confinement and family visitation was routinely employed against those who refused to work.

Forced labor in US prisons is far from coincidental. The Constitution of the US allows for slavery and involuntary servitude as a form of criminal punishment under the 13th Amendment. More than 1.2 million people are serving sentences in state or federal prisons, two-thirds of which are engaged in some form of labor. Furthermore, ethnic and racial minorities such as African-Americans make up the majority of the US prison population. Forced labor in US prisons thus targets specific social groups.

In other words, everything that the US has alleged of China in relation to forced labor is a routine policy in US prisons. Such hypocrisy is nothing new. The US possesses 25 percent of the world’s prisoners and just five percent of the world’s population. Yet prominent US media and politicians repeatedly hype the “threat” of “authoritarianism” from China. The US spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined yet US officials such as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin regularly claim that China is the one acting “aggressively.”

These examples of imperial projection are not without consequence. The US’ decision to enact widespread sanctions on China’s Xinjiang region not only threatens the livelihoods of Uygur workers but also carries the danger of worsening climate change. Xinjiang possesses nearly half of the world’s solar grade polysilicon, the base material for solar power used around the world. Furthermore, the US’ aggressive economic measures toward China are part and parcel of a dangerous geopolitical trend. A consensus has grown in the US foreign policy establishment that China must be treated as an adversary rather than a partner, leading to reckless military escalations in the Asia Pacific region and a ceaseless propaganda blitz in the Western media which has only fanned the flames of hostility.

Imperial projection toward China serves two key functions for the US foreign policy establishment. Negative attention on China creates a convenient scapegoat for domestic ills. The US is experiencing a deepening crisis of legitimacy that is only being worsened by high inflation, the reversal of legal protections for abortion rights, and the concerning frequency of deadly mass shootings. Furthermore, imperial projection serves as a catalyst for the narrow interests of war profiteers. An aggressive policy toward China boosts the short-term profits of US defense contractors and their investors at the expense of the long-term interests of humanity.

The US is in dire need of a course correction. China has made clear that it seeks cooperation with the US as it continues to walk along its socialist development path toward common prosperity and world peace. Instead of continuing on its dangerous path of war with China, the US would be better served addressing the economic and social ills tearing its own society apart. But this would require political leadership’s willing to trade in narrow elite interests for the good of humanity. And no such leadership exists within the US political system at this time.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/07/04/u ... rojection/

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U.S. Marines participate in amphibious assault exercise in 2020 (Shutterstock)

US AND NATO ESCALATE TENSIONS WITH ASIA-PACIFIC WAR GAMES
Civil society opposition to U.S. militarization of the Pacific is growing.
By Ann Wright | June 29, 2022

While the world’s attention is focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, halfway around the world in the Pacific Ocean, U.S. and NATO confrontation with China and North Korea is increasing dramatically.

Ever since the Obama administration’s “Pivot to Asia,” which was created in part to take the spotlight off the decision to surge troops in Afghanistan and Iraq in the failed U.S. war policies in the Middle East, U.S. military naval and air presence in the Western Pacific has been steadily increasing. During the Obama administration, Washington used “freedom of navigation”—an integral part of the Law of the Seas treaty that the United States has failed to ratify—to send large numbers of U.S. naval ships into contested areas in and around the South China Sea. Under the Trump administration, freedom-of-navigation armadas sailed in an even more confrontational manner.

Now, during the Biden administration, NATO countries have joined in the armadas as British, French, and German navies have sent ships to join with U.S. aircraft carrier groups of more than 20 ships. For the first time, the UK’s only aircraft carrier, the Queen Elizabeth, sailed into the Pacific to participate in war maneuvers off the coast of China.

The Trump administration ramped up confrontation with China by sending the highest-ranking U.S. diplomat to visit Taiwan in the history of the 40-year-old U.S. policy of “One China,” according to which Washington does not recognize Taiwan diplomatically. Trump’s actions deeply angered Beijing.

The Biden administration has dramatically increased the number of high-level diplomats visiting Taiwan. Its encouragement of congressional delegations to visit has infuriated the Chinese even more. The Chinese response to U.S. actions has been to send over 50 military aircraft across the narrow Taiwan Strait to the edge of Taiwan’s air defense zone in a show of potential military action.

The confrontation over Taiwan expanded in mid-June 2022. After China claimed that the Strait does not qualify as international waters, that Beijing has sovereignty over the zones extending from both Taiwan’s and China’s shores to the middle of the Strait, the United States said it would not stop conducting military operations there.

Although the United States does not have a defense agreement with it, Taiwan has always purchased U.S. weapons and U.S. military trainers regularly visit Taiwan. President Biden has responded to media questions about the prospect of an invasion by China with statements such as “We will defend Taiwan,” statements that his advisors have had to walk back. Since 2010, the United States has announced more than $23 billion in arms sales to Taiwan. In 2022, U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan so far total $1 billion and are for Patriot missiles and howitzers.

RIMPAC War Games

Adding to the tensions in the region, NATO countries and “partners” are joining the massive Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) naval war exercises. Held every two years since 1971, 2022 RIMPAC will feature 38 ships from 26 countries, four submarines, 170 aircraft, and 25,000 military personnel practicing naval war maneuvers in the Hawaiian waters from June 29 to August 4. Additionally, ground units from nine countries will come ashore on the islands of Hawai’i in amphibious landings.

Forty-five percent of RIMPAC participants are either in NATO or have NATO ties. Eight of the 26 RIMPAC countries are NATO members—Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The four other participating countries are Asia-Pacific “partners” of NATO: Australia, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand. The other countries participating in 2022 RIMPAC are Brunei, Chile, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, the Republic of the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Tonga. With participation of India for the first time in RIMPAC, all four members of the Quad—U.S., Japan, Australia and India—will be war gaming in the Pacific.

In previous RIMPAC war exercises, both China and Russia have been invited to participate, but neither is invited this year. Russia participated in RIMPAC for the first time in 2012, but after issues in Ukraine in 2014, Russia was not invited back, but China did receive a 2014 invitation. China had four ships in RIMPAC in 2014 and five ships in 2016. Congress passed the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act in December, 2021, which included a provision that Taiwan would be invited to participate in future RIMPAC exercises, but ultimately no invitation was extended for the 2022 RIMPAC.

RIMPAC military war exercises have dangerous, intended or unintended, consequences that put the Pacific region at ever increasing risk of military confrontation and destruction. Major cities in Asia—Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, and Pyongyang— could be destroyed in an exchange of ballistic missiles. The same holds true for major U.S. cities.

Civic Opposition to RIMPAC
Many citizens of the 26 RIMPAC countries do not agree with their country’s participation in the war games, calling them provocative and dangerous for the region.

The Pacific Peace Network, with members from countries/islands across the Pacific including Guåhan, Jeju Island, South Korea, Okinawa, Japan, Philippines, Northern Mariana Islands, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Hawai’i and the United States, demand that RIMPAC be cancelled, calling the naval armada “dangerous, provocative and destructive.”

The network’s petition states that

RIMPAC dramatically contributes to the destruction of the ecology system and aggravation of the climate crisis in the Pacific region. RIMPAC war forces will blow up decommissioned ships with missiles endangering marine mammals such as humpback whales, dolphins and Hawaiian monk seals and polluting the ocean with contaminates from the vessels. Land forces will conduct ground assaults that will tear up beaches where green sea turtles come to breed.

The petition rejects “the massive expenditure of funds on war-making when humanity is suffering from lack of food, water and other life-sustaining elements. Human security is not based on military war drills, but on care for the planet and its inhabitants.”

Other citizen groups in the Pacific region are adding their voices to the call to cancel RIMPAC.

In its statement about RIMPAC, the Hawai’i-based Women’s Voices, Women Speak declared that “RIMPAC causes ecological devastation, colonial violence and gun worship. RIMPAC’s ship sinking, missile testing, and torpedo blasting have destroyed island ecosystems and disturbed sea creatures’ wellbeing. This convening of military personnel promotes toxic masculinity; sex trafficking and violence against local populations.”

In a June 14, 2022 opinion piece in the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the only state-wide newspaper in Hawai’i where the headquarters of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command is located, three local activists with the Hawai’i Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines wrote:

We are one with the people of Hawaii in opposing the U.S.-led wars, for which Balikatan (US-Philippine ground war maneuvers) and RIMPAC are warmups. As it is, our governments bring together the people of Hawaii and the people of the Philippines to prepare for war, death and destruction. Military posturing in the Asia-Pacific also risks nuclear war and the potential extinction of the human species. We must instead work toward global cooperation to address the threats of climate change and biodiversity loss; to build toward peace, life and coexistence.

The “No to NATO” organization, with membership in all the NATO countries, challenges NATO war policies through public outreach by webinars and community events in the cities where NATO meetings occur, the latest being in June 2022 in Madrid, Spain.

Together, these efforts decry the preparations for war and work instead for a more peaceful world.

https://fpif.org/us-and-nato-escalate-t ... war-games/

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Official details pathways to reunification
2022-07-08 09:54:41China DailyEditor : Li YanECNS App Download

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The Taipei 101 skyscraper commands the urban landscape in Taipei, Taiwan. (Photo/Xinhua)

Mainland will exert utmost efforts to solve Taiwan question by peaceful means

The historical trend toward a stronger country, national rejuvenation and reunification between the two sides of the Taiwan Straits cannot be stopped by any force or anyone, the mainland's top Taiwan affairs official has said.

"The time, tide and righteousness to resolve the Taiwan question have always been on the side of the forces that advocate unification," said Liu Jieyi, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, in a bylined article published in Thursday's People's Daily, stressing that the national reunification is the "inevitable requirement" of realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation in the new era.

The mainland has been putting forth efforts to prevent and tackle major hazards across the Straits to set up a beneficial environment for national rejuvenation, he said, adding that the rising comprehensive strength and remarkable institutional advantages have been pushing reunification forward.

Zhong Houtao, a Taiwan affairs researcher for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the "righteousness" Liu mentioned meant the legitimacy from historical and legal perspectives.

"On one hand, Taiwan is part of the inherent territory of China and was governed by the latter from of old," he said.

"On the other hand, the Cairo Declaration signed during World War II that terminated the Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan has made it clear that Taiwan belongs to China.

"More importantly, Liu's words also stand for the common aspiration of the 1.4 billion people in China," Zhong said, adding that reunification would be an irreversible trend.

Liu said the fact that both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China "has never and will not change", underlining that the one-China principle is the political foundation of cross-Straits relations and the "1992 Consensus" should be upheld.

"The Taiwan separatist forces are the biggest obstacle to reunification," he said, warning that the Taiwan question is China's internal affair and no external interference will be tolerated.

"We will absolutely not allow anyone, any organization, any party to split any part of the territory from China at any time, in any form," Liu warned, adding that the reason why the mainland makes no promise to renounce the use of force is to ensure the prospects for peaceful reunification and safeguard the fundamental interests of the Chinese nation including the people in Taiwan.

"We will work with the greatest sincerity and exert utmost efforts to achieve peaceful reunification and explore a 'two systems' solution to the Taiwan question," the senior official said, stressing that the principle of "peaceful reunification and one country, two systems" is the fundamental guideline of resolving the Taiwan question and the best approach to realizing national reunification.

In terms of how the principle is carried out in Taiwan, he said the mainland would "fully consider Taiwan's reality, give full consideration to the views and proposals from all walks of life on both sides and fully accommodate the interests and sentiments of our compatriots in Taiwan".

Liu highlighted that the peaceful and integrated development of the two sides would be important for the foundation of reunification.

"We insist consolidating the political, economic, cultural and social foundation of the peaceful development of cross-Straits relations," he said.

"We'll continue paving the way for compatriots in Taiwan to share first in the mainland's development opportunities and ensure that they gradually receive the same treatment as those from the mainland."

Zhong, the researcher, said deepening the integrated development of both sides is part of the mainland's effort for future reunification by enhancing the sense of belonging and identity of the people across the Straits.

"The reunification will be realized not only on a nominal level, but also from the bottom of hearts, which is relevant to integration in all aspects of society," he said.

"The integration process of both sides is actually the process of reunification, which is not a future tense but a progressive tense."

Liu, the Taiwan affairs official, also quoted President Xi Jinping's remarks saying the Taiwan question originated in a weak and ravaged nation, and it will definitely end with national rejuvenation, noting that the Communist Party of China has endeavored to pursue the historic mission of resolving the Taiwan question and realizing complete reunification.

http://www.ecns.cn/news/2022-07-08/deta ... 9461.shtml
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 15, 2022 4:17 pm

Global Times interview: Brian Becker on socialism and the U.S. campaign against China
Global TimesJuly 5, 2022 1292 7 minutes read
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The following interview with Brian Becker, national director of the ANSWER Coalition and a founding member of the PSL, was originally published by the Global Times, a widely-read Chinese publication.

Global Times: As the founder of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, what is your take on China’s achievements during the past decade under the leadership of the CPC? What changes in China during this period have impressed you the most?

Becker: Perhaps the most impressive single achievement during the past decade was the eradication of extreme poverty for more than 850 million people. This was the greatest anti-poverty program achievement in the history of the human race. Another unmistakable achievement was the success of managing the COVID crisis. In the US, where I live, more than one million people have died. More than 60 million workers lost their jobs in 2020. More than 100,000 small businesses were sent into bankruptcy. While the US was plunged into an economic recession and a healthcare crisis of unprecedented proportions, the Chinese government pursued a policy preventing such loss of life inside a country with 1.4 billion people. This would have been impossible had it not been for the policy, guidance, and unified approach of the government. That does not mean that there aren’t still significant challenges, but this was a huge achievement. Also, while China has emerged as the 2nd largest economy in the world the leadership of the Party outlined a plan so that economic development was balanced or became more balanced, that efforts to mitigate pollution and climate destruction were affirmed and acted upon and that the goal was to create “common prosperity.” Finally, China offered a different global vision. The development of the Belt and Road Initiative offered a stark contrast to an economic globalization scheme based on neo-colonialism and the exploitation of the nations in the Global South.

GT: What influence does the development of China’s socialism with Chinese characteristics during this past decade have on the global socialist movement?

Becker: In the US and in Latin America today there is a growing revival in the popularity of socialism – especially among tens of millions of young people who want a more just and sustainable world. Growing economic inequality, the danger of climate catastrophe and more war has led millions of young people to seek an alternative to capitalism. China’s development of socialism with Chinese characteristics and its attendant social and economic achievements have naturally become a focus of study for people who are interested in or committed to finding an alternative to the current system with its grotesque inequalities, ever-present violence, endless war and looming climate disaster. The fact that the current leadership of the Chinese Communist Party has reaffirmed and re-emphasized China’s socialist goals has been a source of great inspiration for people who seek a socialist and humanist alternative.

GT: China has been enriching the state and strengthening the army, while adhering to a defensive defense policy. As an anti-war activist, how do you understand China’s security concept? How does it differ from the security concepts of some Western countries?

Becker: The contrast between China and the US on the question of militarism, war, military expansionism, could not be greater. Anyone who analyzes the security orientation of the two countries with an objective lens will easily observe a profound difference. The US leads the most formidable military alliance in the world, NATO. It unites 30 countries into a military bloc. NATO is a US-led military formation. US current military spending is $800 billion which is more than double the combined military spending of the other 29-member states in NATO. China is not a member of any international military formation. The US has more than 800 foreign military bases and installations around the world. The US went to war in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq for a second time, and Libya. In 2018, the US adopted a new military doctrine prioritizing and preparing for major power conflict which obviously has China as the principal target. Following the 2011 so-called Pivot to Asia announcement the US has redeployed more than 60 percent of its air force and naval assets into the Pacific region. Clearly, the US is actually preparing for military confrontation with China. The current effort in “strengthening the army” is clearly a defensive initiative. It would be foolhardy for China to not take the US threat seriously and to upgrade its military capacity in order to defend the country and hopefully to prevent the outbreak of catastrophic global confrontation.

GT: Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed a Global Security Initiative at this year’s Boao Forum for Asia. What do you think about this new initiative? Will it make a notable contribution to establishing a new global order?

Becker: The initiative proposed by President Xi Jinping at the Boao Forum is in essence a reaffirmation of the UN founding charter. What makes the initiative very new and fresh is that it highlights the growing danger of war in the current century as compared to the challenges facing the world at the time of the formation of the UN. It highlights the need for the countries of the world to prioritize and work together to avoid war. It makes the argument that the prevention of war is in the interest of all countries. That there should be a shared commitment to work together in cooperation to avoid and prevent war. The analogy used is that all of the countries in the world are sharing the planet the way people on a large ship have a shared and intertwined, common destiny as regards the fate of the ship rather than looking as if they only care about their cabin on the ship. This makes perfect sense.

GT: You have said that the US is preparing for a war with China and “hoping that China suffers the same fate as the Soviet Union.” Could you elaborate on that? What challenges does the US pose to the security situation in and around China?

Becker: There are two important aspects of this question but they are both very interconnected. The US is obviously planning and preparing for a military confrontation with China. But the goal is not war itself although that could happen. The US goal is to create a process inside of China similar to that which collapsed the Soviet Union. That could only happen if China lost its internal unity. This is the US plan and it’s not really a secret: The US seeks nuclear primacy and military supremacy. The goal of this military buildup, naval and air provocations, the secret sending of military forces to Taiwan is designed to raise the specter of the containment or isolation of China. The real goal of the US is to create so much pressure on China that it will lead to political fractures within China with the hope that the government will lose its existing internal unity. It was the loss of unity inside the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) that led to the tragic and completely unnecessary dissolution of the Soviet Union.

US policymakers are operating out of a strategic playbook that is premised on the actual course of events in the 1980s that led to the shocking breakup of the Soviet Union, which – let us remember – was the second largest economy and military power. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the US government embarked on a very aggressive military buildup. The US refused new arms treaties. It placed advanced weapons all around the Soviet Union. The US military budget was nearly doubled. The US launched an effort to gain military supremacy in outer space and end the era of military parity between the two countries. The US consciously created a pressure cooker situation. This created fear inside the USSR that war was coming, and it led to a loss of confidence within the leadership and it aided a political current inside the leadership that sought to appease the US. Failure to properly deal with this aggressive posture and to properly manage political reforms led to the breakup of the unity within the CPSU and ultimately led to a counter-revolutionary overturn. I do not believe this will happen in China. This is an imperial fantasy. China is well aware of this strategy. But the US is playing a dangerous game by escalating toward war and confrontation and extinguishing the different cooperative parts of the US-Chinese relationships that have existed in the previous 40 years.

GT: In the last 10 years, it is evident that China has maintained a relatively stable development momentum, while the US’ strengths have been significantly eroded and the country has faced increasing chaos and internal conflict. In your opinion, what are the reasons behind China’s rise and the US’ decline in development? Will the development gap between the two countries become wider and wider in the future?

Becker: The US spent more than $2 trillion in the war that it lost in Afghanistan since 2001. In that same two decades the US experienced three major economic recessions. Another fundamental weakness for the US government is that the only vision it offers the world is one of absolute US domination. This is unacceptable to the rest of the world. By constantly employing military threats, invading other countries, carrying out targeted assassinations around the world using drone technology, expanding NATO which made war in Ukraine almost certain, by imposing draconian economic sanctions and seizing the assets of smaller countries the US is diminishing its standing in the eyes of the people of the world. This is a serious blow to US “soft power.” China has taken an almost diametrically opposed position by emphasizing peaceful cooperation and what the Chinese call a win-win strategy highlighting that interaction with other countries is considered mutually beneficial rather than a relationship based on coercion. US policymakers continue to act and frame their decisions as if they are living in the 19th century where “might makes right” and a few countries trampled over the rest of the globe. China is also offering a clear-cut, living proof example of how countries in the Global South can achieve economic and social prosperity and overcome the long, dark era of colonization or semi-colonization.

https://www.liberationnews.org/global-t ... nst-china/

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Hong Kong: the truth is out
On his first visit back to Hong Kong since 2019, long-term East Asian resident, and Friends of Socialist China Advisory Group member, Kenny Coyle writes that he found a city becalmed. “Rarely”, he observes, “has Western mainstream propaganda so successfully shrouded the truth about a city and society as open as Hong Kong.”

Kenny clarifies the meaning behind China’s insistence that Hong Kong was never a British colony, but rather a Chinese territory under illegal British occupation. His article, which also features an interview with Nixie Lam, a Legislative Council member from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), the territory’s largest and most influential patriotic political party, is full of useful information. It was originally published in the Morning Star and we are pleased to reprint it here.
Hong Kong marked the 25th anniversary of its return to Chinese sovereignty with Chinese president Xi Jinping appearing in the city to witness the inauguration of the Chinese territory’s new leadership headed by John Lee.

The largely indoor ceremony had been forecast to take place amid a mild tropical typhoon, but for the past three years Hong Kong has been battered by quite different kinds of storms.

Xi’s visit takes place after an unprecedented period of turmoil. The first stage beginning in 2019 was characterised by a wave of initially peaceful mass protests against extradition legislation, which rapidly spiralled into violent anti-China protests.

The second stage by the ongoing battle to control the Covid pandemic in the city.

In my first visit since 2019, Hong Kong certainly seems becalmed. The city’s MTR rail network is back to pristine perfection. The political arson that saw 138 of the city’s 161 stations vandalised (including the deliberate destruction of lifts for the disabled and essential safety equipment) during the 2019 protests has long been cleaned up.

Temperature and Covid checks are carried out routinely at restaurant and shopping areas, with minimal inconvenience, although the city continues to enforce a seven-day quarantine on incoming passengers from overseas.

The image in Western media of a city writhing under a police state is belied by the reality on the ground.

Bars and restaurants are busy, as any five-minute evening walk around my Tsim Sha Tsui neighbourhood in Kowloon shows, supermarket shelves are full and whatever the talking heads of the local CNN or BBC bureaus would have you believe about “threats to freedom” on screen, they still somehow manage to prop up the main bar in the Foreign Correspondents Club each evening after their shifts.

Rarely has Western mainstream propaganda so successfully shrouded the truth about a city and society as open as Hong Kong’s.

The 2019 peaceful protests degenerated into the ugliest side of the anti-China movement, with black-shirted groups attacking anything and anyone that failed to kow-tow to their agenda.

Trade union offices, political parties and even those whose only crime was speaking the standard putonghua (Mandarin) version of Chinese in public were targeted for mob attacks.

Living in the neighbouring Special Administrative Region of Macao during this time, I not only witnessed the extremist antics at first hand on visits to Hong Kong (for example during their brief blockade of the city’s immigration department) but could watch shocking broadcasts of the petrol-bombers and barricade builders live-streamed on Hong Kong TV channels.

Just as shocking was the absence of these easily available images on BBC or CNN broadcasts.

A more recent manufactured furore in the British media has been over Hong Kong textbooks being “rewritten” in relation to British rule in Hong Kong prior to China reassuming sovereignty in 1997.

The assumption, of course, is that Chinese history can only be accurately understood through a Western lens.

As if to illustrate the enormous diversity of the British press, the following headlines appeared on the issue: “China rewrites history of Hong Kong with textbooks that deny British rule” (Telegraph, June 14); “China rewrites Hong Kong textbooks to deny Britain ever ruled the city” (Independent, June 15); and slightly more accurately — “China rewrites textbooks to insist Hong Kong was never a colony” (Times, June 15); “New Hong Kong textbooks ‘will claim city never was a British colony’” (Guardian, June 15).

The average reader would be forgiven for viewing this another ridiculous example of CPC censorship, an Orwellian erasure of the well-known history of British administration in Hong Kong.

However, the proposed texts from the Hong Kong education department merely restate the longstanding positions of not only the People’s Republic of China (and that of the previous Republic of China, it should be said) but also that of the United Nations.

In 1972, one year after the PRC took China’s seat at the UN, the PRC successfully removed Hong Kong and Macao (then under Portuguese fascist administration) from the list of colonised territories.

Hong Kong was not to be considered a British colony, it was a Chinese territory under illegal British occupation, an extremely important distinction in China’s eyes.

People’s China never established a diplomatic or consular presence in British-ruled Hong Kong, believing that this would legitimise British rule.

Instead, the office of the New China News Agency (better known today as Xinhua) was the de facto centre of contacts between the British authorities and the PRC government within the territory.

The issue of Hong Kong’s pre-1997 status has become more urgent recently, after the British government and media falsely claimed that the Sino-British Declaration of 1984, signed by the Thatcher government and China, somehow gave Britain some special rights to intervene in Hong Kong affairs after 1997.

The text of the declaration clearly states the opposite: 1997 marked the return of undivided Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong.

Subsequent developments, including the much-belated extension of national security legislation in 2020 are entirely consistent with the principle of “One Country, Two Systems” first outlined by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and are in any case covered by provisions in an annex to the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.

But if Western eyes are on the past, China is looking forward. Plans are in place to create a Greater Bay Area, encompassing the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao and nine major cities in Guangdong province.

The aim is to use the synergy of these southern Chinese cities to create a dynamic economic hub of around 70 million people that will eventually dwarf most national and regional economies.

Many people in Hong Kong believe the city’s future lies in closer co-operation not in conflict with the rest of China.

Nixie Lam, a member of Hong Kong’s legislative council (Legco) and a representative of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB), the largest and most influential party within the patriotic camp, holds to this perspective.

She believes the new administration led by Hong Kong chief executive John Lee has the opportunity to put the territory back on the right track.

Lee, who takes office on July 1, has already outlined a platform that the future government will set clear targets and key performance indicators (KPIs) for selected tasks within the first 100 days of his new administration.

Some of this is designed to streamline government functioning, but he has also pledged to accelerate land and housing development, shorten the waiting time for public housing and address the city’s vast wealth gap.

“Hong Kong has wasted a lot of time and opportunities over the past few years. I see very high expectations among Hong Kong citizens. We have missed out on a lot. Where are we going to develop and to excel is the key, but time is very limited,” stresses Lam, a former grassroots district councillor.

“Perhaps that’s why Lee came up with his 100 days KPI promise, to show he would make visible changes in different aspects of policies and strategies.

“The new administration is formed by various well seasoned politicians, administrators, together with some industry leaders. It shows the new administration wants to restart Hong Kong and work together as a team.

“I’ve joined working groups scrutinising the new government structure. If you look closely, it’s easy to see that they really want to tackle some of the unresolved issues we face by bringing outside experts into the administration.”

Lam, herself a graduate of the University of Queensland in Australia, is nonetheless tired of Western countries continually lecturing Hong Kong.

“It’s boring to hear that democracy or One Country, Two Systems is dead. For those who live in Hong Kong, we know clearly who killed our democracy in 2019.

“Rioters and mobs were everywhere destroying public facilities, paralysing railway systems and so on but they were called ‘Freedom Fighters’ by Western countries. These double standards are not new in Hong Kong,” she insists.

“Hong Kong citizens know what’s best for our city. It is not begging overseas countries to sanction our city, it is not calling for American troops to take over our city, and it is definitely not the violent ‘democracy’ that they embraced.

“The city has been stablised. Ordinary citizens do not need to worry about being targeted by extremists any more. Discussions are no longer highly polarised but focus more on which strategy is best for the city.

“I guess that some people in Western countries do not want to see that our life is getting back to normal. People in Hong Kong are more focused on our Covid strategy and want to find more targeted solutions, finding a way that will balance reopening the city with ensuring people’s lives and health are protected,” she says.

Despite the challenges, Lam is clear about the way forward: “It is for us, Hong Kong citizens to work jointly toward rebuilding our city.”

https://socialistchina.org/2022/07/15/h ... th-is-out/

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China slams 'debt trap' allegations by the West
By MO JINGXI | China Daily | Updated: 2022-07-15 09:17

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Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin. [Photo/fmprc.gov.cn]

The so-called Chinese debt trap is more of a "narrative trap "created by those who do not hope to see China-Africa cooperation pick up speed, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Thursday after a study stated that the West, instead of China, is to be blamed for the African debt crisis.

The study, released on Monday by British charity Debt Justice, said African governments owe three times more debt to Western banks, asset managers and oil traders than they do to China, and are charged double the interest.

"Western leaders through G7 have attributed the failure to make progress on debt restructuring to China, but the data shows that this is mistaken," the study said.

Speaking at a regular news briefing in Beijing, Wang said that just as the organization's head of policy had pointed out, Western leaders blame China for debt crisis in Africa, but this is a distraction as the truth is that their own banks, asset managers and oil traders are far more responsible for it.

Debt Justice's analysis of World Bank data showed that based on available data of 49 African governments up to the end of 2020, nearly 75 percent of their total $696 billion external debt is owed to multilateral institutions and non-Chinese private creditors.

Over the next seven years, 35 percent of African governments' external debt service will be due to non-Chinese private lenders. For the 24 countries with the highest debt burden, their median average of debt payments by creditor grouping is 32 percent to non-Chinese private lenders.

"All these facts and data demonstrated that the so-called Chinese debt trap is purely fake news," Wang said.

The spokesman also called on developed countries and their private lenders and multinational financial institutions to take more robust action to help developing countries ease their debt burden with a view of achieving inclusive and sustainable development of the global economy.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6c7a3.html

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China Willing To Help Sri Lanka Amid Acute Economic Crisis

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National authorities submitted a moratorium on Sri Lanka's 51 billion dollars foreign debt and are negotiating a loan with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Jul. 14, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@ianbremmer

Published 14 July 2022 (9 hours 46 minutes ago)

China is willing to help Sri Lanka cope with the economic crisis plaguing the country, according to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce.

Sri Lanka is going through its worst economic crisis in seven decades and the foreign exchange deficit is making it difficult for millions of people to buy food, medicine, fuel, and other necessities.

Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman Shu Jueting told a briefing that "China will continue to support Sri Lanka to the best of its ability amid the country's difficulties so that it can recover its economy as soon as possible and improve the people's living conditions."

The Chinese official referred to the China-Ceylon Rice Rubber Pact, signed in 1952, which reflects both nations' spirit in fighting hegemony and power politics. "We will together maintain a healthy and stable development of relations under our trade agreement," the spokesperson said.

Overall inflation in the country of 22 million inhabitants reached 54.6 percent last month, with the central bank warning that it could rise to 70 percent in the near future. Amid this scenario, the national authorities submitted a moratorium on Sri Lanka's 51 billion dollars foreign debt and are negotiating a loan with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).


The government's massive and growing debt, rising oil prices, severe foreign currency shortages, which have curbed imports of essential goods such as fuel, food and medicine, have led to months of protests in the country. As a result of the clashes between security forces and protesters, one person was killed and at least 80 injured.

In April, all 24 Sri Lankan cabinet ministers resigned from their posts amid protests and clashes in the capital, Colombo. Over the last weekend, protesters stormed the presidential palace, forcing Gotabaya Rajapaksa to leave for the Maldives. Later the office of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had been appointed acting president, was also raided by protesters.

Acting President and current Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has announced a curfew in effect from Thursday at 12:00 local time until Friday at 5:00.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Chi ... -0023.html

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The Decline of the US and the Rise of the East
JULY 13, 2022

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By Daniel Kovalik – Jul 9, 2022

We are now witnessing a great realignment and transformation. The so-called “American Century” has given way to a new century in which other countries are asserting themselves and taking the lead in the world. This new world order seemed quite unlikely several decades ago when the USSR collapsed and it appeared, and the US certainly declared, that the United States would be the one, dominant power for many decades to come. Ironically, it was the US’ very attempt to maintain this status which has inexorably led to its losing it, and to its decline as a nation.

While ironic, this was all quite predictable. Indeed, the Democratic Party, in its 1900 party platform, warned of this very outcome when it stated, “[w]e assert that no nation can long endure half republic and half empire, and we warn the American people that imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home.” But no sooner were these words uttered than that the US embarked upon unprecedented empire-building beyond its already-giant mainland which itself was the product of a brutal settler-colonial project which displaced, subdued and killed millions of people already living from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

The US, of course, settled upon the instruments of war and violence to achieve its imperial aims. After all, the reasoning went, these had worked so well for it in building the nation to begin with. This addiction to unending expansion through costly wars, however, was not and is not sustainable. Indeed, in his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a former General, warned that the US republic was under threat, not from abroad, but from a growing “military-industrial complex” which was threatening to usurp democratic and civilian rule of the country.

More recently, in what sounded like a postmortem of the United States, Jimmy Carter told President Trump when discussing China in 2019 that the US is “the most warlike nation in the history of the world,” and that this has cost the US dearly.

As Carter explained, “We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion [on military spending since 1979]. … China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.

“And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you’d probably have $2 trillion left over. We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing. We’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of, say, South Korea or Hong Kong.”

The results of all this have been disastrous. As just one example, Forbes magazine reported in 2020 that “54% of US adults 16-74 years old – about 130 million people – lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.” Forbes estimated that this functional illiteracy – on par with what we used to call Third World nations – was costing the US $2.2 trillion a year. It is also costing the US in terms of its ability to maintain an informed electorate which can meaningfully participate in an ostensibly democratic system.

The other factor leading to the decline of the United States has been the increasing usurpation of power by the monied interests which now control every facet of life in the country, including the very system of “democracy,” if one can still call it that. This was made possible by a decision of the least democratic branch of the US government, the Supreme Court, in its 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission which, in the words of the well-respected Brennan Center for Justice, “reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited funds on elections.”

The result is that US electoral positions now go to the highest bidders which in turn act on behalf of themselves and their super rich friends, and against the interests of the vast majority of the population who are forced to languish in poverty, ill-health and ignorance. Nowhere was this phenomenon better demonstrated than during the recent pandemic in which the US suffered the highest number of cases and deaths in the world while the measures imposed by the US government to ostensibly combat the pandemic ensured that the very rich became $4.5 trillion dollars richer at the expense of everyone else. This is the mark of a country that is not working as it should. The US is, indeed, a failed state, and it is failed by design so that the few oligarchs can rule in the breach created by the chaos.

While the US suffers this sad decline, countries in the East like China and Vietnam are rising. With their economies focused on meeting human needs, rather than on fueling war and the gross enrichment of the few, these countries are lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and building sustainable infrastructure in their own countries and around the world. The US, rather than viewing these countries as adversaries or even enemies, should have the humility to learn from them and indeed work with them in creating a more just and prosperous world. This would require the US to radically change course and to focus on adopting peaceful means in its dealings with the world; on creating rather than destroying. It is my hope that the US can make this course correction before it is too late for all of us.

https://orinocotribune.com/the-decline- ... -the-east/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 21, 2022 2:10 pm

Call for 'guardrails' nothing but blather: China Daily editorial
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-07-17 18:59

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This bird eye view shows the coral reefs in China's Xisha Islands, South China Sea. [Photo/Xinhua]

Soon after warning away the USS Benfold guided missile destroyer that trespassed in Chinese territorial waters off the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea on Wednesday, the Chinese People's Liberation Army Southern Theater Command released photos of the operation.

One photo and its caption show the Chinese and United States vessels are in visual range, with a PLA sailor on board the guided missile frigate Xianning gathering data on the USS destroyer. Another photo is a close-up shot of the USS Benfold, which placed its weapons and fire-control radar system in default positions.

This was the first time the PLA has released photos from any such encounters. It reflects the PLA's growing confidence and readiness to respond to the "freedom of navigation" provocations of the US.

Under that pretext, the US military has been repeatedly sending warships to waters off the Xisha and Nansha islands in the South China Sea. It should be noted that three days after its trespassing in waters off the Xisha Islands the USS Benfold conducted a similar "freedom of navigation" operation in waters off China's Nansha Islands on Saturday.

The frequent US military operations have prompted the PLA to develop a routine practice of organizing its naval and air forces to track, monitor and warn away US military vessels and aircraft.

The US moves are clear proof that the US is the major destabilizing factor in the South China Sea.

Washington has repeatedly claimed that its military maneuvers in the South China Sea are aimed at challenging China's "excessive maritime claims" which it alleges pose a serious threat to the freedom of the sea including freedom of navigation and overflight, free trade and unimpeded commerce.

But such allegations do not hold water as there has never been a single case indicating China's safeguarding of its legitimate maritime territorial rights and interests has hindered freedom of navigation or normal commerce conducted through the waters in any way.

On the contrary, it is the US that is taking increasing moves to militarize the South China Sea, using the maritime disputes as an excuse to turn the waters into a venue for its efforts to contain China. By repeatedly sending its warships and military aircraft to stage provocations on China's doorstep, the US intends to showcase its global supremacy and encourage others to participate in its "Indo-Pacific strategy".

The US' provocative freedom of navigation operations show its high-ranking officials have no sincerity at all when they repeatedly call for the establishing of "guardrails" for China-US relations to ensure that the competition between the two countries does not veer into a conflict.

But instead of intimidating China, the reckless US moves will only consolidate China's determination to defend its territorial integrity and sovereignty by quickening its own defense forces' modernization and steadily improving the PLA's operational capabilities and combat preparedness.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6cc71.html

Washington urged to stop interfering in affairs of Xinjiang
By MO JINGXI | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-07-19 07:05

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Workers operate a seeder in Ili Mehmet's cotton field in Shawan, Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, April 16, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said on Monday that the latest attempts by the United States to interfere in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region to contain China have been fully exposed and will only end in failure.

He made the comments at a regular news briefing in Beijing after the US State Department once again groundlessly accused China of "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" in Xinjiang.

In an annual report submitted on Friday to the US Congress on the US' work on preventing and responding to "atrocities", the US State Department irresponsibly highlighted China for so-called human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Wang said that the so-called China-related content of the US report wantonly smears human rights conditions in Xinjiang and maliciously attacks the Chinese government's Xinjiang policy with no factual basis.

"It is a continuation of the US government's old trick of spreading lies and rumors about Xinjiang," the spokesman said.

Wang said that the US has for some time been fabricating and hyping up so-called genocide, forced labor and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, based on lies and disinformation, in order to smear and suppress China.

Last month, regardless of China's strong opposition, the US insisted on implementing the so-called "Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act", which prohibits imports made by so-called "forced labor" into the US of products made in Xinjiang. The act is an attempt to create "forced unemployment" and a "forced return to poverty "in Xinjiang, he said.

"The US is undermining human rights under the guise of human rights, undermining rules under the guise of rules, and trampling on the rule of law under the guise of law," Wang said, noting that Washington's attempts to interfere in Xinjiang and contain China have been fully exposed.

He urged the US to release reports on its own conditions of forced labor domestically and its crimes against humanity in nations including the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.

"The truth will not be covered up forever, and justice will eventually be served," Wang said.

The spokesman added that the international community has seen through the nature of US actions to create lies to attack other countries, while being oblivious to its own human rights crimes.

"China will take all necessary measures to defend its sovereignty, security and development interests," Wang said, noting that the US' attempts to spread lies about Xinjiang and to use Xinjiang as a pretext to interfere in China's internal affairs will only end in failure.

US arms sales opposed

Wang also strongly condemned Washington's latest arms sale to Taiwan, saying that China will continue to take strong measures to resolutely defend its sovereignty and security interests.

The US State Department has approved the potential sale of military technical assistance to Taiwan worth an estimated $108 million, the Pentagon said on Friday.

Zhu Fenglian, a spokeswoman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said on Monday that the US has repeatedly sold arms to Taiwan in serious violation of the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-US joint communiques, in order to condone and assist "Taiwan independence" separatists.

"We urge the US side to stop its attempt to play the 'Taiwan card' and stop playing with fire on Taiwan-related issues," she said.

Zhu also warned Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party authorities that the attempt to seek "independence" by force will only further harm the interests of Taiwan compatriots and push them into disaster.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6d03c.html

Pacific Islands strategy focuses on prosperity
By KARL WILSON in Sydney | China Daily | Updated: 2022-07-16 11:29

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Relief supplies are unloaded in Tonga from a Chinese naval vessel after the Pacific island nation was hit by a volcanic eruption and tsunami in January. XUE CHENGQING/XINHUA

Analysts see potential in its vision for closer ties with nations including China

The Pacific Islands Forum has launched its long-term development strategy to help address the challenges faced by the region and its people, which analysts see the potential for closer cooperation with China among others.

The 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent was endorsed by the regional heads of governments at the 51st Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting in Fiji's capital Suva on Thursday.

"As Pacific leaders, our vision is for a resilient Pacific region of peace, harmony, security, social inclusion and prosperity, that ensures all Pacific peoples can lead free, healthy and productive lives," the leaders' vision in the document stated.

Forum chairman and Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama said:"The 2050 Strategy is about what we share, our challenges and our opportunities about what we need to do together. This is why the 2050 Strategy focuses on our people."

China, which is a dialogue partner of the Pacific Islands Forum, will assist, where it can, to help the Pacific Island countries, or PICs, achieve their development goals, analysts and diplomats said.

James Laurenceson, director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, said China has established good working relationships with Pacific nations in recent years to help with economic aid.

"Across the globe, China has put a great deal of energy into relations with developing countries and that is a good thing. You see that in the Pacific, Africa and Latin America," he said.

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who co-chaired the second China-Pacific Island Countries Foreign Ministers' Meeting with the Fijian prime minister in late May, said China supports PICs in seeking peace and development and in their people's freedom to pursue better lives.

Hans Hendrischke, a professor of Chinese business and management at the University of Sydney, pointed out that China is already the biggest trading partner for several Pacific nations.

He said China's Belt and Road Initiative will be the development model for the region. BRI projects have already improved the living conditions of locals and capacities in several island countries.

'Diplomatic power'

James Bhagwan, leader of the Pacific Regional Non-Governmental Organisations Alliance, said the 2050 strategy fostered greater diplomatic power. "It has to work, because we need this as a region," he said.

Pichamon Yeophantong, senior lecturer in international relations and development at the University of New South Wales Canberra, said the priorities and needs of PICs are very clear. "Climate change and development, along with security, rank highly in their policy agendas," she said, noting that with Western media narratives focusing on what is happening in the region, "sometimes it feels like the Pacific islands are being treated like passive bystanders".

"In reality, however, they are very good in diplomacy, hedging and balancing between regional powers, and we have seen that come through recently," she said.

At a news briefing in Beijing on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that for over half a century, China and Pacific Island countries have witnessed sound growth in bilateral relations and fruitful cooperation in various fields.

"We are happy to see PICs receive more support for its development and vitalization from countries willing to do so," Wang said when asked about the US' moves.

US Vice-President Kamala Harris told the Pacific Islands Forum on Wednesday that the United States will appoint a new envoy to the forum, invest an additional $500 million in funding into the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency in return for fishing rights, and reestablish a US Agency for International Development regional mission in Fiji apart from setting up new embassies in Tonga and Kiribati.

"We believe that all countries, when pursuing cooperation with PICs, should follow the principle of openness and inclusiveness and not target any third party or harm their interests," Wang added.

With the 2050 strategy now endorsed, the forum will focus on its delivery and implementation.

Bainimarama acknowledged that the successful implementation of the 2050 strategy will require that "our dialogue and development partners, regional agencies and international agencies understand and align their development plans to the strategy and engage with us on this basis".

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6cb67.html

Slashed US debt holdings change scene
By ZHOU LANXU | China Daily | Updated: 2022-07-21 07:42

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A bank staff member counts RMB and US dollar notes in Nantong, Jiangsu province. [Photo/Sipa]

More dollar liquidity to keep financial stability, diversify forex reserves

China's trimmed US debt holdings can help the nation gain more dollar liquidity to maintain financial stability and reduce its reliance on dollar reserves, economists and experts said on Wednesday.

Noting that China is the second-biggest foreign holder of US Treasuries, they said the falling foreign holdings of US Treasuries reflect dampening investor confidence in dollar-denominated assets due to radical monetary tightening and elevated inflation in the United States.

Their comments followed data from the US Treasury Department that China's holdings in US Treasury securities had decreased for six consecutive months to $980.8 billion as at the end of May, down from $1.0034 trillion in April and dropping below the $1 trillion mark for the first time in 12 years.

The decline in China's holdings came as part of the global trend of trimming holdings of US debt. Total foreign holdings of US Treasury securities stood at $7.4216 trillion as at the end of May, down from $7.4553 trillion in April and marking the lowest level since May 2021.

Japan, the leading holder of US debt, held $1.2128 trillion in US Treasury securities as at the end of May, the third straight month of decline and compared with $1.2185 trillion in April.

Experts said foreign investors have cut US Treasury holdings mainly to shun losses caused by the potential bond price drops due to the US Federal Reserve's ongoing interest rate hikes to tame inflation running at a 40-year high.

Zhang Liqing, director of the Center for International Finance Studies, which is part of the Central University of Finance and Economics, said yields on US Treasuries rise when the Fed raises interest rates. As bond prices move in the opposite direction of yields, this process would also mean lower bond prices, which would inflict losses on investors who sell the bonds ahead of maturity.

With the Fed having raised interest rates by 150 basis points this year to a range between 1.5 percent and 1.75 percent, the yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds has risen to about 3.01 percent as of Tuesday, significantly higher than 1.52 percent seen at the end of last year, market tracker Wind Info said.

Experts said they expect another hike of 75 basis points next week as the US Consumer Price Index, a main gauge of inflation, rose by 9.1 percent year-on-year in June, the largest increase since 1981.

Andrew McCaffery, global chief investment officer of Fidelity International, said the falling US Treasuries holdings by foreign central banks reflect concerns about the real returns, which subtract the level of inflation, provided by US Treasuries.

"Real (US Treasury) yields have been very negative, which has been offset by a strong dollar. But there are concerns that this is not sustainable," McCaffery said.

Shao Yu, chief economist at Orient Securities, said the falling foreign holdings of US Treasuries have pointed to investors' growing concerns over debt risks in the US and the credibility of the US government.

Apart from reducing potential market losses, China's reduction of US debt holdings can help it to improve dollar liquidity, maintain the stability of the foreign exchange market and alleviate the country's reliance on dollar-denominated assets for foreign exchange reserves, Zhang said.

While radical tightening in the US has ignited worries among investors, China has adhered to a stable monetary policy.

Addressing the Special Virtual Dialogue with Global Business Leaders on Tuesday, held by the World Economic Forum, Premier Li Keqiang said China will keep its macroeconomic policy reasonable and appropriate.

The country will not roll out super large stimulus and excessively boost money supply to achieve an overly high growth target, Li said.

With the current monetary policy staying prudent, China's latest benchmark lending rates unveiled on Wednesday have remained unchanged.

The one-year loan prime rate, a market-based benchmark lending rate, came in at 3.7 percent, unchanged from the previous month. The over-five-year LPR, on which lenders base their mortgage rates, also remained unchanged from the previous reading of 4.45 percent.

zhoulanxv@chinadaily.com.cn

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6d800.html

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THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT THE FUTURE IS CHINA: Young people celebrate, under the Chinese flag, the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s reunification with China

Hong Kong: truth is out
Originally published: Morning Star Online on July 2022 by Kenny Coyle (more by Morning Star Online) | (Posted Jul 16, 2022)

Hong Kong marked the 25th anniversary of its return to Chinese sovereignty with Chinese president Xi Jinping appearing in the city to witness the inauguration of the Chinese territory’s new leadership headed by John Lee.

The largely indoor ceremony had been forecast to take place amid a mild tropical typhoon, but for the past three years Hong Kong has been battered by quite different kinds of storms.

Xi’s visit takes place after an unprecedented period of turmoil. The first stage beginning in 2019 was characterised by a wave of initially peaceful mass protests against extradition legislation, which rapidly spiralled into violent anti-China protests.

The second stage by the ongoing battle to control the Covid pandemic in the city.

In my first visit since 2019, Hong Kong certainly seems becalmed. The city’s MTR rail network is back to pristine perfection. The political arson that saw 138 of the city’s 161 stations vandalised (including the deliberate destruction of lifts for the disabled and essential safety equipment) during the 2019 protests has long been cleaned up.

Temperature and Covid checks are carried out routinely at restaurant and shopping areas, with minimal inconvenience, although the city continues to enforce a seven-day quarantine on incoming passengers from overseas.

The image in Western media of a city writhing under a police state is belied by the reality on the ground.

Bars and restaurants are busy, as any five-minute evening walk around my Tsim Sha Tsui neighbourhood in Kowloon shows, supermarket shelves are full and whatever the talking heads of the local CNN or BBC bureaus would have you believe about “threats to freedom” on screen, they still somehow manage to prop up the main bar in the Foreign Correspondents Club each evening after their shifts.

Rarely has Western mainstream propaganda so successfully shrouded the truth about a city and society as open as Hong Kong’s.

The 2019 peaceful protests degenerated into the ugliest side of the anti-China movement, with black-shirted groups attacking anything and anyone that failed to kow-tow to their agenda.

Trade union offices, political parties and even those whose only crime was speaking the standard putonghua (Mandarin) version of Chinese in public were targeted for mob attacks.

Living in the neighbouring Special Administrative Region of Macao during this time, I not only witnessed the extremist antics at first hand on visits to Hong Kong (for example during their brief blockade of the city’s immigration department) but could watch shocking broadcasts of the petrol-bombers and barricade builders live-streamed on Hong Kong TV channels.

Just as shocking was the absence of these easily available images on BBC or CNN broadcasts.

A more recent manufactured furore in the British media has been over Hong Kong textbooks being “rewritten” in relation to British rule in Hong Kong prior to China reassuming sovereignty in 1997.

The assumption, of course, is that Chinese history can only be accurately understood through a Western lens.

As if to illustrate the enormous diversity of the British press, the following headlines appeared on the issue: “China rewrites history of Hong Kong with textbooks that deny British rule” (Telegraph, June 14); “China rewrites Hong Kong textbooks to deny Britain ever ruled the city” (Independent, June 15); and slightly more accurately — “China rewrites textbooks to insist Hong Kong was never a colony” (Times, June 15); “New Hong Kong textbooks ‘will claim city never was a British colony’” (Guardian, June 15).

The average reader would be forgiven for viewing this another ridiculous example of CPC censorship, an Orwellian erasure of the well-known history of British administration in Hong Kong.

However, the proposed texts from the Hong Kong education department merely restate the longstanding positions of not only the People’s Republic of China (and that of the previous Republic of China, it should be said) but also that of the United Nations.

In 1972, one year after the PRC took China’s seat at the UN, the PRC successfully removed Hong Kong and Macao (then under Portuguese fascist administration) from the list of colonised territories.

Hong Kong was not to be considered a British colony, it was a Chinese territory under illegal British occupation, an extremely important distinction in China’s eyes.

People’s China never established a diplomatic or consular presence in British-ruled Hong Kong, believing that this would legitimise British rule.

Instead, the office of the New China News Agency (better known today as Xinhua) was the de facto centre of contacts between the British authorities and the PRC government within the territory.

The issue of Hong Kong’s pre-1997 status has become more urgent recently, after the British government and media falsely claimed that the Sino-British Declaration of 1984, signed by the Thatcher government and China, somehow gave Britain some special rights to intervene in Hong Kong affairs after 1997.

The text of the declaration clearly states the opposite: 1997 marked the return of undivided Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong.

Subsequent developments, including the much-belated extension of national security legislation in 2020 are entirely consistent with the principle of “One Country, Two Systems” first outlined by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s and are in any case covered by provisions in an annex to the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.

But if Western eyes are on the past, China is looking forward. Plans are in place to create a Greater Bay Area, encompassing the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao and nine major cities in Guangdong province.

The aim is to use the synergy of these southern Chinese cities to create a dynamic economic hub of around 70 million people that will eventually dwarf most national and regional economies.

Many people in Hong Kong believe the city’s future lies in closer co-operation not in conflict with the rest of China.

Nixie Lam, a member of Hong Kong’s legislative council (Legco) and a representative of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB), the largest and most influential party within the patriotic camp, holds to this perspective.

She believes the new administration led by Hong Kong chief executive John Lee has the opportunity to put the territory back on the right track.

Lee, who takes office on July 1, has already outlined a platform that the future government will set clear targets and key performance indicators (KPIs) for selected tasks within the first 100 days of his new administration.

Some of this is designed to streamline government functioning, but he has also pledged to accelerate land and housing development, shorten the waiting time for public housing and address the city’s vast wealth gap.

“Hong Kong has wasted a lot of time and opportunities over the past few years. I see very high expectations among Hong Kong citizens. We have missed out on a lot. Where are we going to develop and to excel is the key, but time is very limited,” stresses Lam, a former grassroots district councillor.

Perhaps that’s why Lee came up with his 100 days KPI promise, to show he would make visible changes in different aspects of policies and strategies.

The new administration is formed by various well seasoned politicians, administrators, together with some industry leaders. It shows the new administration wants to restart Hong Kong and work together as a team.

I’ve joined working groups scrutinising the new government structure. If you look closely, it’s easy to see that they really want to tackle some of the unresolved issues we face by bringing outside experts into the administration.


Lam, herself a graduate of the University of Queensland in Australia, is nonetheless tired of Western countries continually lecturing Hong Kong.

“It’s boring to hear that democracy or One Country, Two Systems is dead. For those who live in Hong Kong, we know clearly who killed our democracy in 2019.

“Rioters and mobs were everywhere destroying public facilities, paralysing railway systems and so on but they were called ‘Freedom Fighters’ by Western countries. These double standards are not new in Hong Kong,” she insists.

“Hong Kong citizens know what’s best for our city. It is not begging overseas countries to sanction our city, it is not calling for American troops to take over our city, and it is definitely not the violent ‘democracy’ that they embraced.

“The city has been stablised. Ordinary citizens do not need to worry about being targeted by extremists any more. Discussions are no longer highly polarised but focus more on which strategy is best for the city.

“I guess that some people in Western countries do not want to see that our life is getting back to normal. People in Hong Kong are more focused on our Covid strategy and want to find more targeted solutions, finding a way that will balance reopening the city with ensuring people’s lives and health are protected,” she says.

Despite the challenges, Lam is clear about the way forward:

It is for us, Hong Kong citizens to work jointly toward rebuilding our city.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/16/hong-kong-truth-is-out/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Jul 22, 2022 4:20 pm

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When it comes to China’s development, Hukou reform is inevitable
In this useful article, republished from China Daily, Keith Lamb provides an overview of the Hukou household registration system and the reasons for the recently-announced plans to reform it. Lamb notes that Hukou was originally introduced in order to prevent uncontrolled urban migration and the accompanying problems (in particular the emergence of slums, which can be found in practically all other recently-industrialized countries). However, the economic and social needs of a modern, increasingly urbanized socialist country require loosening restrictions on household registration and improving the rights and living conditions of people migrating to the cities. As the author observes, “when it comes to building a modern socialist state, inequality in accessing services must eventually, on principle, be transformed into a state of equality.”
China’s National Development and Reform Commission recently announced that the household registration system, popularly known by its Mandarin name Hukou, will be streamlined to encourage urbanization. All cities with a population under 3 million will have Hukou limits removed and registration for an urban Hukou in cities with a population between three and five million will be eased.

The modern Hukou, which reached maturity in 1958, determines who has access to local social amenities, such as education, healthcare and employment. Originally, it was an effective measure that prevented mass internal migration when China had an undeveloped economy based on agricultural production.

Checking mass migration from rural to urban centers prevented slums from building up, which was common in neighboring developing countries. Labor was also paired with the land which was important considering it was the location where the majority of production took place, allowing agriculture to be used in the service of industrialization.

Over time there have been modifications to the Hukou system which was previously rigidly fixed by birth. With the opening up of China’s economy, the transfer of the Hukou became increasingly easier. However, no matter the changes and no matter how necessary the Hukou has been in the context of China’s development, it has received its fair share of criticism.

Indeed, when it comes to building a modern socialist state, inequality in accessing these services must eventually, on principle, be transformed into a state of equality. This transformation isn’t a question of “will” but “how.” That is to say, there is an obvious sympathy for this principle but changes must take place pragmatically based on China’s economic conditions and in a step-by-step fashion to prevent social disorder.

The plan of reducing Hukou restrictions for smaller cities first and then eventually scrapping restrictions for China’s large urban centers represents this aforementioned step-by-step approach.

This will prevent a mad rush to already large cities which could overburden their social services. It will encourage even urbanization across China, creating new economic centers, preserve local culture and prevent “Londonization”, where all resources get sucked into one metropolis. It also allows the central government to focus resources on smaller cities.

When it comes to China’s plans there are plenty of factors that determined that Hukou restrictions need to be continually eased. For example, China’s 14th Five Year Plan seeks to develop a complete domestic demand system. Here, domestic consumption is leveraged to drive the economy and purchase choices drive up innovation on personal and family items.

The problem so far has been that migrant urbanites with no access to essential services have held back on consumption in favor of saving for retirement and emergencies. According to a 2020 paper by Wen-Tai Hsu and Lin Ma from Singapore Management University, this would change with a more laissez-faire urbanization policy that provides social services to all.

Increased urbanization, which goes hand in hand with the easing of Hukou restrictions, allows all urbanites to access social services and welfare which in turn aids this new consumer-driven economy as household capital is freed up. Furthermore, with increased consumer purchasing power, living standards are raised.

Consequently, while previously the Hukou was expedient to China’s development, if it doesn’t adapt to the new changing reality it will eventually lead to becoming a hindrance to China’s development. In the past, the Hukou maintained social order and economic growth by preventing mass migration under the conditions of scarcity. As scarcity is relieved and abundance, a characteristic of mass consumerism, becomes a pillar of China’s modern economic development, the easing of Hukou restrictions would boost economic growth while greater equality will act as a driver of social order.

When putting people at the center of socialist development, the easing of Hukou restrictions and their eventual dissolution is more than just about creating greater economic growth, consumer opportunities, equality and liberty – it’s also about building a highly skilled socialist workforce. With the increased use of AI and robotics in the manufacturing process, the initial unskilled rural labor that drove China’s opening up to the world will become increasingly redundant.

As such, China’s future workforce demands a first-rate education and not providing this as a basic social service to all could cost China in the long run. Furthermore, as China seeks to avert a demographic crisis, characterized by low birth rates, the move toward the state taking away personal burdens of workers due to Hukou inequality, like education and healthcare costs, could further act as a driver to increase the birthrate.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/07/22/w ... nevitable/

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Pham Binh Minh: China and Vietnam are brotherly and friendly neighbors with the same socialist cause
Immediately following an extensive tour of South East Asian nations, which included both bilateral visits and meetings as well as participation in regional and international fora, on July 13, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held the 14th meeting of the China-Vietnam Steering Committee for Bilateral Cooperation in Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, together with Pham Binh Minh, Vietnam’s Standing Deputy Prime Minister.

Citing the two countries special friendship, Wang Yi said that their two parties should “provide strong theoretical support for the development of the socialist cause of the two countries.”

Pham Binh Minh said, “China and Vietnam are brotherly and friendly neighbors with the same socialist cause, and also comprehensive strategic cooperative partners. Vietnam sticks to the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the path of socialism, and pursues an independent, all-round and diversified foreign policy. Relations with China are the top priority of Vietnam’s foreign policy, and it’s Vietnam’s strategic choice to develop friendly relations with China.”

The next day, Wang Yi held the Sixth Meeting of the China-Cambodia Intergovernmental Coordination Committee via video link, together with Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Hor Namhong. Wang noted that next year will see the 65th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Cambodia, and added:

“China and Cambodia have built a community with a shared future under the guidance of high-level exchanges, strengthened solidarity and mutual assistance with the goal of safeguarding common interests, deepened mutually beneficial cooperation in a people-centered approach, and strengthened multilateral coordination and collaboration with the purpose of championing international fairness and justice, thus consolidating political mutual trust and cementing the foundation for strategic cooperation. Facts have proved that the building of a China-Cambodia community with a shared future serves the fundamental and long-term interests of the two peoples, meets the trend of the times, and conforms to the big picture of peace and stability in the region, thus representing a completely right direction.”

The following reports were first carried on the website of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
The 14th Meeting of the China-Vietnam Steering Committee for Bilateral Cooperation Is Held

On July 13, 2022, the 14th Meeting of the China-Vietnam Steering Committee for Bilateral Cooperation was held in Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The meeting was co-chaired by State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vietnamese Standing Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh, and attended by officials in charge of relevant ministries, commissions, and local governments from both sides in an online and offline format.

Wang Yi said, General Secretary Xi Jinping and General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong have maintained strategic communication to steer bilateral relations. All departments of both sides have made joint efforts to continuously push for new progress in practical cooperation. This year, both China and Vietnam have important domestic political agendas. It’s important to strengthen coordination in a holistic approach, and make joint efforts in the direction of building a strategic community with a shared future. Facing the risks and challenges on the way forward and the arduous tasks of reform and development, we should inherit and carry forward the special friendship, consolidate solidarity and mutual trust, and deepen mutually beneficial cooperation, so as to serve respective national construction and development, and make greater contributions to peace, stability and prosperity in the region.

Wang Yi put forward proposals on strengthening bilateral cooperation. First, highlight the guidance. We should elevate the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership between the two countries to new heights under the guidance of the important consensus reached by the high-level leaders of the two parties and the two countries. Second, work for more strategic significance. We should deepen experience-sharing on state governance, and strengthen exchanges between legislative bodies and between the two parties, so as to provide strong theoretical support for the development of the socialist cause of the two countries. Third, demonstrate pragmatism. We should give play to the geographical proximity and complementary industrial advantages of the two countries, further release dividends of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, and work to upgrade the economic and trade cooperation between the two countries. Fourth, encourage innovation. We should strengthen cooperation in climate change, green development, photovoltaics, and clean energy, among others. Fifth, maintain stability. We should strengthen people-to-people and cultural exchanges to cement the foundation of public support for the friendship between the two countries.

Pham Binh Minh said, the Vietnamese side congratulates Chinese comrades on the great achievements that captured the attention of the world in advancing the cause of national development, the successful convening of the sixth plenary session of the 19th Central Committee of the Community Party of China (CPC), the successful hosting of the Olympic Winter Games Beijing 2022, and the effective management and control of the resurgence of the pandemic in some areas. By scoring these achievements, China has laid a solid foundation for realizing better development and also made positive contributions to promoting solidarity and progress in the world. He believes that under the strong leadership of General Secretary and President Xi Jinping, China will achieve its second centenary goal on schedule. He wishes the 20th National Congress of the CPC a complete success.

Pham Binh Minh said, China and Vietnam are brotherly and friendly neighbors with the same socialist cause, and also comprehensive strategic cooperative partners. Vietnam sticks to the leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam and the path of socialism, and pursues an independent, all-round and diversified foreign policy. Relations with China are the top priority of Vietnam’s foreign policy, and it’s Vietnam’s strategic choice to develop friendly relations with China. Thanks to the joint efforts of both sides, bilateral relations have maintained a sound momentum of development, and cooperation has yielded fruitful outcomes with many highlights. Guided by the consensus reached by the high-level leaders of the two parties and the two countries, Vietnam is ready to maintain close high-level exchanges, consolidate strategic mutual trust, promote cooperation in various fields, help the two countries smoothly advance respective major political agendas, and further demonstrate the strategic significance and rich connotations of bilateral relations.

Wang Yi said, the 20th National Congress of the CPC is the most important agenda in the political life of the CPC and China this year, and it will surely be a congress featuring solidarity, victory and progress. The congress will inject fresh and strong impetus into the Chinese people’s new journey towards building a modern socialist country and realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation at a faster pace.

Wang Yi said, the traditional friendship featuring comradeship and brotherhood, and the common mission of sticking to the leadership of communist parties and pursuing a socialist path are powerful endogenous driving forces for the development of China-Vietnam relations. Under the current situation, both sides should firmly push forward the respective goals of development and revitalization, stay committed to the socialist path, firmly develop the China-Vietnam friendship, safeguard the common strategic interests of the two countries, and join hands to cope with changes in the regional situation and global challenges.

The two sides took stock of the positive outcomes of bilateral pragmatic cooperation, and agreed to step up synergy to turn the consensus into concrete actions that promote cooperation.

The two sides will seek greater synergy between development strategies, and advance cooperation on connectivity, the Belt and Road Initiative, and the “Two Corridors and One Economic Circle” strategy at a faster pace.

The two sides spoke highly of the bilateral trade that witnessed positive growth against an overall downward trend, and will explore the establishment of a mechanism for jointly ensuring and promoting the stability of industrial and supply chains. The two sides will strengthen port construction and facilitate customs clearance.

The two sides will strengthen exchanges and cooperation in agriculture, pandemic response, emerging industries, news media and other fields.

The two sides will properly handle sensitive maritime issues and work for more visible outcomes of maritime cooperation.

The two sides will enhance solidarity and coordination in regional and international affairs, stick to the ASEAN-led and effective regional cooperation architecture, uphold true multilateralism, and act on open regionalism.

After the meeting, the two sides jointly announced the signing of an agreement on economic and technological cooperation, as well as cooperation documents on agriculture, marine environment and maritime cooperation, among others.

The Sixth Meeting of the China-Cambodia Intergovernmental Coordination Committee Is Held

On July 14, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Hor Namhong co-chaired the sixth meeting of the China-Cambodia Intergovernmental Coordination Committee, which was held via video link.

Wang Yi said, under the strategic guidance of President Xi Jinping and Cambodian leaders, China and Cambodia have strengthened coordination in a holistic approach, pushing for constant and new outcomes of all-round cooperation between the two countries. Next year will mark the 65th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Cambodia, and the first five-year action plan of building a China-Cambodia community with a shared future will be completed. China is ready to work with Cambodia to keep bilateral cooperation always at the forefront of the times, so as to make it better serve the respective national development and more vigorously promote development and prosperity in the region.

Hor Namhong said, Cambodia firmly pursues the one-China principle, firmly supports the Global Development Initiative and the Global Security Initiative put forward by President Xi Jinping, and wishes the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China a complete success.

Hor Namhong said, Cambodia and China have made remarkable progress in fully implementing the action plan of a China-Cambodia community with a shared future. He thanked China for providing large quantities of vaccines and other anti-pandemic materials, which have provided a strong guarantee for Cambodia to effectively control the pandemic and realize economic recovery. He thanked China for bringing tangible benefits to the Cambodian people by helping Cambodia maintain stability and improve people’s well-being. Cambodia is firmly committed to building a Cambodia-China community with a shared future and consolidating the “iron-clad” friendship between Cambodia and China, so as to better benefit the two countries and two peoples.

Wang Yi stressed, China and Cambodia have built a community with a shared future under the guidance of high-level exchanges, strengthened solidarity and mutual assistance with the goal of safeguarding common interests, deepened mutually beneficial cooperation in a people-centered approach, and strengthened multilateral coordination and collaboration with the purpose of championing international fairness and justice, thus consolidating political mutual trust and cementing the foundation for strategic cooperation. Facts have proved that the building of a China-Cambodia community with a shared future serves the fundamental and long-term interests of the two peoples, meets the trend of the times, and conforms to the big picture of peace and stability in the region, thus representing a completely right direction. The two sides should firm up confidence, remove interference, and write a new chapter in the high-quality development of bilateral relations in the new era, with building a community with a shared future in a more comprehensive and in-depth way as the main task.

Taking stock of the implementation of the consensus reached at the fifth meeting of the China-Cambodia Intergovernmental Coordination Committee, the two sides were satisfied with the fruitful outcomes of solidarity and mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries, and also made plans for cooperation in the next stage:

First, maintain high-level strategic coordination. The two sides will formulate a new action plan for building a China-Cambodia community with a shared future, and advance exchanges and cooperation in various fields in a coordinated manner.

Second, step up efforts to ensure political security. The two sides will deepen experience-sharing on state governance, and firmly support each other in safeguarding core interests and pursuing a development path in line with respective national conditions.

Third, cement the foundation for pragmatic cooperation. The two sides will advance key projects of high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, continue to fight the pandemic together, and expand cooperation in economy, trade, agriculture and other fields.

Fourth, consolidate the foundation of public support for the friendship. More flights between the two countries will be opened to facilitate the return of Cambodian students to China to continue their education. The two sides will well implement livelihood projects, and strengthen cooperation in fields such as science and technology, education, culture and tourism, as well as among think tanks.

Fifth, strengthen coordination and cooperation in multilateral affairs. The two sides will stick to the ASEAN-led regional cooperation architecture, and resist any attempts to turn East Asian cooperation platforms into an arena for major-power rivalry. China supports Cambodia in playing a greater role in international and regional affairs and in performing its duties as the rotating chair of ASEAN.

After the meeting, the two sides jointly announced the signing of cooperation documents on human resources and infrastructure, among others.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/07/20/p ... ist-cause/

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China, CELAC to deepen cooperation on poverty reduction in fresh sign of growing ties
China and the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have agreed to cooperate more closely in poverty reduction, especially through post-pandemic economic recovery, infrastructure construction and digital technology, following the second Forum on Poverty Reduction and Development between China and CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), held virtually last week.

CELAC officials and experts “praised China’s efforts to eradicate absolute poverty, especially through rural-urban integration and digital technology support, which are seen as valuable for Latin American countries to alleviate poverty.”

Stressing the urgency of the tasks in hand, an Argentinian delegate noted that: “The epidemic has exacerbated social inequality and brought a devastating impact on the most vulnerable. We need to find solutions through bilateral and multilateral cooperation.”

Two days before the meeting, Nicaragua’s Trade and Industry minister announced that his government was expediting the conclusion of a Free Trade Agreement with China.

The following report is reprinted from Global Times.
China and Latin American and Caribbean countries have agreed on deeper cooperation in poverty reduction, with joint efforts in areas such as post-pandemic economic recovery, infrastructure construction and digital technology, officials and experts said at the second Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)-China Forum on Poverty Reduction and Development, held virtually on Wednesday.

At the forum, officials and experts from CELAC also praised China’s efforts to eradicate absolute poverty, especially through rural-urban integration and digital technology support, which are seen as valuable for Latin American countries to alleviate poverty and promote the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

CELAC estimates that the number of people living in extreme poverty rose by about 5 million between 2020 and 2021 due to the deepening of the social and health troubles prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, official data showed in January.

As part of the cooperation in addressing rising poverty, China and CELAC will work jointly to ease the negative effects of the pandemic. China’s efforts to ensure broad access to vaccines, donate medical supplies, and offer supports to fortify local health systems, which are key to the recovery, are widely recognized and applauded by representatives from the UN and CELAC countries.

China’s efforts to help Latin America and Caribbean countries via medical donations and vaccine offers have been widely recognized by countries across the region.

China is the first and largest vaccine supplier to many Latin American countries, and has carried out joint research, development and production cooperation with many countries in the region on COVID-19 vaccines, drugs and medical equipment.

About 80 percent of the world’s extreme poverty is concentrated in rural areas, which are less resilient to the pandemic and are at higher risk of falling back into poverty. How to enhance rural resilience and maintain a rural-urban development balance is a common challenge for China and Latin America, said experts at the forum.

“The epidemic has exacerbated social inequality and brought a devastating impact on the most vulnerable. We need to find solutions through bilateral and multilateral cooperation,” said Gustavo Martínez Pandiani, undersecretary for Latin American and Caribbean Affairs in Argentina’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Coordinator of the CELAC, at the forum.

World Bank data in 2021 showed that the COVID-19 has magnified the damaging effects of inequality in the Latin America and Caribbean region, and more than half (54.4 percent) of the region’s workers are in the informal sector.

China, in its completed drive to eliminate absolute poverty, has launched a rural revitalization strategy to achieve a balanced urban and rural development. China and CELAC countries share typical characteristics in multidimensional poverty, and there is great room for cooperation in rural revitalization, experts noted.

China has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience in rural poverty reduction, especially in infrastructure and public services such as safe drinking water, education, electricity and food, which can offer valuable lessons for Latin American countries, said Wang Peng, director of Development and Strategy Research Office at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

“Infrastructure is key to increasing the productivity of a country, and with its salaries and employment, which in turn helps to reduce poverty. China has a great experience on building quality infrastructure and has had construction projects in Latin American countries that have allowed them to increase their productivity. I hope that cooperation is strengthened in order to continue the reduction of poverty in Latin America,” Andres Zambrano, an associate professor at the University of The Andes, Colombia, told the Global Times.

The China-proposed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has made steady progress in Latin America over the past three years, which has brought concrete benefits to regional economies such as enhanced connectivity, both physical and digital.

The BRI, the Global Development Initiative and the China-CELAC Joint Action Plan for Cooperation in Key Areas (2022-2024) will be the policy basis for future China-CELAC cooperation in poverty reduction, building a community of shared future for mankind that is free of poverty, María Francesca Staiano, director of China Studies Center of National University of La Plata, Argentina, told the Global Times.

The application of digital technology, which has greatly contributed to China’s poverty reduction, has also become another focus of the forum, as Latin American countries have begun to use digital technology in reducing inequality, promoting inclusiveness and increasing economic opportunities in recent years.

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven the widespread use of digital technologies. In the post-pandemic era, digital technology will exert greater potential to promote economic transformation, create a boom in the digital economy and achieve fair distribution, which requires unremitting efforts of all countries, Francisco Durán, vice-minister of research and knowledge application, Venezuela, said at the forum.

China and Latin American countries have shown mutual understanding and support on issues concerning each other’s core interests and major concerns, and cooperated closely within the frameworks of the UN, the G20 and APEC, thus effectively safeguarding the interests of developing countries, said Chen Luning, deputy director-general of the Latin American and Caribbean Affairs Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China.

Trade between China and CELAC hit a record high of $451.6 billion in 2021. China is the third-largest source of investment in Latin America, and Latin America is the second-largest destination for China’s overseas investment. Over 3,000 Chinese enterprises have invested in Latin America and the two sides have actively promoted cooperation in emerging areas such as big data, artificial intelligence, 5G, the internet and clean energy, to inject new momentum into China-CELAC cooperation, data shows.

On Monday, Nicaragua’s Trade and Industry Minister Jose Bermudez announced that President Daniel Ortega’s administration is promoting actions to implement the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with China.

“We hope to attract more Chinese enterprises to invest in Nicaragua through various projects and frameworks to further contribute to poverty reduction,” Ivan Acosta Montalvan, minister of finance and public credit of the Republic of Nicaragua, said at the forum.

Nicaragua and China restored diplomatic ties at the end of 2021.

Yu Bo, counselor of the newly reopened Chinese Embassy in Nicaragua, told the Global Times in a recent interview that local people speak highly of China’s contribution and positive role in the region, as China has injected a lot of economic vitality and livelihood development projects into the country.

More than 80 representatives and officials from the Latin American and Caribbean affairs department of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UN, three organizations in Latin America and other 22 CELAC member countries attended the forum that was hosted by the National Rural Revitalization Administration, created earlier in 2021 to facilitate the national rural vitalization strategy, alongside the International Poverty Reduction Center in China.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/07/19/c ... wing-ties/

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China’s Stock Market Value Hits Record High, 2020. (Photo: Tasnim News Agency)

Is China headed for a crash?
By Michael Roberts (Posted Jul 22, 2022)

Originally published: The Next Recession on July 21, 2022 (more by The Next Recession) |

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Once again, Western ‘experts’ are predicting a financial crash in China. “China is flailing”, says one commentator; another says “a debt bomb is about to explode”. These would-be Cassandras reckon China’s demise will be driven by the bursting of the property bubble, excessive debt and the grinding down of the economy due to the government’s “terrible” ‘zero-COVID’ policy that keeps parts of the country in permanent lockdowns. And then of course, there are the growing restrictions on China’s exports and its investments abroad, imposed by the U.S. and supposedly backed by its allies in Asia.

How much truth is there in this latest batch of critiques on China’s economic progress? The property crisis has reached dangerous levels. Last year, Evergrande, China’s second-largest private property developer was close to bankruptcy. The Evergrande property model is essentially a Ponzi scheme, where the company collects cash from the pre-sale of an ever-growing number of apartments, plus hundreds of thousands of individual investors and uses the cash to fund further sales by accelerating construction in progress and funding down-payments. Like any Ponzi, this works as long as it’s accelerating. But when the market slows, those incoming streams of cash start to fall behind the growing arc of cash demands. Evergrande now has about 800 unfinished projects and there are about 1.2 million people waiting to move in.

Now the property crisis has reached the point where millions of Chinese purchasers have stopped paying their upfront mortgage payments. Chinese homebuyers’ rapidly escalating boycotts on mortgage payments have spread across at least 301 projects in about 91 cities, with the value of mortgages that could be affected swelling to an estimated 2 trillion yuan ($297 billion). About 70% of household wealth in China is invested in real estate. Some Chinese banks have responded by seizing purchasers’ savings deposits, claiming they are really ‘mortgage investment products’. This has sparked open protests outside some banks, leading to the government surrounding the banks with tanks.

At the same time, China’s usually stupendous annual growth in real GDP has been sliding, even before the COVID slump in 2020. While recovery was strong in 2021, new bouts of COVID variants have caused new lockdowns. The Chinese government has been hugely successful in its policy of zero COVID, keeping the death rate down to miniscule levels compared with the major capitalist economies. But economic growth and employment have taken a hit as a result.

The Chinese economy shrank by a seasonally adjusted 2.6% quarter on quarter in the three months to June 2022. The nationwide urban survey-based unemployment rate eased only to 5.9% in May, with the unemployment rate for the 16-24 age group rising to an elevated 18.4%. It is increasingly clear that the government’s target real GDP growth rate of 5%-plus is not going to be met this year. And remember this target has been reduced over the last few years, as the double-digit annual expansion of the last decade has disappeared.

China: annual growth rate %

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So, is this the moment of collapse in the Chinese model of development and the end of all that talk about ‘moving towards socialism’ etc? Many Western experts think so. What will cause this collapse, in their view, is the failure of the Chinese leaders to ‘liberalise’ the economy and open it up even more to capitalist companies and markets. Time to stop ‘zero COVID’ and relax restrictions as ‘successfully done’ (sic!) in the West. In effect, China needs more capitalism. It needs to expand the private sector.

But wait a moment. What are the causes of the current property crisis and the debt expansion? It can be laid squarely at the door of China’s expanding private sector, as promoted by a sizeable section of the Chinese leadership, particularly in the finance and property sectors.

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Increasingly, China’s investment expansion has been in unproductive sectors like finance and real estate. Why in China, of all countries, was home building in the burgeoning cities left to private capital developers offering mortgages to buy? Why were homes not built by the state sector for rent? The result has been a classic case of a Western property market crash that the state now has to clear up. This will have to be resolved by the state (local governments) finishing off projects and restoring the rights of mortgagees to their money.


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There is not going to be a financial crash in China. That’s because the government controls the financial levers of power: the central bank, the big four state-owned commercial banks which are the largest banks in the world, and the so-called ‘bad banks’, which absorb bad loans, big asset managers, most of the largest companies. The government can order the big four banks to exchange defaulted loans for equity stakes and forget them. It can tell the central bank, the People’s Bank of China, to do whatever it takes. It can tell state-owned asset managers and pension funds to buy shares and bonds to prop up prices and to fund companies. It can tell the state bad banks to buy bad debt from commercial banks. It can get local governments to take up the property projects to completion. So a financial crisis is ruled out because the state controls the banking system.

But the current property mess is a signal that the Chinese economy is becoming more influenced by the chaos and vagaries of the profit-based sector. It is the private sector that has been doing badly during COVID and after. Just one small example: COVID lockdowns in Shanghai were out-sourced to the private sector with poor results; in Beijing, local government did the job directly with much more success.

Profits in the capitalist sector have been falling. Profits earned by China’s industrial firms increased only by 1% yoy to CNY 34.41 trillion in January-May 2022, slowing from a 3.5% rise in the prior period, as high raw material prices and supply chain disruptions due to COVID-19 curbs continued to squeeze margins and disrupted factory activity. Profits at state-owned industrial firms rose 9.8%; while those in the private sector fell 2.2%. Only the state sector is continuing to deliver. This is what happened in the global financial crisis of 2008-9, which China avoided by expanding state investment to replace a ‘flailing’ capitalist sector. What Xi and the Chinese leaders have called the “disorderly expansion of capital”.

The capitalist sector has been increasing its size and influence in China, alongside the slowdown in real GDP growth, investment and employment, even under Xi. A recent study found that China’s private sector has grown not only in absolute terms but also as a proportion of the country’s largest companies, as measured by revenue or (for listed ones) by market value, from a very low level when President Xi was confirmed as the next top leader in 2010 to a significant share today. SOEs still dominate among the largest companies by revenue, but their preeminence is eroding.

Far from the answer to China’s mini-crisis requiring more ‘liberalising’ reforms towards capitalism, China needs to reverse the expansion of the private sector and introduce more effective plans for state investment, but this time with the democratic participation of the Chinese people in the process; not by tanks outside banks. Otherwise, the aims of the leadership for ‘common prosperity’ will be just talk.

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Having said all this, it is still the case that the public sector-dominated Chinese economy is and will do better than those in the West, the G7 economies. Here are the latest IMF forecasts for growth in the major economies.

Even this year, if China only manages around 4% real GDP growth, that would still be faster than any growth rate in the G7 economies. And the IMF forecasts that China will grow at 5%-plus in 2023, while G7 economies will be lucky to manage half that rate, assuming there is no new global slump. Indeed, longer term, the IMF forecasts that China will grow at a subdued rate of 5% a year, but that rate would more than twice as fast as the U.S., and more than four times as fast as the rest of the G7.

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I have discussed at length in previous posts the claim by Western experts that China’s falling working-age population and its slowing productivity growth rate mean that it will begin to fail. These arguments are weak and faulty. Indeed, even on the adjusted (A) Western measures of labour productivity growth during the COVID period, China did way better than the ‘dynamic’ USA.

Indeed, the forecasts (and hopes) of the Western experts that China is about to melt down are clearly not agreed with by the strategists of capital in the U.S. and NATO. They do not expect internal disintegration and so continue to try and strangle China’s economy externally.

https://mronline.org/2022/07/22/is-chin ... r-a-crash/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon Jul 25, 2022 1:46 pm

US POLICY TOWARDS CHINA IS DOOMED TO FAILURE
Jul 21, 2022 , 3:36 p.m.

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Bali, Indonesia, on July 9, 2022 (Photo: Reuters)

The American Cold War mentality did not vanish with the end of the Cold War. Although Washington had unipolar control of the world, his foreign policy strategy continued to be to create one imaginary enemy after another, progressively losing his rationality.

For several years their eyes have been on China, and American leaders have justified their hostile ideological position by saying that it is a confrontation between democracy and authoritarianism, but such a narrative is not sustainable, much less when the diseases of the American system are they openly exhibit before the world, such as the intensification of inequalities, political polarization, police repression and the abandonment of public policies for the majority while the demands of the rich have an immediate response from the government.

The hysteria caused in Washington by the rise of the Asian country has been modeling its actions to try to contain it, however, they are far from being enough to cause a positive result for US objectives. It is not something that is being said only from Beijing, it is also warned by analysts adhering to the United States' vision.

THE OFFENSIVE AGAINST CHINA IS DETRIMENTAL TO THE US

The National Interest website published an article on July 11 titled "U.S. China Policy Heads for Disaster." The author is Mushahid Hussein, Chairman of the Pakistani Senate Defense Committee. The article notes that Washington appears suddenly to realize the reality of China's rise and is eager to "catch up," but five basic facts show that it is "embarking on an unwinnable Sisyphus quest" that will ultimately , will harm their own interests and will not be able to prevent the rise of the People's Republic.

The first thing Hussein mentions are the differences between Chinese and American economic policy.

"If we compare the economic policy of the United States with that of China, there is a huge gap between the pronouncements of the United States that have not been accompanied by practices, while China has promoted a slow but sure transformation of the global economic landscape to its benefit. with practical policies that produce results.

The data highlighted by the author on China's progress in international trade is illustrative: of the 193 members of the United Nations, 130 countries have more trade relations with Beijing than with Washington.

China has been expanding and adapting its Belt and Road Initiative projects, building a global infrastructure that connects the world. Instead, many western initiatives with the same basic idea are forgotten, change their name or are replaced by others, without getting off the ground. The most recent examples are the "New Silk Road", an initiative promoted in 2011 by the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, the "Construction Law" launched in 2019 by the Trump administration, the Build Back Better World initiative ( B3W) that President Biden presented in 2021 at the G7 Summit and that this year was renamed the Global Partnership for Infrastructure Growth.

None of the programs described above have shown concrete results, and this is mainly due to the petty and dismissive relationship with the rest of the world, especially the Global South. The wealth of the United States, and of the West in general, is sustained by an extremely unequal economic system and the plundering of other territories' resources and the limitations of other nations' opportunities. The countries perceive the clear contrast with China, which advocates a new international commercial economic order that, although it is not charitable, proposes more egalitarian relations and more balanced economic opportunities.

For the second point, Hussein speaks of the dismal performance of the United States in recent decades in taking confrontations to the military level, in a comparison with the country's soft power, which the author maintains is its strength.

"Embarking on the quest to contain China, when it does not yet directly threaten core US interests, would be a tried and failed formula, wasting resources as occurred in the post-9/11 ' War on Terror ', when $6.5 trillion was squandered in two decades of pointless conflict."

To what he said, it should be added that there is no way to support the idea that China could become a threat to the security of the United States, since its defense budget is only a third of that of the United States, and there are also gaps in the number of armaments and deployment abroad. Beijing invests prudently in military spending and prioritizes economic and technological development.

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The United States dominates world military spending (Photo: Peter & Peterson)

The growing unpopularity of the Biden administration and the need for China to intervene to ease the US economy are two other elements that do not fit in with the plan for a New Cold War.

"For Biden, the November midterms are 'make or break,' as they will determine whether he will have a political future beyond 2024," the author says. Democrats have only a slim lead in Congress and are likely to lose it in the upcoming midterm elections. In early July, polls showed just 37% of those surveyed approved of Biden's job, down from the lowest level during the Trump era.

Further on, the author says that "Biden needs Xi for an economic bailout to give the US economy much-needed relief." But the US authorities refuse to accept that reality. In fact, the current administration has not stopped implementing the tariffs that were established on China in the trade war unleashed by the Trump administration, which has resulted in galloping inflation, the highest in 40 years, which has seriously affected the welfare of the American people.

The fourth point is the notorious technological advantage consolidated by Beijing in relation to Washington. Hussein cites historical research by Harvard professor Graham Allison to corroborate this. In 2020 alone, China was responsible for the production of 1.5 billion mobile phones, 250 million computers and 25 million cars. Reversing the economic growth and technological excellence of the Asian country will be a difficult goal to achieve, if not impossible, says the author.

"In key areas of innovation, science and technology, which will be decisive for the advancement of the 21st century, China is almost on par with or ahead of the United States, including in artificial intelligence, 5G, cloud computing. , robotics and studies in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)".

The last point made in the article indicates that there are more convergences between US and Chinese interests in strategic global issues than divergences, so the US government would be paying a very high price by not breaking the vicious circle of hostility.

On the international scene, Hussein names the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and stability in Afghanistan as examples of this, although regarding the latter it is evident that in Washington they have no consideration whatsoever; he also mentions other areas where both nations can benefit such as climate change, anti-terrorism cooperation, regional connectivity and the establishment of free trade organizations.

"Even here, China has an advantage, as the incentives offered by the China-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) are not comparable to the US initiative of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), which does not provide for the access to the market or the reduction of tariff barriers".

In this sense, Hussein emphasizes that China acts in an evidently pragmatic way by decoupling trade from politics, something that does not happen in the same way with the United States. Since becoming a superpower, Washington has been unscrupulously stirring up the global situation and interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.

With regard to Ukraine, Hussein admits that China would be a "key facilitator" in the search for a peaceful solution with Russia, although this alternative is not entirely to the liking of US leaders, but to which they seem increasingly obliged, bearing in mind He says that his image of power has been compromised since the battles began on Ukrainian territory.

In short, the United States' foreign policy towards China has not come out of the quagmire, not even because of the partisan change in government, and the facts are showing that if it continues to contain the Asian country at all costs, Washington can only lose so much internally. as at the international level.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/la ... al-fracaso

Google Translator

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Beijing condemns Tokyo's new defense white paper
By WANG XU in Tokyo and ZHAO JIA in Beijing | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-07-23 08:37

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Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin. [Photo/fmprc.gov.cn]

Beijing on Friday expressed its firm opposition and has sent stern representations to Tokyo after Japan's new defense white paper contained lengthy paragraphs hyping up the "China threat", as the Japanese government considers amending its pacifist Constitution.

The paper, which was released on Friday and approved by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's Cabinet, said the country had "entered a new period of crisis in the twenty-first century", and pointed fingers at China's internal affairs like the Taiwan question, as well as China's military development and cooperation with other countries.

In response, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said that Japan should "immediately stop the erroneous practice of hyping up security threats in the neighborhood to justify its military build-up".

Noting that Japan publicly stated in the paper that it would revise defense documents by the end of this year and further increase defense spending to develop its so-called counterstrike capabilities, Wang said, "It is worrying that Japan is deviating from the path of pacifist and an exclusively defense-oriented policy".

Following a landslide victory in this month's upper house election, Kishida's administration now has enough seats in both houses of Japan's parliament to push for a revision of the nation's pacifist Constitution.

Under the Constitution, Japan "renounces war as the sovereign right of the nation" and has capped its defense spending at about 1 percent of its GDP for the past 50 years. But since Tokyo changed the status quo unilaterally when it illegally "nationalized" China's Diaoyu Islands in 2012, Japan has become more assertive in terms of security, beginning with lifting the ban on its right to exercise collective self-defense.

As a result, Kishida had vowed to boost its defense budget to 2 percent of the nation's GDP and is considering first-strike capabilities against "enemy bases" in a potential conflict.

However, given that Japan has not fully recovered from the pandemic and a weak yen has made economic burdens on its citizens more pressing, local media said Kishida is expected to face strong resistance on defense spending, primarily from Komeito, the coalition partner of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

As a result, Kishida took a step back in recent remarks concerning the 2 percent GDP target and instead used more vague expressions like "drastically increase defense spending within the next five years".

In line with the change, while answering a question from China Daily, a Japanese Defense Ministry official confirmed that "there has not been a clear number set (for the spending) for now".

Wang Qi, a researcher of East Asian Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said Tokyo's intention of hyping up the "China threat" serves the purpose of forcing Japan's parliament to approve more spending. "Under this narrative, lawmakers who are against the increase are seen as 'unpatriotic' or at least do not have a sense of crisis."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6df25.html

China has ability to avoid economic crisis
By YIFAN XU in Washington | China Daily Global | Updated: 2022-07-25 07:54


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Photo taken on Sept 14, 2020 shows the view of downtown areas in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province. [Photo/Xinhua]

Economists call for serious measures to overcome slowdown challenges

China is resilient and can respond to economic risks, negative factors and crises, experts say.

"My view is that a systemic crisis is still pretty unlikely to occur in China," said Thomas Orlik, chief economist at Bloomberg Economics.

Orlik spoke at the event "Will the Bubble Still Not Pop? A Discussion of China's Economic Future" hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday.

He published the book China: The Bubble That Never Pops in 2020, suggesting that China's economy and financial system are "more resilient than critics in the West give them credit for", and China's economic and financial policymakers are "more innovative, more ingenious at better solving problems than critics here in Washington, DC, or on Wall Street give them credit for".

These were still the reasons why "there's nothing so far which looks like a systemic financial crisis" in China, he said.

Orlik also said China's economy had been hit by the pandemic, like that of the rest of the world, and "Chinese resilience is standing up in the face of the COVID-19 stress test".

"The bubble that never pops still is not going to pop," Orlik said.

"In a global pandemic, we really can't talk about winners, but China has lost less than most other major economies."

Specifically, Orlik said that in public health, China performed "extremely well". In growth, China had a V-shaped recovery after controlling the first COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. But the picture became less positive after the Omicron outbreak and lockdowns in several major cities, leading to weak growth in the second quarter of this year.

In the long run, Orlik said, the United States and China would be closer to each other in terms of their share of the global economy, though no one can tell the exact timing of it.

Data released by China's National Bureau of Statistics on July 15 shows that China's GDP grew by 0.4 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of this year. The Chinese economy grew 4.8 percent in the first quarter, and fell back significantly in the second quarter, leading to GDP growth of 2.5 percent in the first half of the year. China's full-year economic growth target is 5.5 percent.

Optimistic views

It is a "challenging moment" for China and the US with long-term economic uncertainty, Orlik said. For China, he suggested grappling with problems in the real estate sector to avoid triggering bigger troubles. For the US, he warned that high inflation and aggressive tightening by the Federal Reserve may take the US into a recession.

Joyce Chang, chair of global research at JP Morgan, said China is capable of easing policies and using stimulus to avoid systematic crisis and still has "a lot of tools" to rebound.

"Quarter-to-quarter growth came down 8.7 percent. But for the third quarter, we are looking for a rebound. It's probably going to be in the quarter-to-quarter over 10 percent after declining 8.7 percent. We have 5.7 percent for the fourth quarter and the year growth forecast at 3.2 percent," Chang said on China's growth data and forecast.

Arthur Kroeber, head of research at Gavekal Dragonomics, said China is unlikely to suffer a crisis, but it does not mean that it is "immune to crisis".

"The system is very resilient, and the ability to respond to crisis is much higher than most people give credit for," Kroeber said. He also suggested China focus more on microeconomic forms of competition and tax law rather than paying too much attention on deploying capital.

Yao Yang, dean and professor of the National School of Development at Peking University, said the opinions vary among Chinese economists on China's growth prospects.

"In the long run, I am actually more optimistic than most people. I believe that at the end of this decade, the Chinese economy is going to become as strong as the American economy," Yao said.

China leads in many areas of technology and production, such as electric vehicle production which is "phenomenal", he said.

Nicholas Lardy, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said China's role in foreign investment, international trade and the global economy is increasing even during the pandemic.

"I would point out that China has actually continued to strongly converge on the advanced economy levels in 2020, 2021, and again this year," Lardy said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 6e16f.html

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U.S. Attempts To Make China An Enemy Require A Lot Of Fantasy

The U.S. weapon industry needs U.S. enemies. Without those it is hard to justify an ever growing war budget. The most lucrative enemy, besides Russia, is of course China.

But there is a problem. China has no interest in being a U.S. enemy and certainly not in being THE enemy. In its view that only takes away resources that are better used elsewhere.

That is the reason why China avoids talks with the U.S. about military and strategic issues.

CIA columnist David Ignatius thus laments:

China wants to ‘reduce misunderstanding’ with the U.S. It could start by talking.

ASPEN, Colo. — Chinese Ambassador Qin Gang assured a foreign policy gathering here this week that Beijing wants “to reduce misunderstanding and miscalculation” with the United States. If that’s true, why does China continue to resist a U.S. proposal to discuss “strategic stability” between the two increasingly competitive countries?


What have talks about 'strategic stability' to do with reducing misunderstanding and miscalculation? The later can be achieved in very simple low level talks between ambassadors or politicians. There is nothing 'strategic' needed about them.

President Biden said on Wednesday, before his covid-19 diagnosis was announced, that he expects to talk with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in the next 10 days, and a senior administration official said the president’s agenda will include a renewed emphasis on the risks in the relationship, and the need to establish better communications. But, so far, the official said of the Chinese, “they haven’t taken us up” on a U.S. proposal for the stability talks.

The Chinese do not see and do not want instability so there is no need to talk about it. What they sees is a U.S. trick that would make it possible to designate China as an 'enemy'.

Ignatius' next paragraph demonstrates that:

This difficulty in developing a Sino-U.S. dialogue about strategic issues has frustrated the Biden administration. An important lesson of the Cold War was that nuclear-armed superpowers must communicate to avoid dangerous mistakes. But China has resisted arms-control talks even as it expands its nuclear arsenal, and as a result, it hasn’t learned a common language for crisis management in the way the Soviet Union did.

China is not in a Cold war with the U.S. It does not see itself as a U.S. enemy. There is no reason then to talk in Cold war language:

Biden first proposed the talks in a virtual summit with Xi last November, saying the two countries needed “common-sense guardrails to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict,” according to a White House statement at the time. Items on the agenda for such talks would include expansion of a 1998 agreement for avoiding maritime incidents, measures to avert dangerous military activities, and plans for a hotline and other crisis communication measures, the administration official said.

If there were more agreements over incidents and military activities would the U.S. be more or less aggressive in its action against China?

Why does the U.S. want a hotline and crisis communication? Would they not help the U.S. in provoking more incidents than it dares to do without them?

Rather than embracing what former Australian prime minister and China scholar Kevin Rudd calls “managed strategic competition” in a new Foreign Affairs article, Beijing insists the United States should return to its old policies of supportive engagement, which facilitated China’s rise. Like nearly every other Chinese diplomat I’ve encountered over the past decade, Qin often repeated the phrase “win-win cooperation,” which China sees as a cure-all for its increasingly testy relationship with Washington.

What is bad with a 'win-win cooperation'? Why replace that with 'strategic competition'?

China wants to have it both ways as a superpower: flexing its muscles without being seen as a bully. Xi has been explicit in his “Made in China 2025” plans for dominance of major technologies. But China “has difficulty in recognizing the relationship [with the United States] as competitive,” the senior administration official said. Instead, it responds to criticism from the U.S. and Asian regional powers with a wounded tone, as though to say, “Who, us?”

Lots of countries have lots of plans to have dominance in major technologies. The Netherlands (and German) have such a dominance in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, needed to make modern computer chips, as well as in several other fields. Other countries, France, South Korea, Japan, Russia, the U.S., have other industry sectors in which they are globally dominant. That is just the normal way of global capitalism in which countries seek to do their best not in all fields but in those in which they are better.

Framing a strong and sustainable U.S.-China policy remains the Biden administration’s biggest long-term challenge, despite the current preoccupation with the war in Ukraine. Beijing is the only competitor that could genuinely challenge the United States militarily, officials believe. But Ukraine has complicated U.S.-China policy — for both sides.

Now we come to the point. How please could China genuinely challenge the United States militarily? By invading Mexico and Canada or with a big landing force that threatens Los Angeles and New York? Why would China want do that?

Xi was surprised that the Biden administration, which the Chinese expected would be weak and ineffective abroad, has been able to rally global support for Ukraine. But despite Xi’s wariness of incurring sanctions, he remains firmly aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the senior administration official said. Hopes that the war might encourage a break between Beijing and Moscow were misplaced.

Ignatius has forgotten to take his meds. The 'global support' is the NATO, EU and the 5-eyes spying cooperation. Those are some 34 countries out of the 193 UN member states. Why did anyone expect that China would not take the neutral stand that the majority has taken? Those who did should be send back to school to learn a bit about rationality.

Enough with that blubber. Ignatius, like many other people in the Washington DC bubble, does not understand China and makes no effort to learn about it. These people just mirror what they think the U.S. would do and project that on a country that thinks in very different terms.

Another example of these 'thinkers' is Elbridge Colby:

Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial offers a blueprint for containing and combating China’s rise in order to preserve American freedom, prosperity, and security—emphasis on security. The argument turns on a very specific vision of China’s plans, which Colby does not attempt to link to actual Chinese policy or strategy for achieving hegemony in East Asia. The resulting prescriptions, although they’ve been lauded by some, are fatally flawed.

Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development from 2017 to 2018, believes that China could pursue a “focused and sequential strategy” of threatened or executed “wars against isolated coalition members,” starting with Taiwan. He fears Beijing would do this in such a way that does not trigger a regional war but culminates in Chinese hegemony in Asia.


To prevent this, Colby believes the United States must pursue a “strategy of denial” to preserve U.S. dominance in Asia.

The problem is that there is no evidence that there is an actual 'Chinese policy or strategy for achieving hegemony in East Asia'.

Colby provides no sources that claim such. He made up the 'threat' because he things that is what the U.S. would do if it were China.

The most glaring flaw is that Colby works off what he thinks China’s strategy should be, not the evidence about what it actually is. This is a particularly bad approach to analysis, because it makes mirroring or speculation easier to smuggle into predictions of adversary behavior.
A good defense strategy requires an understanding of how the expected adversary plans to fight. Yet he does not engage with Chinese military doctrine, Chinese strategic thought, or the robust debate in the United States about Chinese strategy and ambitions. Instead, he argues that because of uncertainty about China’s strategy, the United States should simply focus on China’s “best strategy” for winning Asia. In Colby’s words, “a state’s best strategy does not ultimately depend on what the state’s leaders think it is” because it relates to “objective reality.”


In consequence of his 'garbage in' process Colby's output is likewise garbage.

Building a response according to an adversary’s “best strategy” also makes you much more likely to miss what that adversary is actually doing. Colby defends his approach of strategizing based on China’s “best” strategy by claiming that “Defeating a bad strategy is easier and less costly than defeating a good one.” Therefore, if the United States prepares for China’s best strategy, any real Chinese strategy should be even easier to handle.
In reality, the defense posture and investments needed to defeat an adversary’s “best” strategy might be significantly different from those needed to defeat an adversary’s second-best strategy.


Colby's book is not about strategy but about spending as much money on a U.S. position of aggression towards China as possible:

Colby proposes that an American-led coalition impose a strategy of denial on China, blocking China’s ability to traverse the 80 miles of the Taiwan Strait. How to put the bell on the cat?
“Defending forces operating from a distributed, resilient force posture and across all the war-fighting domains might use a variety of methods to blunt the Chinese invasion in the air and seas surrounding Taiwan.”

The US and its allies might “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips. The defenders might also try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control … And once Chinese forces entered the Strait, US and defending forces could use a variety of methods to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft.”

Colby leaves what means we might employ here to the imagination.


Like the first reviewer of Colby's book this one also criticizes his factless starting position:

It isn’t so much that Colby gives the wrong answers. He fails to ask pertinent questions about Chinese intent and technological capability. Instead, he gives us a pastiche of generalities that obscure rather than clarify the strategic issues at hand.
In brief, Colby depicts China as an expansionist power eager to absorb territory, citing alleged Chinese designs on the Philippines and Taiwan on a half-dozen occasions – as if China’s interest in the Philippines were equivalent to its interest in Taiwan.


Garbage input producing garbage output topped with militaristic fantasies do not create a good strategy.

The problem is that in the next republican administration Colby will likely have another high Pentagon position.

That makes such dumb thinking a danger for the world.

Posted by b on July 22, 2022 at 15:59 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/07/u ... .html#more
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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