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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 30, 2022 2:08 pm

Why doesn’t more of the Western left support the People’s Republic of China?
At a webinar of the International Manifesto Group on the theme of Anti-imperialism and the Western Left, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez gave this talk about the Western left’s failure to meaningfully engage with Chinese socialism.


The focus of my presentation is: why doesn’t more of the Western left support the People’s Republic of China? Why doesn’t more of the Western left engage in a serious way with Chinese socialism?

There are lots of things about modern China that seem worthy of support, from a socialist point of view.

Poverty alleviation. Reducing poverty is a decidedly leftist objective. If there was no poverty under capitalism – if there were no homeless, no people without sufficient food to eat, without access to education and healthcare, without work or the possibility of earning an income – most people on the left would probably find something better to do with their time than struggling for a new society.

So the fact that China has achieved so much in the realm of poverty alleviation should obviously be something that we study and celebrate.

Not everyone trusts the Chinese government’s statistics, not everyone is convinced by the claim that China in 2020 eliminated extreme poverty. Fine. But it is absolutely beyond question that, in the period from 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed, the Chinese people have experienced an unprecedented and extraordinary improvement in their living standards and their level of human development.

China was one of the poorest countries in the world. Millions would die every year due to malnutrition, even in non-famine years. The vast majority of the population had no access to education and healthcare.

Life expectancy has more than doubled since 1949. China has achieved universal literacy. Everybody has access to education and healthcare. The social and economic position of women has improved beyond recognition.

Yes, life expectancy and literacy have improved in much of the world. But in China’s case, it has gone from a long way below the global average to a long way above the global average. The UN Development Programme describes China as having achieved “the most rapid decline in absolute poverty ever witnessed”.

There is tremendous inequality in China, and yes there are billionaires, but actually the economic baseline – the quality of life for the poor – is much higher than in other countries of the developing world.

The rural poor in China may not have a great deal of disposable income, but they have access to land, they have secure housing, they’re not drowning in debt to feudal landlords, their children get educated, they can see a doctor if they need to, they’re entitled to a pension, they have water piped into their homes, and so on. They might be considered as poor, but it’s a very different category of poverty to that which can be seen elsewhere in Asia.

And there are a number of other areas in which China is making amazing progress.

On climate change and biodiversity, China has emerged as a global leader.

On the Covid-19 pandemic, China has established the gold standard in terms of going all out to protect human life.

The fact that China is able to focus to such a degree on poverty alleviation, on renewable energy, on education, on suppressing the pandemic, on cracking down on corruption, and so on, doesn’t reflect some mystical, etherial quality of Chinese culture. It reflects the fact that the Chinese state prioritises the needs of ordinary people.

And that in itself reflects the fact that the CPC came to power via a revolution that was led by, supported by and sustained by the working class and peasantry. It was a revolution that created a workers’ state – moreover, a state led by a communist party with Marxism as its guiding ideology.

And yet, support for Chinese socialism is a niche position on the Western left.

Socialist China?
To start with, an awful lot of people think that China is a capitalist country, or even an imperialist country.

China has nearly 700 billionaires. A lot is made of China’s billionaires. Of course, China’s a huge country. Proportionally speaking, measured in terms of billionaires per million population, China stands at 0.27, which is actually below the global average of 0.35.

Monaco, by the way, is the world leader, with 79 billionaires per million population! The US is well above the global average with just under 2 per million. So China can hardly be said to be the home of billionaires.

But anyway. You can find McDonalds, KFC and Starbucks in Chinese cities. There’s private capital, there are big businesses and wealthy individuals and significant inequality. There are rich people and poor people; there is exploitation of labour; and there is integration into global value chains operated by huge multinationals.

A lot of people on the Western left look at this situation and say, well, this can’t be socialism.

And yet such people face an ideological trap that’s very difficult to break out of.

The standard of living in China has increased dramatically and continuously since 1949, certainly including in the period from 1978 when China is supposed to have “gone capitalist”. No capitalist country has achieved what China’s achieved in terms of improving the lives of ordinary people – certainly not on anything like the scale, or for such a sustained period of time.

Under capitalism, wealth always has a counterpart in poverty. The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, but tens of millions of people lack access to healthcare. Hundreds of thousands are homeless. And that’s before we even think about the extent to which US wealth relies on poverty, war and destruction elsewhere in the world – which is very much not the case for China.

If China is capitalist, and Chinese capitalism has delivered such extraordinary improvements to the lives of hundreds of millions of people, does that mean we need to think again about being anti-capitalists? That’s a serious question for anti-China leftists.

The Chinese themselves have always been very clear: they use market forces, within the overall context of a planned and state-run economy, in order to stimulate the development of the productive forces.

The Chinese state maintains tight control over the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy: heavy industry, energy, transport, communications, and foreign trade. China’s financial system is dominated by the ‘big four’ state-owned banks, which are accountable to the government rather than to private shareholders.

This level of intervention and regulation – which is the opposite of the free market fundamentalism and ‘small government’ neoliberalism that prevails in the West – means that capital isn’t in control; that the economy exists to benefit the people as a whole.

The land in China continues to be owned and managed at the village level.

So from an economic point of view, when you do a bit of investigation, China is much more socialist and much less capitalist than it might appear at a superficial level.

I often quote the Shanghai investor Eric Li, who’s interviewed on John Pilger’s film ‘The Coming War on China’. He makes an essential point about how China works:

“China is a market economy but it’s not a capitalist country. There’s no way a group of billionaires could control the politburo in the way billionaires control American policy making. Capital does not have enshrined rights in China.”

That is to say, in capitalist countries, the interests of capital come first. The capitalist class is the ruling class. In China that’s manifestly not the case.

Look at the top priorities of the Chinese government in recent years. Eradicate extreme poverty. Clamp down on corruption. Shift to renewable energy. Protect biodiversity. Protect human life in a pandemic. Improve living standards. These goals represent the will of ordinary people, not a capitalist elite.

Compare that with the major capitalist countries. Where I am in Britain, we’ve faced years of bitter austerity – life for ordinary working class people is getting worse all the time. Our death rate from Covid is almost a thousand times higher than China’s. Our progress rolling out renewable energy is painfully slow.

And the fact that China’s government represents the class interests of the masses is also reflected in the fact that it’s extraordinarily popular. Studies, including by Western academic institutions, routinely show that the CPC-led government has a 90-plus percent approval rating.

Meanwhile, the latest polling data indicates that only 20 percent of respondents feel the US Congress is doing a good job. But the US is the democracy, apparently.

The other thing to quickly mention about China and socialism is that the Chinese themselves continue to conceive of their political trajectory in terms of socialism and communism. Xi Jinping often says: “Only socialism can save China”, and “socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism and not any other kind of -ism.”

All school students learn the basic tenets of Marxism; all the major universities have Schools of Marxism. It’s pretty difficult to understand why the Chinese would go to such lengths to pretend to be socialists.

Propaganda war
Another important factor in how the Western left engages with China is the propaganda war. A lot of people who won’t even give critical support to Chinese socialism are happy to give uncritical support to anti-China propaganda put out by Western imperialists.

China’s the new colonial force in Africa.

China’s the new colonial force in Latin America and the Caribbean.

China is cornering developing countries in debt traps.

China is perpetrating a genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

China is preventing Tibetans and Inner Mongolians from speaking their languages.

China is trying to wipe out democracy in Hong Kong.

And the list goes on. Each item can be, and has been, comprehensively debunked. But why do people fall for these lies over and over again?

It should be perfectly obvious why the US and its allies would wage a propaganda war against China. China’s rise constitutes an existential threat for US hegemony. China is by most measures the largest economy in the world; it’s a leader in multiple key areas of science and technology; it takes an independent and anti-imperialist stance on the global stage and consistently supports the Global South, consistently works towards multipolarity; it’s a non-white power; it’s run by a communist party… For these reasons and more, China is the principal target in the US-led New Cold War, and the propaganda war is part of that.

But why do people fall for it? Why do people who consider themselves to be critical thinkers not think a bit more critically about the information they’re being fed about China?

There are several elements to this.

For one thing, a lot of this propaganda is quite powerful and sophisticated, and it actively connects to progressive ideas and sentiments. Particularly since the Carter administration, US politicians and media have really mastered the use of human rights as a stick to beat their enemies with. They find a problem, magnify it, exaggerate it, build a slick and all-pervasive campaign around it, and make you feel like you’re a bad person if you don’t join that campaign.

The accusation of genocide is particularly potent in these terms. By accusing China of genocide in Xinjiang, or Russia of genocide in Bucha, you create an emotional-intellectual environment where to stand with China or Russia is the equivalent of being a Holocaust denier. So you’ve massively increased the psychological cost of taking an anti-imperialist position.

The propaganda is very persuasive, very sophisticated, and we have to understand that and systematically counter it.

Then the Western left has a couple of quite deep-rooted problems that it needs to face up to.

It has a eurocentrism problem. The trajectory of Marxism over the course of the 20th century was towards the East and the South. It started as the ideology of the North American and West European industrial working class in their struggle against capital; it shifted East first to Russia, then China, Vietnam, Korea; then South to Cuba, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Guinea Bissau, Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Nicaragua, Grenada and elsewhere.

It became the ideology of the oppressed masses worldwide against imperialism, capitalism and white supremacy. It’s very significant that the final sentence of the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, reads: “Workers of the world, unite!” The Comintern, at its second congress in 1920, at the suggestion of a certain Vladimir Lenin, expanded this to: “Workers and oppressed peoples of the world, unite!”

But a lot of the Western left never quite caught up with that. In their minds, workers’ struggle still mainly looks like white men, working in factories and demanding pay rises. The idea of a Chinese or Zimbabwean peasant being at the cutting edge of the global class struggle doesn’t quite resonate.

The less a movement looks and acts like the European working class of the late 19th century, the less support it gets. And if you look at the communist parties in countries like China and Korea – countries that really aren’t at all Europeanised, that don’t have their philosophical roots in Greece and Rome, and so on – they don’t fit that bill.

Connected to that, the Western left also has a dogmatism problem. Let’s just admit it. In spite of – or perhaps because of – our lack of success building a socialist project of our own, we’ve developed very fixed ideas about what socialism is. And those ideas often don’t match the messy reality of Chinese socialism, which exists in the real world, which is engaged in a long-term battle for its survival in the face of ongoing imperialist hostility and destabilisation, and which therefore has had to make compromises and to develop creative solutions to new and complex problems.

Conclusion
How do we go about addressing these issues in our movement? It’s a tough question. Through the work that various groups and individuals have been doing – including the International Manifesto Group – we’re starting to see the re-emergence and consolidation of an international anti-imperialist movement. We need to continue developing this work, building unity and deepening our understanding.

We need to be cognisant of the propaganda war, and we need to fight resolutely against it.

And of course we always need to be alert to the intellectual arrogance and the prejudices that are so easy to absorb when you exist in a culture that’s fundamentally racist and Eurocentric.

Thank you very much for listening.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/04/29/w ... -of-china/

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NATO and AUKUS: the makings of an Asian NATO
In this recent presentation to the International Manifesto Group webinar, The Case Against NATO, Dr Jenny Clegg traces the makings of an Asian NATO via such mechanisms as AUKUS and the Quad whose fundamental purposes are to contain and confront a rising China. She further draws attention to the extension of NATO influence into the Asia Pacific through its Partnerships for Peace for example with Japan, South Korea and Australia; and also considers the impact of the Ukraine crisis in relation to these developments with the increase of tensions, divisions and militarisation in the region
NATO serves as the nuclear-armed fortress that helps to elevate the West above the ‘Rest’; it anchors Europe to its western orientation, severing it from its Eurasian geography.

But NATO members are also Pacific powers – the US, Canada, but also France and Britain, which maintain possession of a few islands and hence some considerable maritime territory.

In this Pacific presence can be seen the makings of an Asian NATO as a counter to the growing Eurasian dimension.

Whilst the world’s focus is on Russia in the Ukraine, for the US, China is the ‘pacing challenge’, and from this perspective, the Ukraine crisis can be seen as the first phase in the US’s last-ditch battle to retain its world supremacy, a battle pitting ‘democracies against autocracies’ in which NATO is to serve as the armed vanguard against the so-called Russia-China alliance.

The world before NATO was to be a new world of the UN Charter which, in the coordination of the wartime allies – the US, UK, Soviet Union and China – and in its commitment to national sovereignty, held the promise of a multipolar world.

It was this new world of the equality of nations that the US set out to smash in driving the first Cold War.

From Cold War to thaw back to Cold War in the Asia Pacific
The Cold War in the Pacific divided China and Korea and involved two hot wars – in Korea and Indochina – at the cost of countless lives and countless war crimes.

The US sought to set up an Asian NATO – however Australia lacked trust in Japan after WW2; Japan’s military was constrained under Article 9 of its constitution; and many South East Asian states, having fought to gain independence, chose non-alignment over subordination in a military alliance.

SEATO – Southeast Asia Treaty Organization – was set up in 1955 to block the ‘communist domino effect’ but it lacked unity and folded in 1977. The US instead relied on bilateral alliances and a spread of some 400 military bases to encircle China.

The Cold War never ended in the Pacific – China and Korea remain divided. Nevertheless, a degree of thaw in the 1990s allowed China to improve its relations in the region whilst ASEAN extended membership to the three communist-aligned Indochinese nations along with Myanmar. Regional economic growth entered a new phase.

But then, sending things into reverse, Obama embarked on his Asian pivot launching the freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. Following this, Trump declared China a strategic competitor, initiating the Quad to draw India into a new network with Australia, Japan and the US.

2020 saw the counter-hegemonic trend gather momentum with agreement on RCEP – the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, embracing large parts of East Asia and Oceania; the EU was also about to sign a major investment deal with China – these two developments recalling the coalition of Germany all the way across to China which Brzezinski foresaw in 1997, claiming this would be hostile to the US.

The US then prepared to strike back, launching the New Cold War, followed in September 2021 by AUKUS – a mini–Asian NATO, an intervention by the outside Anglosphere which started to sow disunity within the region, undermining its resolve for Asians to deal with Asian affairs.

NATO in the Pacific

NATO itself has been expanding into Asia since 2012 with its Partnerships for Peace programme drawing in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Pakistan, and the Philippines.

By 2014, an equation was already being drawn between Russia and the Ukraine and China in the South China Sea.

At the 2019 NATO summit, Pompeo raised the issue of the China threat and, in 2021, the NATO 2030 document widened its focus to include the ‘IndoPacific’, making very clear a strategy of: Russia first then China.

Biden has advanced on Trump’s anti-China approach in two key ways, elevating the Quad and bringing the Taiwan issue more into view. But the Quad lacks military muscle – hence the announcement of AUKUS.

The US and UK are to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, not only violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but also subverting the nuclear weapons free zones of South East Asia and the South Pacific – both important advances of regional independence in the 1980s. These submarines will extend Australia’s naval reach much further into the South and East China Seas.

Australia is to be transformed into a forward base for the US military, providing the core of a regional ‘hybrid warfare’ network, with looser links bringing nations into various regional networks under US direction, covering diplomacy, intelligence sharing, media narratives, supply chains and so on.

The pact also represents a new level of cooperation in military technologies – in quantum computing and digital technologies – as exemplified in the recent announcement on the development of hypersonic weaponry.

Accompanying the promotion of arms sales and the implementation of sanctions, AUKUS then is designed to secure US dominance over East Asia’s future growth in its support of US competition at the cutting edge of new technologies.

The impact of the Ukraine crisis
Amidst the Ukraine crisis, fears have been raised of a Chinese military takeover of Taiwan – in a completely false parallel between Ukraine, a sovereign state and Taiwan, recognised by the UN as a part of China.

As in Europe, militarisation in East Asia is accelerating: Japan has just increased its military budget by $50bn; Australia has estimated the cost of AUKUS at an eye-watering $250bn. With the newly elected conservative president in South Korea, a North East Asian arc with Japan and the US, comes into view, and with both Japan and South Korea strengthening military links with Australia, there are possible ties here into AUKUS in the South.

AUKUS only received a lukewarm reception amongst regional powers with Indonesia and Malaysia most openly expressing their reservations. Again, as in Europe, pressure is being brought to bear to erode the long held stabilising positions of Japan’s peace clause and ASEAN’s non-aligned inclinations, using the threat of sanctions to splinter and subordinate the organisation so as to clear the obstacles to militarisation.

Rather than Ukraine-Taiwan, Ukraine-the South China Sea may offer a better parallel: whilst Russia insists on Ukraine’s neutrality, China has been seeking the neutrality of the South China Sea in negotiations on a code of conduct which limits permission for outside powers to set up naval bases.

The marker of the Cold War battle line of ‘democracies versus autocracies’ is being drawn by the US around the so-called democratic right of nations to choose their allies. This is also the meaning behind the ‘free and open IndoPacific’ – that is freedom to join in the making of an Asian NATO.

Why is it that the US is blocking peace negotiations on Ukraine’s neutrality? Why can’t it accept the legitimacy of Russia’s security concerns? Not least, because this would set a precedent for China over Taiwan and the South China Sea. And it is China that is seen as the real, comprehensive challenger.

Amidst false allegations that China is supplying arms to Russia and propping Russia up, NATO is strengthening its links with the Pacific 4 – Australia, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand. The upcoming summit this June will set the stage for an attempt to legitimise NATO’s increasing penetration into the IndoPacific region as the necessary opposition to the so-called ‘Russia-China alliance’.

In conclusion
NATO expansion is the root cause of the war in Europe; through its links into the Asia Pacific, it is equally intent to divide and destabilise a region now forecast to overtake Europe as the centre of the world economy by 2030.

Russia first, China next, NATO is bringing on a new world order – it’s called the jungle.

If China has not criticised Russia, at least one reason is because it looks to the long term – to a new security plan not just for Europe but one which restores its Eurasian orientation, a new Eurasian Security Order

China, in taking its stand on the indivisibility of security, on security for all – not of one at the expense of another – is keeping alive the spirit of the UN Charter.

https://youtu.be/BGAocoqiOLo

https://socialistchina.org/2022/04/27/n ... sian-nato/

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Qin Gang: The Ukraine crisis and its aftermath
China’s Ambassador to the US, Qin Gang, is making persistent efforts to explain to the American public his country’s real position regarding the conflict in Ukraine and to counter disinformation. Below is his article, published on April 18 by The National Interest, a leading US conservative bimonthly International Relations magazine, founded in 1985.

Ambassador Qin notes that: “To end this unwanted conflict as soon as possible is more important than anything else.” He notes that Europe is the focus of the current crisis and the continent needs not only an end to the fighting but also a fundamental answer to the question of securing lasting peace and stability and a balanced and effective security architecture.

Qin Gang contrasts the eastward expansion of NATO, which contributed in no small measure to today’s tragic situation, with the development of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, in which framework China has amicably settled all its historic border disputes with Russia and the countries of Central Asia, both of which may be traced to 1996, and notes: “Different choices lead to different outcomes.”
The Ukraine crisis is agonizing. One more minute the conflict lasts means one more hardship for the 43 million Ukrainian people. To end this unwanted conflict as soon as possible is more important than everything else.

China loves peace and opposes war. It advocates upholding international law and universally recognized norms governing international relations and respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries, including Ukraine. China supports all efforts that can deliver a ceasefire and relieve the humanitarian crisis on the ground, and will continue to play a constructive role toward this end.

Lessons must be learned. While working to end this conflict, we must also give some serious thought to the changes brought by the crisis and the path forward in its aftermath.

The postwar international system is coming under the heaviest pressure since the Cold War. The once-in-a-century pandemic, the Ukraine crisis and the unparalleled sanctions, the spiraling inflation and a looming recession, all these have sounded the alarm for the “boiler” of the international system. It is high time for us to reduce the pressure, not the other way round, for our shared world.

Europe is the focus of all the pressure in the crisis. Its prospects of stability and prosperity were apparently damaged overnight and replaced by huge uncertainties. To reverse this situation, there must be not only an end to this war, but also a fundamental answer to lasting peace and stability in Europe, and a balanced, effective, and sustainable philosophy and architecture for its security.

The contrasting shifts over the thirty years on the two ends of the Eurasian continent should shed some light on how security can be ensured for Europe and the world. After the Cold War, when Europe chose to use NATO’s eastward expansion to preserve security, on the other side of the continent, China, Russia, and Central Asian countries initiated the Shanghai Five mechanism, in an unprecedented exploration of a new security philosophy and model. In 1996, when President Bill Clinton for the first time announced a timetable for NATO enlargement in Detroit, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan signed the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions, resolving China’s boundary issues with former Soviet Union countries once and for all and putting an end to military standoff along the China-Soviet Union border. The cornerstone of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has thus been laid, and the “Shanghai spirit,” i.e., mutual trust, mutual benefit, equality, consultation, respect for cultural diversity, and pursuit of common development, has been established. As such, neighborly friendship and common peace have prevailed among China, Russia, and Central Asian countries. As is shown by history, different choices lead to different outcomes.

The unfolding Ukraine crisis has also put America’s relations with both Russia and China to new tests. In 1992 when Russian President Boris Yeltsin paid his first visits to the United States and China following the Soviet disintegration, the countries agreed not to regard each other as adversaries, which basically put Russia’s bilateral relations with the United States and China on the same level. Over the past thirty years, the China-Russia relationship has made great progress, but it is still based on non-alliance, non-confrontation, and non-targeting of third countries. China has been and will remain an independent country that decides its position according to the merits of each matter, immune from external pressure or interference. The claims about China’s prior knowledge of Russia’s military action or China providing military aid to Russia are pure disinformation. Had similar conflicts happened in other places or between other countries, China’s position would be no different. At the same time, U.S.-Russia relations are sliding into a new Cold War, which is not in the interest of either China, the United States, or Russia, and is not what China wants to see. After all, a worse Russia-U.S. relationship does not mean a better China-U.S. relationship, and likewise, a worse China-Russia relationship does not mean a better U.S.-Russia relationship, either. More importantly, if the China-U.S. relationship is messed up, that does not augur well for Russia-U.S. relations or the world.

Disturbingly, as the crisis continues, some people are wielding the stick of sanctions against China to coerce the renunciation of its independent foreign policy of peace. Some are clamoring about a “Beijing-Moscow Axis” in a dangerous misinterpretation of China-Russia relations, asking China to bear responsibility for the crisis. Some are linking Taiwan to Ukraine and playing up the risks of a conflict across the Taiwan Strait. Still others, for all the lessons that should be learned, are fanning up misunderstanding, confrontation, and insecurity in Asia-Pacific, without a modicum of care if this region might follow in the footsteps of Europe. These words and actions are not helpful to resolving the crisis or ensuring the stability of China-U.S. relations. Dragging everyone down does no good to our future generations.

Ukraine knows best how the postwar international system was all built. Over seventy years later today, its future is again closely linked with that of the world. Though we are not able to reach consensus, for the moment, on what kind of international system we want, last century’s “scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind,” and the following four decades of estrangement should enlighten us that we all live in a shared world with a shared future. It is out of the question for any country or country bloc to have absolute security while ignoring other countries’ security. Without respect, trust, mutual accommodation, and cooperation, the world would never be peaceful. It does not need and cannot afford another Cold War in the aftermath of the Ukraine crisis.

China and the United States should not only work together to tackle the warming of the global climate, but also seek maximum common ground in addressing the cooling of the international political climate. Differences in perception of the crisis do not justify groundless accusations or pressure and should not hinder our joint efforts to end the crisis. I have been staying in close communication with American colleagues on it. At the same time, China and the United States should take a long-term view and have pragmatic and constructive dialogue, coordination, and cooperation for what comes our way outside and after the crisis. In this way, we can bring about an arrangement for lasting peace and stability in Europe acceptable to all parties; properly resolve other global hotspots; prevent and address the crisis’ impact on the global economy and trade, finance, energy, food, and industrial and supply chains; and minimize the losses for the economy and people’s livelihood. The current international system is not perfect. It needs to make progress with the times, and China is committed to supporting and contributing to this process, not undercutting or wrecking it. In the final analysis, our shared goal is lasting peace, universal security, and common prosperity for the 1.8 billion Chinese and American people and the 7.8 billion world population. This is the historical responsibility for China and the United States as two major countries.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/04/23/q ... aftermath/

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China: Experts Say There Is No Chance To Ease Pandemic Control

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China experts warn on not easing COVID-19 measures control. Apr. 29, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@globaltimesnews

Published 29 April 2022

As cases of infected people by the Omicron variant of COVID-19 continue to increase, Chinese experts said there is no chance to ease pandemic measures.

On Friday, the top Chinese epidemiologist Liang Wannian said that in light of outbreaks resulting from an increase of infected people by the Omicron variant, China could not afford a relaxation of the pandemic control measures.

The Expert said during a press conference that China's elderly and underage population has not yet completed its vaccination schema. Meanwhile, different parts of the country are facing discrepancies in medical resources.

"Under such circumstances, the country's medical resources will be stretched too thin should we adopt a laissez-faire epidemic containment approach," he said, adding that such a move would also affect the health of vulnerable people, which include minors and the aged people.

Referring to anti-pandemic measures conducted in Beijing and Shanghai, the top epidemiologist highlighted the need for the swift and full establishment of containment policies to effectively strike infections due to the Omicron variant and stay one step ahead of the virus.


Liang considers that intended to stop the spreading of the virus and continue protecting citizens' lives; China needs to continue standing with the principle of timely detection, quarantine, patient admission, and treatment.

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

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Latest data released by National Health Commission by midnight, April 29, 2022.
- Chinese mainland reports 1,410 new locally transmitted confirmed COVID-19 cases, 47 new deaths

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 8965f.html

Chinese mainland reports 5,646 new local COVID-19 cases, 5,487 in Shanghai
Updated: 2022-04-29 10:00

BEIJING -- The Chinese mainland on Thursday reported 5,646 locally transmitted confirmed COVID-19 cases, of which 5,487 were in Shanghai, according to the National Health Commission's report Friday.

The rest of the cases were reported in 17 other provincial-level regions, including Beijing, Jilin, and Zhejiang.

Of all the newly reported local confirmed cases, 5,125 were previously identified as asymptomatic infections.

Shanghai also reported 9,545 of the 9,942 local asymptomatic carriers newly identified on the mainland.

Following the recovery of 2,796 COVID-19 patients on Thursday, there were 28,317 confirmed COVID-19 cases undergoing treatment in hospitals across the country.

Shanghai on Thursday also reported 52 deaths from COVID-19, bringing the mainland's total COVID-19 deaths to 4,975.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202204/ ... 5a19a.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri May 06, 2022 2:04 pm

Beijing Reportedly Conducted Massive ‘Stress Test’ Modeling Impact of Russia-Style Sanctions on PRC
Yesterday (Updated: Yesterday)

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A stock investor gestures as he checks share prices at a securities firm in Fuyang, east China's Anhui province. File photo. - Sputnik International, 1920, 04.05.2022

The reported test comes on the heels of an emergency conference involving Chinese state regulators and major domestic and foreign banks last month discussing how the Asian nation’s assets could be protected if the US imposed Russia-style restrictions on the People’s Republic.

The Chinese government ran a comprehensive “stress test” drill in late February and early March to model what impact Western sanctions similar to those imposed against Russia would have on its economy, The Guardian has reported, citing a source with knowledge of the exercise.
The test reportedly involved key government agencies, including bank regulators and international trade bodies, with officials tasked with formulating emergency measures to be taken if restrictions were imposed.
“Those involved in this exercise use how Russia was treated as a baseline for China’s own policy response should it be treated in the same fashion by the West. This stress test involves a range of methodology, including modelling,” the source indicated.

The source suggested that the stress test was Beijing’s “natural reaction” to the crisis between Russia and the West.

Tong Zhao, a senior fellow at the Beijing-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the test was a logical measure, given that what the US and its allies did to Russia could be done to China as well. The researcher said the stress test may have been undertaken in part amid US threats to sanction China if it provided military or economic or military assistance to its Russian partner. This week, Washington admitted that it has not seen any evidence of such support being provided.

The ‘stress test’ comes on the heels of a report by the Financial Times last week that regulators from China’s central bank and the finance ministry met with representatives of major national lenders and foreign banks operating in the PRC to discuss how Beijing can protect its assets after Russia lost nearly half of its foreign reserves following their seizure by the US and its allies in late February.

Chinese Private Oil Refineries Covertly Buying Russian Fuel at Lesser Price - Report
Yesterday, 02:43 GMT

Commenting on the asset seizure on Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that over $300 billion in Russian reserve assets saved through exports of oil and gas to the West were “stolen” to “punish” Russia for its military operation in Ukraine.
“Now we are offered to continue trading as before, and the money will remain with them. When they want, they will pocket [the money] again,” Lavrov added, referring to European countries’ resistance to paying for Russian natural gas in rubles through Gazprombank.

https://sputniknews.com/20220504/beijin ... 69936.html

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US criticized over blaming, smears on China's position
By ZHANG YUNBI | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-05-05 07:44


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Chinese and US flags flutter outside a company building in Shanghai, November 16, 2021. [Photo/Agencies]

The Chinese embassy in the United States has rebuked and debunked a recent statement issued by US State Department attacking Beijing's position on the Ukraine situation, saying that "blaming and smearing just won't solve the problem".

"China's position on the Ukraine issue is impartial, objective and beyond reproach," an embassy spokesperson said in remarks published on the embassy's website on Wednesday.

On Monday, the US State Department issued a statement on its website claiming that Chinese officials and media show China's support for Russia as they "routinely amplify Kremlin propaganda, conspiracy theories, and disinformation" on the Ukraine issue.

In response, the Chinese embassy spokesperson said that "the US side should seriously reflect on itself" when it comes to spreading disinformation.

"It is the US officials and media who have spread such rumors that China knew in advance and tacitly supported Russia's military action, and that China helped Russia evade sanctions and provided military support to Russia. These are disinformation in every sense of the word," the spokesperson said.

In addition, the spokesperson noted that the US has waged wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, killing 335,000 civilians, and "this is not disinformation".

"The vast majority of countries in the world stand for resolving the Russia-Ukraine conflict through dialogue and negotiation, and none of them wants to see the situation escalate or get out of control. This is not disinformation," the spokesperson added.

The US State Department's statement specifically attacked Beijing's recent criticism on Washington sponsoring biolabs in Ukraine, calling the criticism "fabricated accusations".

Challenging Washington's claims, the Chinese embassy spokesperson noted that the US admitted that it has 26 biolabs in Ukraine in the working document it submitted last year to the meeting of the State Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention.

"According to the fact sheet released by the US Department of Defense in March, the US is supporting 46 facilities in Ukraine. This is not disinformation," the spokesperson said.

The US should welcome joint verification by the international community under the United Nations and the Biological Weapons Convention, the spokesperson added.

Noting that both countries are permanent members of the UN Security Council, the spokesperson said Beijing and Washington "should work together with the rest of the international community for an early political settlement of the Ukraine crisis".

"We should work together to realize a cease-fire as soon as possible, increase humanitarian assistance to Ukraine and protect civilians. We should strengthen coordination for greater world energy, food and supply chain security," the spokesperson added.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5a990.html

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Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare walks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang during a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Oct. 9, 2019. (Photo: AP/ Mark Schiefelbein)

Solomon Islands PM warns of invasion by Australia and U.S.
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on May 5, 2022 by Mike Head (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) (Posted May 06, 2022)

Based on the ultimatums issued by the Biden administration and Australia’s Liberal-National government, backed by the opposition Australian Labor Party, Sogavare’s statement is entirely credible. His warning, and the belligerent reaction to it in Canberra, also highlights the escalating U.S.-led war drive to confront China, even as Washington intensifies its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

In an address to parliament in defence of his government’s recent security agreement with China, Sogavare denounced the warnings issued by both the U.S. and Australian governments that no Chinese military presence in Solomon Islands would be tolerated.

Without naming the U.S. or Australia, Sogavare said: “We deplore the continual demonstration of lack of trust by the concerned parties, and tacit warning of military intervention in Solomon Islands if their national interest is undermined in Solomon Islands. In other words, we are threatened with invasion.”

Sogavare’s statement followed U.S. Indo-Pacific co-ordinator Kurt Campbell’s declaration, issued on April 22 during a top-level visit to Solomons Islands, that the U.S. would “respond accordingly” to any Chinese military presence in the country.

Campbell’s threat was swiftly echoed by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who said a Chinese base in Solomon Islands would be a “red line” for Australia, that is, a trigger for military intervention. Defence Minister Peter Dutton has accused China of “aggression” and said Australia needed to “prepare for war.”

Equally bellicose was the reaction of the Labor Party, which is using the campaign for the May 21 federal election in Australia to position itself as the most reliable and ruthless advocate of Australian and U.S. imperialist interests.

In an election debate with Morrison, Labor leader Anthony Albanese accused the Coalition of leaving “our backyard” unsecured, allegedly by allowing China to establish a foothold in the region. Labor’s shadow foreign affair minister Penny Wong described the Solomons’ agreement with China as the “worst Australian foreign policy blunder in the Pacific since the end of World War Two.”

Wong’s statement underscores the strategic importance of the Solomons, a country of 700,000 people and hundreds of islands in the southwest Pacific, as well as the other scattered Pacific island states. These islands became key battlegrounds in the U.S. war against Japan in World War II, including the bloody six-month 1942-43 Battle of Guadalcanal in the Solomons.

That war established U.S. domination over the Pacific, which Washington is intent on retaining, with the assistance of Australia, as part of its drive to prevent China from posing any challenge to Washington’s global power.

Sogavare denounced the references in Australia to the Solomon Islands being in Australia’s “backyard.” He said backyards were “where rubbish is collected and burned”, and “where we relieve ourselves.”

The Solomons’ PM also condemned nations that proclaimed “Christian values” but had waged “some of the bloodiest wars in the history of our planet.” That charge certainly applies to the long history of U.S.-led wars, not least those in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Sogavare also said there were “two sides” to the war in Ukraine, as there had been on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The latter reference was in response to Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who fuelled the anti-China campaign by claiming that the Solomons’ security agreement with China would result in “our own little Cuba off our coast.”

As Sogavare recounted, the Cuban crisis, which raised the immediate danger of nuclear war, was triggered by the U.S. after Cuba invited the Soviet Union to station missiles on its territory as a deterrent against a U.S. invasion. That followed the botched American “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba in April 1961 and the stationing of U.S. missiles in Italy and Turkey within striking distance of the Soviet Union.

Sogavare has every reason to warn of a military intervention and regime-change operation against his government. His government has been destabilised already by a right-wing separatist movement in Malaita province encouraged by Washington.

One of Sogavare’s previous administrations was ousted in 2006-07 as a result of Canberra’s machinations which were part of a protracted Australian-led military occupation of the Solomons, the 2003 to 2017 “Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands” (RAMSI).

Sogavare has denied any plan for a Chinese military base but that has not halted the threatening allegations against him. On the contrary, just-retired Australian Strategic Policy Institute head, Peter Jennings, who has close links in Washington, said Sogavare’s warning was “as unhinged as Fidel Castro’s.”

Jennings said “Sogavare should remember” that “the Cuban missile crisis ultimately left Cuba isolated from its neighbours in the Caribbean, with a mouldering economy.”

Jennings echoed the alarm in Washington that Australia had failed to prosecute U.S. and allied strategic interests sufficiently aggressively in the Solomons.

Jennings said Sogavare’s reaction to Australian and U.S. concerns over the China agreement showed “Australian politicians have been pandering to Pacific leaders with soft soap rhetoric about the Pacific family.” He added: “When a genuine crisis comes along sometimes we need to remind the region that Australia has security interests that need to be respected.”

Morrison confirmed today that he had not spoken to Sogavare since issuing his “red line” threat. In a bullying tone, he told reporters: “We are Solomon Islands’ primary security partner.” Morrison claimed that Sogavare had conveyed to him agreement with that proposition.

The contemptuous attitude of the U.S. and Australia towards the Solomons’ sovereignty exposes the fraud that the U.S. war plans against China and Russia have anything to do with defending “democracy” or “national sovereignty.”

In provoking war with Russia, Washington and Canberra have said Ukraine’s ability to join the NATO military alliance must be upheld, even if it leads to a nuclear World War III. However, with regard to the Solomons, “national sovereignty” is thrown overboard.

The Socialist Equality Party is the only party in the Australian elections opposing the U.S.-led war drive and seeking to mobilise the working class, in Australia and internationally, against it.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/06/solomon ... a-and-u-s/

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Latest on COVID-19 pandemic
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-05-06 09:00

We provide the latest updates and crucial information on the global COVID-19 pandemic here.

May 6

China

- Chinese mainland reports 373 new confirmed COVID-19 cases, 4,740 asymptomatic infections

Chinese mainland reports 356 new local confirmed COVID-19 cases, 245 in Shanghai
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-05-06 10:31

A medical worker takes a swab sample from a resident for a nucleic acid test in Chaoyang district, Beijing, on May 5, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]
BEIJING - The Chinese mainland on Thursday reported 356 local confirmed COVID-19 cases, of which 245 were in Shanghai, according to the National Health Commission's report Friday.

Apart from Shanghai, 12 other provincial-level regions on the mainland saw new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases, including 55 in Beijing and 24 in Henan.

Shanghai also reported 4,024 locally transmitted asymptomatic infections Thursday, out of a total of 4,272 local asymptomatic carriers newly identified on the mainland.

Following the recovery of 1,602 COVID-19 patients on Thursday, there were 11,515 confirmed COVID-19 cases undergoing treatment in hospitals across the Chinese mainland.

Thursday saw 12 deaths from COVID-19, all in Shanghai.

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http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5a524.html


- 1.2 billion people have been fully vaccinated in China, according to the National Health Commission
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon May 09, 2022 2:02 pm

China Has 'Financial Nuclear Bombs' If West Levies Russia-Style Sanctions, Beijing Warns
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, MAY 06, 2022 - 10:00 PM

Multiple analysts at Chinese state-linked think tanks and banks have weighed in on the Biden administration's recent threats to punish the world's second-largest economy over China's refusal to condemn Russia's war in Ukraine, and amid US charges that it could be helping Moscow evade sanctions, or even quietly resupplying Putin's military machine (charges which at this point have remained without evidence).

"It is necessary to speed up the construction and external connection of the cross-border yuan clearing system CIPS … [But] the primary choice is to continue to strengthen cooperation with Swift," Wang Yongli, a former vice-president with the Bank of China and a former board member for Swift, was cited as saying in a fresh South China Morning Post report this week.

However, China is taking note and studying its own preparedness and future options in the wake of the US drastic measure of freezing Russia's central bank assets overseas. On this, Yongli underscored to the SCMP that "The huge foreign exchange reserves are hard-won, and they are China’s ‘financial nuclear bombs’ with a powerful deterrent effect. It must be used properly rather than arbitrarily, and cannot be easily slashed."

Officials in Beijing are putting counterparts in Washington on notice - pointing out that "China is no Russia" given China's immensely larger role in nearly every facet of the global economy. They've also said that any potential Taiwan reunification scenario with the mainland would not be like Russia-Ukraine, and yet it's understood well due to the current crisis and the West's anti-Russia sanctions constitute a "textbook warning for China":

“The expansive economic sanctions that US-led Western countries have imposed on Russia can be seen as a textbook warning for China – on how far [the sanctions] can go,” said He Weiwen, former economic and commercial counsellor at the Chinese consulates in New York and San Francisco.

The SCMP report lists a number of short and long-term strategies being mulled in a crisis scenario with the West, predicated on geopolitical factors like a showdown over Taiwan.

For example, "China has been stepping up efforts to diversify its foreign exchange reserve assets in the past two decades, according to data from the State Administration Of Foreign Exchange." The report recommends, "One countermeasure China can take is to expand its economic and financial opening up to the outside world, and encourage foreign investors to hold more Chinese assets, according to Chinese government advisers."

Below are some key sections from the analysis outlining various possible scenarios...

Unintended Consequences

"China and the US have a stake in each other, so for the US, China is totally different from Russia. The political calculations will inevitably be restrained by economic conditions.”

Lu Xiang, a senior fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), also said that if the same sanctions were levied against China, they would have unintended consequences for the nation or global bloc imposing them.

“The effects of any sanctions are mutual,” Lu said. “We have assets in the US and Europe, and so do they in China.”

"Some US sanctions will inevitably remain in place, and perhaps more will come, but the unfolding of the sanctions will follow its original pace," according to Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University and an adviser to the State Council, the country’s cabinet.

“A sharp and sudden escalation is quite unlikely,” Shi said.

Playing with Ambiguity

“The United States is now playing with ambiguity,” a Beijing-based foreign diplomat was quoted as saying. “China also wants to know, clearly, under what specific circumstances it would be sanctioned.”

Accordingly, the Chinese government, along with state-owned banks and enterprises that have business relations with Russia, have been adopting a very prudent approach since the war began, according to Professor Shi with Renmin University.

“Such a Western attitude [towards Russian aggression] has probably been fully anticipated by China, so to protect Chinese assets, I think so far, China has been acting very cautiously,” Shi said.

Slashing Reserves?

According to the report, "There has been talk inside China of slashing its huge holding of reserves, but experts say this is not feasible, as a sudden change in the volume could have catastrophic consequences in global markets."

Wang Yongli explained, “...Of course, this does not rule out China increasing its purchase of gold or other strategic materials, or adjusting the currency and country composition of foreign exchange reserves, to further reduce its US dollar reserves, but we avoid this as much as possible to use it as a means of confrontation with the US.”

Read the rest of the SCMP report here. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-wary-ru ... 40603.html

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ ... ns-beijing

The phrase 'hoisted on their own petard"'comes to mind...

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China will never forget NATO's bombing of Chinese embassy: spokesperson(1/1)
2022-05-07 10:24:05Ecns.cnEditor :Gu Liping

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The Chinese people will never forget NATO's barbaric atrocities of bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and will never allow the historical tragedy to be repeated, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Friday. "The NATO claims to be a defensive organization, but it in fact has repeatedly violated international law and wantonly waged wars against sovereign countries, undermining world and regional peace and killing and displacing a large number of innocent civilians," said the spokesperson.

http://www.ecns.cn/hd/2022-05-07/detail ... 8113.shtml

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No to a new Monroe Doctrine in the Pacific
This article by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez explores the hysterical and hypocritical reaction by the US and Australia to the recently-announced security agreement between China and the Solomon Islands. Carlos observes that the Western imperialist powers are attempting to construct – via AUKUS and other means – a Monroe Doctrine in the Pacific, imposing US hegemony over the region as part of their long-term strategy of China containment. The article also deals with the contention that China itself is acting in an imperialist manner in the Pacific.
The Anglo ruling classes have gone into a state of frenzy over a recently-signed security agreement between the People’s Republic of China and the Solomon Islands. Various people who had barely heard of the Solomon Islands just a few weeks ago are now expressing grave concern that this small sovereign nation could be used as a pawn by an aggressive and expansionist China in its bid for world domination.

The deal itself appears to be entirely ordinary, allowing for China to “make ship visits to, carry out logistical replenishment in, and have stopover and transition in the Solomon Islands,” in addition to providing the Solomon Islands police with training and – on invitation – support. Indeed, the Solomon Islands already has similar security cooperation arrangements with Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Fiji; as such, the deal with China simply represents a desire to “seek greater security partnership with other partners and neighbours.”

Responding to criticism of the deal by Australian and US politicians, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare assured that it was signed “with our eyes wide open, guided by our national interests”, and that it has been developed not as a means of power projection but of addressing the island nation’s security needs.

Nonetheless, Western politicians and media have reacted with an anxiety bordering on the hysterical. Indeed the Australian government made repeated attempts to prevent the deal being signed in the first place, and its failure has prompted bitter recrimination. Allan Gyngell from the Australian Institute of International Affairs commented to BBC News that “the objective had to be to stop something like this happening. You can’t read it any other way – this is a failure of Australian diplomacy.” Meanwhile, opposition leader Anthony Albanese described Australia’s failure to prevent the agreement going through as “a massive foreign policy failure” and “a Pacific stuff-up”. The Australian Labor Party is now promising that it will “restore Australia’s place as the partner of choice in the Pacific” if it is successful in the coming federal elections.

Australia’s Defence Minister Peter Dutton condemned the security deal in overtly racist terms, implying that China had bribed the Solomon Islands leadership. “We don’t pay off, we don’t bribe people, and the Chinese certainly do.” Prime Minister Scott Morrison backed Dutton up in characteristically incoherent fashion, describing China as “an autocratic nation that is not playing by the normal rules on how they seek to influence other nations in our region.”

Meanwhile, David Llewellyn-Smith, founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Diplomat, said the quiet part out loud, calling for Australian armed forces to “invade and capture Guadalcanal such that we engineer regime change.” To kick things off, Australia should “immediately begin amassing an amphibious invasion force to add pressure.”

In summary, the entire political mainstream in Australia is outraged at the idea of a sovereign nation in the Pacific exercising its right to sign a security deal without Australia’s explicit approval. Karen Andrews, Home Affairs Minister, stated boldly that the Pacific “is our backyard, … is our neighbourhood.” Such flagrantly colonialist language, strongly reminiscent of the notorious Monroe Doctrine (in which Latin America is “America’s backyard”), is not unusual in Australian policy circles.

The hypocrisy is particularly stark given that Australia also has a security agreement with the Solomon Islands. Indeed between 2003 and 2013 Australia “led a contingent of military personnel, police and civilians” in the country, and maintains a presence of 115 troops there. The 2017 bilateral security treaty between the two countries allows for “Australian police, defence and associated civilian personnel to be deployed rapidly to the Solomon Islands in the event of an emergency.”

Australia is only a relatively minor imperialist power, acting essentially as a regional agent of the US (or as George W Bush memorably put it, as a “deputy sheriff”). As expected, the US ruling class shares Australia’s concerns in relation to the China-Solomon Islands deal. Daniel Kritenbrink, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs rushed to the Solomon Islands shortly after the announcement of the security agreement in order to express his discontent; specifically, to “let them know that if steps were taken to establish a de facto permanent military presence, power projection capabilities, or a military installation, then we would have significant concerns, and we would very naturally respond to those concerns.”

Kritenbrink pointedly refused to rule out the prospect of US military action against the Solomon Islands if China were to establish a naval base there.

It’s noteworthy that the US is so worried about the possibility of China building a military base in the Solomon Islands. There is certainly nothing in the security agreement indicating that such a base would be built; indeed a statement by China’s embassy asserted that “the so-called establishment of Chinese military bases is fake news made up by someone with ulterior motives.” The US, meanwhile, maintains hundreds of military bases in the region, including in South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Australia, the Philippines and Guam (a US colony). According to what principle would it object to China having a military base?

The principle is simply that the US considers itself “the world’s policeman” and affords itself the right to impose its uncontested hegemony. That is, while it hypocritically claims to uphold a “rules-based international order”, it is in fact a rogue state, intent on consolidating and expanding an imperialist system built around the narrow interests of its ruling class.

Meanwhile Damian Cave, writing in the New York Times, complains that Prime Minister Sogavare “has shown little interest in listening to Australia, the United States or other Pacific Island nations”. In failing to act as a humble proxy of US-led imperialism, Sogavare has “shaken his own democracy and the stability of the entire Asia-Pacific region.”

The language used by US and Australian politicians and journalists is highly revealing. As Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin pointed out, these two Anglo-Saxon powers are attempting to construct a Pacific Monroe Doctrine for the 21st century.

Cold War in the Pacific

The Solomon Islands is composed of six large islands and over 900 smaller islands, not far from Papua New Guinea. While its territory has been populated by humans for some 30,000 years, it entered Western consciousness for the first time in 1893 when it was colonised by Britain. It remained the British Solomon Islands Protectorate until the late 1970s, when it won its independence. Queen Elizabeth II continues to be its head of state.

Since gaining independence in 1978, the Solomon Islands have been largely neglected by the country’s putative allies in Washington and Canberra, left to overcome the legacy of a century of colonialism and underdevelopment whilst trying to navigate life on the periphery of globalised capitalism. The resulting poverty and inequality, combined with continuous exposure to imperialist culture, have led to high crime rates, inter-ethnic and regional tensions, and poor public health outcomes.

In this context, the country’s national leadership has shifted its geopolitical orientation somewhat in recent years, in particular opting to deepen its relationship with China in order to attract investment and learn from the latter’s experiences in poverty reduction. Prime Minister Sogavare has stated that the Solomon Islands seeks to expand cooperation with China in the areas of trade, investment, agriculture, fishery and tourism. Closer links between the two countries are already paying off, with China providing the Solomon Islands with hundreds of thousands of doses of its Covid-19 vaccines.

While improved links with China are a no-brainer for the people of the region, they are causing serious headaches in Washington. The US was outraged when, in 2019, the Solomon Islands switched allegiance from Taipei to Beijing and announced that it would join the Belt and Road Initiative.

Washington went so far as to pledge 25 million USD to Malaita, the country’s most populous island, in a bid to bribe it into breaking with national policy and maintaining its ties with Taiwan. No serious attempt was made to obscure the nature of this bribe. Dr Terence Wood from the Australian National University’s Development Policy Centre noted that the 25 million represents 50 times what Malaita received in total from aid donors last year. “I’d almost certainly think that the United States is focusing on Malaita right now because it sees Malaita as a potential source of support, in its own geostrategic struggle with China in the region.”

Daniel Suidani, Malaita’s premier, duly did as instructed, maintaining the island’s relationship with Taiwan and encouraging residents to protest against the central government’s China policy. These protests reached their climax in November 2021, when rioters attacked the parliament and attempted to overthrow the government. There were a number of attacks specifically directed at Chinese businesses. It’s obviously no coincidence that a large proportion of the rioters were from Malaita, and that Daniel Suidani led the calls for Prime Minister Sogavare to step down, claiming he had “elevated the interest of foreigners” – that is, Chinese – “above those of Solomon Islanders.”

Incidentally, and ironically, Australian troops were deployed to help control the violence.

The broader context here is of course the escalating US-led New Cold War, in which China is enemy number one. Hegemony over the Pacific is a core component of this war, and the US has been steadily increasing its militarisation of the region for the last decade, stepping up its naval presence in the South China Sea; bolstering its Indo-Pacific Command; and rampaging up its war games, joint exercises, and its development and deployment of advanced weaponry. NATO made it clear in 2021 that it now considers China to be a “full-spectrum systemic rival.”

In 2021, the US, Britain and Australia surprised and shocked the world with the announcement of a new trilateral security pact, AUKUS. Under this agreement, writes Jenny Clegg, “the US and UK are to equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, not only violating the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty but also subverting the nuclear weapons free zones of South East Asia and the South Pacific.” Since then, it has been announced that the AUKUS countries will cooperate on the development of hypersonic weapons. (It’s worth mentioning in passing that, while Australia and the US have complained bitterly about not being consulted regarding the China-Solomon Islands security agreement, nobody consulted either China or the Solomon Islands about AUKUS – even though, as Sogavare has pointed out, it will “affect the Pacific family by allowing nuclear submarines in Pacific waters”).

AUKUS constitutes an incipient Pacific extension of NATO. As such it seems the US is pursuing a coordinated global military infrastructure to reinforce its Cold War aims.

Where do the Solomon Islands fit into this picture? Maintaining client states in the Pacific is part of the overall project of China encirclement and containment. Chen Hong, writing in the Global Times, puts it well: “The US, assisted by its local proxy Australia, has been attempting to assemble a small anti-China clique in the region as a way to serve its own interests and goals.” The current hysteria over China’s relationship with the Solomon Islands is therefore inextricably connected with the US’s continuing “pivot to Asia” and its attempts to preserve, consolidate and expand its hegemony.

Chinese imperialism?

It was entirely predictable that the US and Australian ruling classes would be offended by the growing China-Solomon Islands friendship. However, there has also been some fairly sharp criticism from an unexpected source: the Canadian anti-imperialist author and political analyst Stephen Gowans. Gowans, who has written extensively in opposition to the nefarious activities of US imperialism in Syria, Korea, Libya and elsewhere, writes that “the security pact between China and the Solomon Islands is a manifestation of imperialism.”

He declares that modern imperialism is defined by two central dynamics: “large countries exploiting profit-making opportunities in smaller countries” and “large countries competing among themselves to monopolise the sum total of the world’s profit-making opportunities.” He apparently believes that China aims “to create a security architecture to protect its tycoons’ investments” and to “counter US domination of shipping lanes important to China’s capitalist economy.” As such, according to Gowans’ definition and description, China is behaving as an imperialist power in the Pacific.

Any serious analysis of the dynamics of the New Cold War is almost totally absent in this analysis. Everyone on the anti-imperialist left can presumably agree that the US and its allies are engaged in imperialism in the Pacific. And it is abundantly clear that China opposes US imperialism in the Pacific; opposes US weapons sales to Taiwan; opposes AUKUS; opposes the numerous and varied attempts by the US and its allies to contain, encircle, destabilise and weaken China.

Yes, China wants to be able to safely and reliably access shipping lanes. It also wants to prevent US attempts to undermine the CPC government and replace it with an administration more willing to submit to US diktat. China wishes to ensure that it can’t be subjected to a blockade; that it can import and export in accordance with its economic strategy – a strategy which brings tangible benefit not only to “Chinese billionaires” but to the entire population, which has benefitted from the most extensive poverty alleviation program in history.

Can these aims reasonably be described as an example of imperialism? In his 2018 book Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, Gowans gave a pithy and useful description of imperialism, as “a process of domination guided by economic interests.” By analysing the New Cold War as an example of inter-imperialist rivalry, Gowans loses sight of the reality of the imperialist system – an imperialist alliance led by the US (and incorporating Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan) which engages precisely in a global “process of domination guided by economic interests.” This takes the form of a network of 800 military bases; unilateral sanctions against dozens of countries; wars of regime change; proxy wars; destabilisation campaigns; structural adjustment programs; nuclear threats; and more.

China is defending its legitimate interests (starting with the right to exist) and promoting mutually beneficial relations between itself and other countries. This is not the same as imperialism; to claim as such is to resort to Neither Washington Nor Beijing pseudo-Marxism. Meanwhile, China should be judged on the basis of its actions, not on the basis of an assumption that it is “driven by an expansionary capitalist logic.”

Those struggling for sovereignty and against imperialism in the real world value China as an important partner in that fight. Not without reason did Hugo Chávez talk of China and the socialist-oriented countries of Latin America constructing a “strategic alliance with the strength of the Great Wall” against US hegemonism.

China is providing aid, trade and investment; it is helping the Solomon Islands and other countries in the region to break out of underdevelopment. It is not sponsoring regime change, it is not interfering in other countries’ political systems, it isn’t imposing political conditions on its loans. It is conducting itself on the basis of solidarity and mutual benefit, and in accordance with the principles of non-interference. Such a model of international relations is crucial to the further development of a multipolar world; it is by definition not imperialist.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/05/02/n ... e-pacific/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed May 11, 2022 2:40 pm

US Has Changed Taiwan Wording on State Dept. Website

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Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. May. 10, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@CGCHINA_CPT

Published 10 May 2022
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The U.S. move will be detrimental to the one-China principle and will be counterproductive, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said.

Spokesman Zhao Lijian's statements came after the State Department's website section on Taiwan had removed wording about not supporting Taiwan's independence and acknowledging Beijing's position that Taiwan is part of China.

The Chinese spokesman said that "there is but one China in the world, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory, with the Government of the People's Republic of China as the sole legal government of China."

"The U.S. has made solemn commitments on the Taiwan question and the one-China principle in the three China-U.S. joint communiqués," the spokesman said, adding that the recent U.S. move on the matter will backfire and burn the U.S. itself.

"This kind of political manipulation on the Taiwan question is an attempt to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and will inevitably stir up a fire that only burns," the United States, Zhao, said.


Zhao called upon the United States to respect the one-China principle and the stipulations of the three China-U.S. joint communiqués and the political commitments made with China regarding the Taiwan issue.

Along these lines, the official demanded an end to political manipulation on the Taiwan issue, which is, according to China, the most sensitive and vital issue in its relations with the U.S.

Zhao said Washington "should implement President Biden's statement that the United States does not support Taiwan independence." The Chinese government considers the democratically governed island an inviolable Chinese territory.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/US- ... -0022.html

G7 Stop Meddling in China’s Internal Affairs- FM Spokesperson

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Chinese FM spokesperson said called on G7 to stop meddling in the country's internal affairs. May. 10, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@MFA_China

Published 10 May 2022 (9 hours 8 minutes ago)

On Tuesday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson called on Western countries and the G7 to stop meddling in its internal affairs.

After the Group of Seven (G7) foreign ministers and a European Union official showed their concerns about Hong Kong executive election, Zhao Lijian, a Chinese spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry, urged Tuesday to Western countries to stop interfering in the country's internal affairs.

During a daily press briefing, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that "certain Western countries and institutions are conspiring with each other to slander the election and grossly interfere in China's internal affairs. China expresses firm opposition to this and strongly condemns it."

Zhao continued to say that some countries have ignored that democracy has increased in Hong Kong and that mainstream public opinion wants unity and prosperity for the territory. "They sound like 'preachers of democracy' when they point fingers at Hong Kong's democratic elections, its high degree of autonomy, and its human rights and freedoms, which only exposes their double standards and their attempt to bring chaos to Hong Kong and contain China," he added.

"Hong Kong is China's Hong Kong. What kind of electoral system Hong Kong implements and what kind of democratic development path it explores are issues that fall entirely under the scope of China's internal affairs, and no external forces have the right to interfere," said the spokesperson.


Zhao said that the Asian country is seeking to establish the "one country, two systems" principle for developing high-quality democracy in accordance with Hong Kong's current reality. He added that any external forces trying to undermine this process would fail.

On Sunday, John Lee, 64, former chief secretary for administration of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government, won the first executive elections in the regional electoral system since its improvement in 2021.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/G7- ... -0025.html

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Chinese mainland reports 302 new local COVID-19 cases, 228 in Shanghai
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-05-11 10:51
BEIJING -- The Chinese mainland on Tuesday reported 302 confirmed local COVID-19 cases, of which 228 were in Shanghai, the National Health Commission said on Wednesday.

Apart from Shanghai, seven other provincial-level regions on the mainland saw new locally transmitted COVID-19 cases, including 24 in Beijing and 22 in Henan.

Shanghai also reported 1,259 locally transmitted asymptomatic infections Tuesday, out of a total of 1,545 such cases newly identified on the mainland.

Following the recovery of 817 COVID-19 patients who were discharged from hospital on Tuesday, there were 7,568 confirmed COVID-19 cases receiving treatment in hospitals across the Chinese mainland.

Tuesday saw seven deaths from COVID-19, all in Shanghai.

https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202205/ ... 5bfc1.html

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Latest data released by National Health Commission by midnight, May 10, 2022.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5a524.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat May 14, 2022 1:54 pm

U.S. Seeks ASEAN Proxy Willing To Poke China
On Wednesday, May 11, the Associated Press published a piece of the election in Philippine which included some dubious editorial assertions:

Marcos presidency complicates US efforts to counter China

MANILA, Philippines (AP) — Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s apparent landslide victory in the Philippine presidential election is raising immediate concerns about a further erosion of democracy in Asia and could complicate American efforts to blunt growing Chinese influence and power in the Pacific.
Marcos, the namesake son of longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos, captured more than double the votes of his closest challenger in Monday’s election, according to the unofficial results.

If the results stand, he will take office at the end of June for a six-year term with Sara Duterte, the daughter of outgoing President Rodrigo Duterte, as his vice president.

Duterte — who leaves office with a 67% approval rating — nurtured closer ties with China and Russia, while at times railing against the United States.


The whole piece is much longer than the quote. But it nowhere explains why a free and fair election, like the one the Philippines just held, would lead to 'a further erosion of democracy in Asia'. It also does not explain why anyone might doubt the results when indeed nobody really does.

What it does explain well is why Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will not become a U.S. puppet:

[A] 2011 U.S. District Court ruling in Hawaii finding him and his mother in contempt of an order to furnish information on assets in connection with a 1995 human rights class action suit against Marcos Sr.

The court fined them $353.6 million, which has never been paid and could complicate any potential travel to the U.S.


Marcos has said that he will keep the Philippines on the same neutral foreign policy line as Duterte did. Developing better relations with China is part of that.

That does not fit U.S. plans to use the Philippines as a proxy to poke the Chinese tiger.

Currently Biden is holding a summit with the leaders of countries that belong to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Members are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Myanmar was not invited to the summit and Duterte did not take part.

The agenda of the summit is astonishingly thin:

The summit, which concludes on Friday, is intended to cover an array of topics, including trade, human rights and climate change. But it is also part of an effort by Mr. Biden’s foreign policy team to highlight one of the president’s primary goals: assembling a united front against China as it increasingly demonstrates its economic and military might around the world.
...
On Thursday evening, the White House announced new investments of about $150 million in the region as part of a series of agreements between the United States and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN.
The investments by the United States include $40 million for clean energy projects in Southeast Asia.
...
The United States also pledged to invest $60 million to deploy additional maritime assets — led by the Coast Guard — to the region, and to perform training and other activities in coordination with other countries aimed at enforcing maritime laws.

And the administration said it would spend $15 million to expand health surveillance programs in Southeast Asia and better detect Covid-19 and other airborne diseases in the region.


These numbers are stingy and will not move anyone to support the U.S. against China which spends billions on infrastructure in those countries.

They also include a Trojan hoarse program none of those countries is really interested in. More on that later.

The program for the summit looks a bit like a snub:

On Thursday, the leaders from the ASEAN countries met with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers before gathering at a Washington hotel to discuss business opportunities with Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, and executives from American industries.
Mr. Biden welcomed the leaders to the White House on Thursday evening in a brief ceremony on the South Lawn. The group posed for a picture before walking into the White House for dinner.

On Friday, the Asian leaders will meet with Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in the morning, and then with Mr. Biden at the White House later in the day. According to the administration official, the group will discuss trading opportunities; transit through disputed waterways, including the South China Sea; and other topics.


These are presidents and prime ministers who are not really interested in talking with underlings like Raimondo and Blinken. They want to talk with the boss. But Biden seems to have little interest in making friends with them.

Was this summit intentionally designed to fail?

Anyway. Back to the Trojan horse for which the U.S. will spend $60 million in an attempt to poke the tiger.

A year ago Peter Lee wrote an excellent piece on the Philippine election that took place this week. It explains what the 'additional maritime assets' are supposed to do.

Will a New Philippine President Work with the US Coast Guard to Light Off World War III in the South China Sea?

For those of you who plan ahead, May 9, 2022 is the big one. Mark your calendars. That’s the date of the Philippine presidential elections.
Recapturing the Malacañang Palace for a pro-American president is an obsession of U.S. strategists. And if I’m thinking about it now, they’ve been thinking about it ever since Rodrigo Duterte won the last election in 2016.
...
I expect that the old guard in Manila, in coordination with the United States, will do whatever is necessary to make sure that, no matter who makes it to the Palace, the embarrassment of a Duterte-style balancer presidency is not repeated.

A pro-US presidency means turning away from the PRC to deepen the security relationship with the United States and Japan and perfect the “First Island Chain” anti-China picket line.

And the Philippines will reassume its place at the center of US plans to confront the PRC in the South China Sea.

As we now know that plan did not work out. But it is interesting how it was supposed to be followed by tackling the People's Republic of China in the South China Sea:

Post-Duterte I expect there will be continual poking at PRC vulnerabilities in the SCS as they relate to Philippine claims and can be construed to demand US support.
These include Reed Bank, an energy play within the Philippines EEZ that the PRC tries to claim as inside its nine-dash line.

Then there’s the Scarborough Shoal, a fishing spot now controlled by the PRC but a flashpoint for Philippine nationalism.

And there is the aptly-named Mischief Reef.


China has made Mischief Reef into an artificial Chinese island within the Philippine's economic zone. If the Philippine would reclaim the reef by force the 'additional maritime assets' the U.S. sends could come to its help:

If the Mischief Reef op goes down, that backing will probably come from, of all things, the US Coast Guard.
The US Coast Guard’s scope of operations, despite its name, is not America’s coasts. It’s a global power projection arm in the realm of law enforcement, not warfare.

Or as the head of the Coast Guard himself puts it, the Coast Guard is “a maritime bridge between the Department of Defense’s lethality and the State Department’s diplomacy.”
...
The Coast Guard is in the process of basing three so-called Fast Response Cutters at Guam. They are armed with 4 machine guns and a cannon and are designed for extended duration patrols of 2500 nautical miles.

The stated Pacific mission for the Coast Guard is to offer logistics and escort i.e. armed US backup for the coast guards of friendly states in their enforcement activities in the Pacific in the realms of illegal fishing, drug trafficking, and “the threats these activities bring” mostly, I would think, from China.

Stage one is implementing this US-backed enforcement regime on behalf of Palau and the other Polynesian satrapies whose defense and foreign relations are managed by the US government.

Then, if conditions permit, you got the South China Sea.

Guam is too far from the South China Sea, so to operate in the SCS the US Coast Guard will have to rely on tenders—unless the cutters are permitted to operate out of the Philippines,

That’s something I think the US military would dearly love, and is undoubtedly on its wish list for any post-Duterte Philippine administration.


I am pretty sure that Peter Lee had that right. But with Marcos junior at the helm of Philippine that country will not agree to those plans:

Allowing the U.S. to play a role in trying to settle territorial spats with China will be a “recipe for disaster,” Marcos said in an interview with DZRH radio in January. He said Duterte’s policy of diplomatic engagement with China is “really our only option.”
The coast guard cutters to be stationed in Guam are the '$60 million additional maritime assets' Biden promised to the ASEAN leaders.

Maybe some other country can be convinced to proxy-poke China to then ask for armed U.S. coast guard backup.

I doubt though that it is truly in anyone's interest as China is certain to poke back - harshly.



Posted by b on May 13, 2022 at 17:29 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/05/u ... .html#more

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US political meddling in Taiwan question slammed
By WANG QINGYUN | China Daily | Updated: 2022-05-13 08:00

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An American flag flies outside of the US Capitol dome in Washington, Jan 15, 2020. [Photo/Agencies]

The United States should effectively implement President Joe Biden's position of not supporting "Taiwan independence", cease political manipulation of Taiwan-related issues and stop "using Taiwan to contain China", Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Thursday.

Zhao made the remark after US National Security Council Coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs Kurt Campbell said in an interview with a think tank on Wednesday that leaders of the US and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will talk about topics including China at a special summit scheduled for Thursday and Friday in Washington.

Campbell said "there is a deep sense" that the US should not be distracted from the Indo-Pacific region again, and that the US "wants to take steps to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits", according to an online recording.

The one-China principle is a consensus of the international community and a universally recognized norm for international relations, Zhao said at a daily news conference, adding that the US should observe the principle, the three China-US joint communiques and the political commitment it has made to China on the Taiwan question.

Speaking of the US-ASEAN Special Summit, Zhao said the US, as a country outside the region, should play a positive and constructive role in promoting regional peace and development, instead of undermining regional peace and disrupting regional solidarity and cooperation.

"Nor should the US play the game of taking sides under the pretext of cooperation or play with fire over issues concerning China's core interests," Zhao said.

Commenting on reports that the US could soon launch its Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an initiative Biden proposed in October 2021, Zhao said the Asia-Pacific region is "a land for cooperation and development instead of a chess game for geopolitics".

Reuters quoted Japanese Ambassador to the US Koji Tomita as saying that he expected Biden's visit to the Republic of Korea and Japan later this month will coincide with the framework's formal launch.

"China believes that any cooperative framework in the Asia-Pacific region should comply with the trend of the times, which is peace and development," Zhao said.

Such a framework should also enhance trust and cooperation between regional countries, stick to the principles of respecting sovereignty and noninterference in others' domestic affairs and reflect openness, transparency, inclusiveness and equality, Zhao said.

"China stands ready to work with all parties to uphold the principles of openness and win-win cooperation, reject small groups with a Cold War mentality and build a large stage for cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region," the spokesman said.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5c59d.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed May 18, 2022 4:19 pm

Go to Yan’an: Culture and National Liberation
MAY 16, 2022
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Dossier N°52


Image
Front: Actors of a Beijing opera troupe perform.
Back: Drama students of the Lu Xun Academy of Arts (also known as Luyi) rehearse a play in a structure they built themselves.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

The Chinese communist base area of Yan’an was a literal and metaphorical stage for envisioning, experimenting, and building a new society and a new human being. On this stage, peasants, workers, and soldiers became the actors pushing history forward and the protagonists in the stories they wrote, sung, performed in, and lived. The images of this dossier are collages using photographs of cultural and everyday life during the ‘Yan’an decade’ (1935–1945)



My heart, don’t pound so hard.

Road dust, don’t block my view…

I grab a handful of yellow dirt and will not let it go,

Clutching it tight, close to my bosom.

Many were the times I dreamt of returning to Yan’an,

In dreams my arms embraced Pagoda Hill.

A thousand, ten thousand times I’ve been calling you,

– Mother Yan’an is here now, right here!

The Du Fu Creek Sings, and Willow Grove Village smiles,

The fluttering red flags are beckoning me.

White towels around their necks and red bands at their waist,

My dear people meet me, taking me across the Yan River.

I plunge into their arms, my arms stretched wide,

Too much to say at once, my tongue is tied.


– He Jingzhi, Return to Yan’an (1956).


Image
Top: Students reading at the Luyi library.
Bottom: Attendees of the 1942 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art.
Credit: Yan’an Literature and Art Memorial Hall [延安文艺纪念馆] and Wikimedia Commons/China Pictorial [人民画报]



Art That Serves the People

It was 1:30 in the afternoon on 2 May 1942, a cool spring day in the north-central Chinese city and communist revolutionary base of Yan’an. The central Party office, nicknamed ‘the airplane’, was housed in the city’s only three-storey building. The main hall was bustling, emptied of its usual dining furniture save for rows of benches and a single desk, ready to receive Mao Zedong when he punctually walked in. The attendees were convening for a meeting ‘to exchange views on various aspects of the current literary and artistic movement’.[1] Though the precise number of participants was not recorded, over one hundred invitations had been sent days before by Kai Feng, the acting head of the Propaganda Department and chairperson of the meeting. That the invitation had been printed on pink paper, which was not locally produced, signalled the importance attached to the meeting by the top tiers of the Communist Party of China (CPC). The country’s leading intellectuals, military commanders, and political cadre gathered along with representatives from across the spectrum of art and literary work, including publishing, research, newspaper, film, photography, drama, poetry, and youth units, among others.

In the months leading up to the conference, Mao had personally exchanged dozens of letters and held several one-on-one conversations with key intellectuals, navigating the divergent artistic and literary currents of the Left and identifying the urgent cultural questions of the time. Beyond being a political leader, Mao was, after all, a poet whose own classically-informed work had documented the birth and rise of the Chinese communist movement. His poetry painted scenes of the many battles and encirclements, victories and defeats, from the communist base he helped establish in the Jinggang Mountains to the epic Long March that brought the Red Army westward. During the Yan’an period (1935–1945), he summarised these experiences in theoretical and practical writings which would come to be known as Mao Zedong Thought. There, in the cave dwellings with their iconic arches, Mao studied and wrote prolifically on topics from military tactics to philosophy, party-building to political economy, land reform to internationalism. Among these was the systematic analysis of the role of art and literature in advancing the revolutionary struggle, summarised in Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. In this text, published the year after the Yan’an Forum, Mao and others distilled years of experience and experimentation in communist cultural and ideological work.

Back in the Party office on that afternoon in 1942, Kai had officially opened the first of the forum’s three plenary sessions that stretched over the course of three weeks. In each of the plenaries, seated at the only desk in the room, Mao carefully took notes as points were being raised. Talks, the subsequently published text, drew from these interventions and conversations.

‘The purpose of our meeting today’, Mao said in his introductory remarks, ‘is precisely to ensure that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy’. To understand the enemy, Mao offered an analysis of the political conjuncture, which started ‘from objective facts…: the War of Resistance Against Japan which China has been fighting for five years; the world-wide anti-fascist war; the vacillations of China’s big landlord class and big bourgeoisie in the War of Resistance and their policy of high-handed oppression of the people’. Revolutionary conditions had emerged in China, Mao noted, because of the discontent and misery generated by a century of imperialist aggressions and the Japanese occupation; whether the political forces would be able to push back against the Chinese elite and drive an independent agenda remained to be seen. One example of the revolutionary development was the creation of the base areas and the mobilisation of popular support in these areas, including that of writers, artists, and other intellectuals. ‘In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people there are various fronts’, Mao said, ‘among which there are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts’.[2]

He recognised that a military victory was insufficient without creating ideological unity in the Party and placing the proletarian subjectivity at the centre of revolutionary work. The ‘army with guns’ and the ‘cultural army’ carried out complementary work: the battle in the trenches and the battle over the hearts and minds of the people. Cultural work was key to this ideological transformation, supporting workers, peasants, and soldiers in seeing themselves as the protagonists of their own stories and history.

To achieve this goal, Mao laid out five artistic and literary ‘problems’ to be addressed: position, attitude, audience, work, and study. On the first point, Mao argued that cultural workers should take a ‘class stand’ – one that is firmly positioned alongside the people – in which artists also see themselves as workers in the struggle. Regarding ‘attitude’ and ‘audience’, Mao expanded on the correct approach that should be taken by artists and writers in order ‘to extol’ and ‘to expose’. In the first camp, the idea was that praise should be given to the struggles, aspirations, and ‘brightness’ of the people. On the other hand, it was also necessary to ‘expose the dark’, directing criticism towards the enemy and pointing out the shortcomings of allies in the united front to resist Japanese occupation.

In his introductory remarks, Mao highlighted some of the key debates that had emerged in Yan’an and sparked the need for the forum. He put forth a criticism of the earlier generation of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal awakening led by urban intellectuals and students, many of whom were politicised in that uprising and now found themselves in Yan’an. Though they helped spark the formation of a national consciousness and a new cultural movement, their work remained largely unknown to most people and to the peasant majority. They did not speak in ‘the rich, lively language of the masses’, as Mao called it. Two decades later, the country had reached a new political conjuncture which necessitated a different kind of cultural production and a new kind of intellectual. Only through immersion and work in the countryside – both mental and physical – could these urban intellectuals transform themselves into revolutionary workers and produce artistic creations that truly served the people. This, Mao said, required ‘a change in feelings, a change from one class to another’.

To understand the cultural workers that Mao was addressing and why they had come to Yan’an, we must examine how the city became the revolutionary heart of the communist movement. Thousands of writers, artists, and intellectuals had been inspired to go to Yan’an and brought with them different conceptions and practices of revolutionary cultural work. The Yan’an Forum sought to bring clarity and unity in the midst of diversity and divergence.

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Top: A Luyi choir rehearses the Yellow River Cantata.
Bottom: Literature students travel to the battle front in northwest Shanxi.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]


Go to Yan’an!

‘Father, I have to leave this home, but what should I do to leave?’, wrote a sixteen-year-old woman living and studying in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu in the spring of 1938.[3] In the letter, she expressed her dissatisfaction and desperation while confronted with the state of her homeland. Months earlier, the Second Sino-Japanese War had been triggered by an armed conflict known as the July 7th Incident on Beijing’s Luguo Bridge (or Marco Polo Bridge). The Japanese invasion and occupation of China – which began in 1931 and lasted 14 years until the end of World War II in 1945 – now entered full force, taking the lives of tens of millions of Chinese people and sparking mass migration in the country.[4] High schools and universities dispersed their students; some sought refuge in safer regions while others were inspired to join in the struggle for ‘national salvation’, which had become the spirit of the times. ‘So now, I have nowhere to go but Shaanbei (northern Shaanxi)’, the teenage student continued. ‘I have been considering it for a very long time, thinking of all the ways others have tried, but this is the only place that won’t let me down and will allow me to survive’.[5] She was one of thousands of students and intellectuals who decided to make the long journey to the communist-held revolutionary base of Yan’an.

Situated in the Loess Plateau of the north-central province of Shaanxi, Yan’an is an important site of Chinese civilisation and people and a sacred home of the Chinese Revolution. With roots tracing back 3,000 years, Yan’an was an ancient hub home to the Yellow River, the famous yellow earth, and the mythic Yellow Emperor before populations migrated southwards.[6] By the time the communists made it their capital in 1937, it was a ‘poor, dusty, and remote frontier town of about 10,000 inhabitants’.[7] Yan’an was also the destination of the epic Long March (1934–1935), a mass retreat of communists from their base area in south-eastern Jiangxi after they were pushed out by a series of encirclement campaigns led by the Nationalist Party forces (Kuomintang or KMT) with the support of Nazi Germany.

Midway through the Long March, in January 1935, the Zunyi Conference was held, attended by six of the twelve members of the politburo of the CPC. The Red Army had suffered huge losses and was deeply demoralised, and this pivotal meeting established Mao Zedong as the main leader of the Party and its troops at the helm of the Chinese revolutionary process. Some 12 months, 9,000 kilometres, 18 mountains, and 24 rivers later, only 8,000 soldiers on the Long March arrived in Yan’an.[8] Of the original 86,000 people who had been organised into three columns and set off on the trek, many starved, were killed, defected, or gave up along the way. It was ‘an Odyssey unequal in modern times’, as Edgar Snow called it.[9] In the caves of Yan’an, Snow was the first foreign journalist to interview Mao and report to the world about the early years of the Communist Revolution, published in his classic book, Red Star Over China (1937). That year, Yan’an became the official seat of power of the CPC in the heart of the communist-controlled region known as the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region. In the ‘Yan’an decade’ that followed, the ragtag group of poorly-fed and poorly-equipped communists would mobilise the support of tens of millions of peasants in the region, gain popular support in the cities, grow its active Party membership to 1.2 million people, and build a Red Army made up of one million soldiers, supported by millions more armed peasants.[10] On 1 October 1949, 14 years after arriving in Yan’an, Mao Zedong would declare the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.

As the political and cultural epicentre of the Chinese communist movement, Yan’an captured the imagination of artists, writers, and urban intellectuals from far and wide. In 1938, painter and educator Wang Shikou made the 300-kilometre journey from Xi’an to Yan’an by foot despite contracting malaria along the way. Before becoming a world-renowned cartoonist, a young Hua Junwu set off from Japanese-occupied Shanghai, passing through the southern cities of Hong Kong and Guangzhou before reaching Yan’an – all without his mother’s knowledge. That same year, prominent feminist writer of the May Fourth generation Ding Ling arrived in the communist base area. These artists and writers were among the estimated 40,000 intellectuals who would make their way to Yan’an by 1943.[11] Often coming from families of landlords, aristocrats, small business owners, and rich peasants, many of these intellectuals left relative urban comforts to traverse hundreds or thousands of kilometres in wind, sand, rain, and snow.

In those exploratory early years, cultural organisations of all kinds were formed, merged, re-named, and dissolved. Artistic and literary groups were set up in factories, schools, military units, and rural bases. Street poetry groups were established, with one collective’s manifesto stating, ‘do not let a single wall in the countryside or a single rock by the side of the road lie free and empty…Write…Sing – for the resistance, for the nation, for the masses’.[12] Theatre troupes, which emerged earlier in the 1930s as a powerful force in the resistance to Japanese imperialism, were particularly well received by a largely illiterate rural population. They were able to orally and accessibly communicate the most urgent problems of the day, explain the communist programme, serve as counter-propaganda, and, most importantly, win the confidence of the people. During his visit in 1936, Edgar Snow, impressed with the commitment and creativity of these troupes, called them the most ‘powerful weapon of propaganda in the communist movement’. To Snow, ‘there is no fine partition between art and propaganda. There is only a distinction between what is understandable in human experience and what is not’.[13]

However, this cultural work was still dominated by the urban intelligentsia, comprised of full-time and amateur writers with elite or formal education backgrounds. Few peasants, workers, and soldiers participated in this sphere, and traditional forms of folk art were rarely featured. Though arriving with good intentions, these intellectuals came from realities that were worlds apart from those of the local peasantry. ‘Writers from other parts of the country were not used to life in the Liberated Zone, and it takes time to adjust, so there have been some disputes’, noted novelist, playwright, and future Minister of Culture of the People’s Republic of China Mao Dun.[14] He continued, ‘The writers had idealised Yan’an and thought that everything would be perfect. But upon arrival, they found that there was a gap between the reality and the ideal, which has led to all kinds of comments’. The ‘comments’ mentioned referred to the growing discontent from a section of the intelligentsia and their divergent views from the Party on the social function and political duty of cultural workers.

Expose the Dark or Praise the Bright?

In the months leading up to the Yan’an Forum, five prominent writers who were all CPC members published a series of essays in the Party paper, Liberation Daily (Jiefang Ribao). Ding Ling, the paper’s editor, along with Ai Qing, Lou Feng, Wang Shiwei, and Xiao Jun, criticised the lack of access to reading materials in the base area, unconducive conditions for artistic creation, special status of CPC leaders, and subjugation of women. At the heart of the essays was the question of artistic independence and the perceived restrictions set by the Party on artistic production. Was the role of art and literature to ‘praise the bright’ – to glorify the deeds of the Party and the people – or to ‘expose the dark’ and point to the problems in Chinese society and the communist movement?[15]

Zhou Yang, a Party leader responsible for art and cultural work and a trusted comrade of Mao, led the other side of the debate. In Remarks on Literature and Life (1941), Zhou sharply rebuts the criticisms raised:

…in these very villages lie the fresh stories of life and struggle worthy of artistic treatment. If you feel there is nothing to write about now, let your intense desire for life replace your creative urge. Stepping out from your caves and mingling a bit with the common people would certainly help.[16]

These back-and-forth exchanges precipitated the Yan’an Forum, where Xiao Jun, the key oppositional voice, was the first speaker invited by Mao to give comments at the initial plenary session. Over the following three weeks, the debates continued in convenings within respective artistic fields, in published articles, and in two other plenary sessions held on the 16th and 23rd of May 1942. The points raised were systematised, revised, and reflected upon. A year later, Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art was first published on the seventh anniversary of the death of the influential writer and leading figure of the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun.

In the published text, the conclusion is separated into five sections, starting with the central question: ‘literature and art for whom?’ Inspiration was drawn from Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin’s Party Organisation and Party Literature (1905), which identified the goal of cultural work as serving the ‘millions of working people – the flower of the country, its strength and its future’.[17] Mao broadened the conception of ‘the people’ to include not only industrial workers but also peasants, soldiers, and the urban bourgeoisie, thereby situating intellectuals as workers among the masses. The second section focuses on ‘how to serve’, balancing the need to popularise revolutionary ideas with the urgency to raise the cultural standards and literacy of the people. ‘Through the creative labour of revolutionary writers and artists’, Mao wrote, ‘the raw materials found in the life of the people are shaped into the ideological form of literature and art serving the masses of the people’. In other words, revolutionary culture draws from and returns to the people, the ‘inexhaustible’ and ‘only source’.

The third section takes up the relationship between cultural work and revolutionary work as a whole. It contains one of the better-known passages of the text, which argues against the detachment of art from politics, intellectuals from the people, and culture from revolutionary work:

In the world today, all culture, all literature and art belong to definite classes and are geared to definite political lines. There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, or art that is detached or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian cause; they are, as Lenin said, cogs and wheels in the whole revolutionary machine.

By placing politics – particularly class politics – at the centre of cultural work, Mao firmly rejected the notion that art and culture could exist disconnected from society.

In the fourth section, Mao defined the criteria for judging artistic intention based on social practice and impact. For Mao, the study of Marxism was essential to uprooting the inherited bourgeois, feudal, liberal, and individualistic ways of seeing, so that ‘while they are being destroyed, something new can be constructed’. The final section points to the thousands of intellectuals who had arrived in Yan’an to serve the revolution, many of whom had joined the Party in body but not yet in mind. The Yan’an Forum and subsequent text were not just a response to a small group of intellectual critics: they were part of this greater ideological struggle against the ‘non-proletarian ideology’ that still existed among many Party members.

The historic forum was part of the Rectification Movement (1942–1944) that sought to create ideological unity in the Party and shrink the still-large gap between the work of the artists and writers and the reality of the peasant majority.[18] The detachment of intellectuals from material circumstances has long been a problem explored in the Marxist tradition. ‘The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’, wrote Karl Marx in Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Half a century later, Antonio Gramsci called for the creation of a ‘new intellectual’, one who would throw themself into ‘active participation in practical life, as constructor, as organiser, “permanent persuader” and not just a simple orator’. [19] Similarly, Mao believed that in order to create these ‘new intellectuals’, the traditional intellectuals like those who went to Yan’an had to struggle to transcend their class origins.

The revolutionary process required the creation of a new intelligentsia that brought in new revolutionary ideas rooted in the culture of rural China – in other words, a mass culture, a people’s culture. During the Yan’an decade, the new intellectuals partook in cultural programmes and mass literacy campaigns, combatting the 90 percent illiteracy rate in the countryside. At the time of the Yan’an Forum, Mao estimated that there were already more than 10,000 cadres in Yan’an who could read; during this process, they would unlearn and relearn how to interpret the world around them.

At the same time, the cultural power of the people had to be built. This required the ‘raising of standards’, as Mao put it in Talks: increasing the cultural literacy of the people while simultaneously awakening their revolutionary consciousness. However, the creation of a new popular culture would not happen overnight. In the early years after the Russian Revolution, Lenin reflected on a similar question regarding the building of workers’ power:

Soviet power is not a miracle-working talisman. It does not, overnight, heal all the evils of the past – illiteracy, lack of culture, the consequences of a barbarous war, the aftermath of predatory capitalism. But it does pave the way to socialism. It gives those who were formerly oppressed the chance to straighten their backs and to an ever-increasing degree to take the whole government of the country, the whole administration of the economy, the whole management of production, into their own hands.[20]

In Yan’an, perhaps for the first time in millennia, Chinese peasants were learning to straighten their backs with every song, poem, artwork, and play – each integral to the creation of a new human being and a new society. Peasants would become the protagonists in their own lives and in the stories that they told – the subject driving history and culture forward. In Talks, Mao was speaking to the people’s hunger for culture: ‘The cadres of all types, fighters in the army, workers in the factories, and peasants in the villages all want to read books and newspapers once they become literate, want to see plays and operas, look at drawings and paintings, sing songs and hear music; they are the audience of our works of literature and art’. Though an urgent task, literacy was not treated as a prerequisite for enjoying and producing culture, for mass culture belonged to the people. In the meantime, the urban intellectuals who went to Yan’an had to go through their own transformation in order to close the gap between them and the peasant masses. This transformation was at the heart of the Yan’an Forum, which offered a definition both of the ‘people’ and of the ‘intellectual’; together, they could turn into an effective political force.

Image
Top: Women and children at Luyi nursery.
Bottom: Professor Wang Chaowen works on a sculpture.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]



New Wine in Old Bottles

At the time of the Yan’an Forum, Ma Ke was a music student at the Lu Xun Academy of Arts (also known as Luyi), an educational centre which had been transformed from a Catholic church to train artist-cadres in Yan’an. ‘[Mao’s] talk was an immense inspiration to us students’, Ma reflected in a 1962 article in Peking Review.[21] ‘We wanted to go out to the people as soon as possible, to learn, to temper ourselves, and to do our bit for the revolution’. Ten months after the Yan’an Forum, the Central Committee of the CPC decided to mobilise literary and theatre workers to go to the countryside, which Mao called the ‘big school’.[22] Ma was among these students, who, exhausted after trudging the hills for one day, were welcomed by a group of peasants beating gongs and drums, each carrying a broom. To Ma’s surprise, the local peasants had cleaned the path for ten li (five kilometres) in anticipation of the arrival of these young intellectuals who had been ‘sent by Chairman Mao to help in their fanshen’ (literally their ‘turning over’, their liberation).[23]

Despite his enthusiasm, Ma admits the disdain that he initially carried for the folk melodies he heard: ‘I felt it was a bit monotonous, that it lacked refinement and so-called “artistry”. […] In one word, I didn’t like them, nor did I sing their songs’. It was through the process of engaging with the people that Ma’s thinking began to shift: ‘I [began] to sense the rich emotion contained in their music. I began to hear it differently. It now appeared so free and spirited, so simple and natural that it seemed that every valley and stream rang with its melody. Carried away by my sentiments, I too joined the rest, singing loud and long’. Going to the countryside was part of Ma’s self-transformation, overcoming the superiority he felt as an intellectual and as a professional artist in the face of mass, popular, and living culture. ‘We travelled 400 li [200 kilometres], and everywhere we found this same ocean of song. Throughout the vast countryside, everyone was a singer, man or woman, old or young’. Learning from the peasants’ songs, the urgency of their needs, and their determination for emancipation was part of the humbling work of ‘popularising the intellectuals’.[24]

It was through this process that Ma went on to compose the music of one of the most important Chinese operas of the period, The White-Haired Girl, later turned into a film in 1951 and a national ballet in 1965. The story’s protagonist is Yang Xier, a peasant woman forcibly sold to a landlord to pay her father’s debts and separated from her fiancée, Wang Dachun. After she finally fled to the mountains, where her hair turned white while trying to survive, Wang joined the communist’s Eighth Route Army. When Wang and Yang eventually reunited, they did so not only as a couple, but as comrades.

This story of revolutionary love in the midst of class struggle is not a total work of fiction – it is based on local folklore of a ‘white-haired ghost’ that had been haunting villages in Northern China. Ma Ke and his fellow students learned of this story when they were sent to the countryside. They added musical form and revolutionary content to the local experience, which became a nationally celebrated classic. The opera can be seen as a living example of the ideas advanced by the Yan’an Forum, particularly the need for artists and writers to study and immerse themselves in their local conditions and popular cultural forms.

These cultural workers paid special attention to folk songs and dances, particularly yangge, or ‘rice songs’. These songs, traditionally sung for the gods or landlords, were given new connotations and content to instil a revolutionary spirit and encourage soldiers on the frontlines. Popular songs like Nanniwan (about a gorge in Yan’an) by He Jingzhi, who wrote the libretto of The White-Haired Girl, were distinctly ideological while also being rooted in mass culture, setting political messages to popular melodies. Building a new revolutionary culture did not mean discarding all the culture that came before it – be it of ancient, feudal, or foreign origins; it meant to ‘take over all the fine things in our literary and artistic heritage [and] critically assimilate whatever is beneficial’, Mao contended in Talks. Transmitting revolutionary ideas in a language and form that was familiar and welcomed by the local people was a way of serving ‘new wine in old bottles’.[25]

Just as traditional forms of culture were given new revolutionary content, the ‘old bottles’ of traditional intellectuals were being transformed into ‘new’ intellectuals that served the people. Few writers embodied this process more than Ding Ling. When Ding left cosmopolitan Shanghai for the dusty fields of Yan’an, she was already an established writer, celebrated for novels like Miss Sophia’s Diary (1928) that spoke to the conditions of the modern, urban Chinese woman. Upon arriving in Yan’an, however, she struggled to write authentic descriptions of peasant life, which she was still unfamiliar with at the time, and to overcome her own prejudices, individualism, and alienation from the people. The difficulties that Ding and other writers had in portraying peasants in the context of class struggle was not based on their shortcomings alone, but also because the historical conditions had not yet created a revolutionary consciousness among the people. As literary historian Wang Xiaoping explains, ‘the revolutionary (“proletarian”) consciousness did not exist in modern China “as it was” but had to be cultivated and raised to a higher plane by experienced revolutionaries equipped with a dialectical political theory’.[26] Ding’s short stories and novels are a testament to this transformative and dialectical process, and to the years of unlearning and relearning, to become intellectually and politically integrated with the masses, which in turn deepens class consciousness.

The path traversed by Ding reflects the process of popular ‘integration’ that Mao identified in Talks: ‘Intellectuals who want to integrate themselves with the masses, who want to serve the masses, must go through a process in which they and the masses come to know each other well’. Nearly a decade after arriving in Yan’an, Ding wrote her first novel about the revolutionary movement and land reform, entitled The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River (1948). This work emerged from the years she spent living and working with women, peasants, workers, veterans, and cadres in some of the country’s most remote rural districts. Years later, like many intellectuals who suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), Ding still held true to the Yan’an spirit. In one of her last speeches, written in 1980 a few years before she passed away at age 81, Ding explained, ‘It was hard and I suffered, but I also gained a lot… I can’t write about generals, because I don’t have that kind of experience. But I can write about peasants, about workers, about ordinary people, for I know them well’.[27] To know the people well is what she and tens of thousands of intellectuals sought to do in the years following the Yan’an Forum, which helped bring the Chinese people and nation to revolution. In her speech, Ding eloquently summarised the Yan’an spirit: ‘Creation itself is a political action, and a writer is a politicised person’. Ding’s words are an affirmation that art and culture are essential to class struggle. They are a call to today’s writers, artists, and intellectuals who are committed to people’s struggles and aspirations to follow in her footsteps.

Image
Top: Drama students engage in early morning physical training.
Bottom: An Eighth Route Army production brigade cultivates land in Nanniwan, southeast of Yan’an.
Credit:[Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台 ] and an unknown source

The Yan’an Spirit 80 Years On
After Talks was first published on 19 October 1943, the text was translated and published in dozens of languages, finding resonance with millions of people around the world.[28] Inspired by the screen-printing tradition of woodcuts from Yan’an and Mao’s call for artists to be immersed in people’s struggles, the Indian artist Chittaprosad rendered heart-breaking sketches of the Bengal Famine of 1943–44, which claimed the lives of three million people at the tail-end of Britain’s brutal colonial rule.[29] Cuban national poet Nicolás Guillén called Talks a ‘glittering scientific materialist platform for literature and art theories… that can help understand and determine the tasks of artists and writers amid the Cuban Revolution’.[30] Indonesia’s Lekra, a cultural organisation of 200,000 members affiliated with the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), developed its core method of turun ke bawah, or ‘going down to the masses’, in the Yan’an spirit.[31]

Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (1966) – ‘the little red book’ – includes excerpts from Talks, and its penultimate chapter is dedicated to art and culture. With over one billion official editions sold in three dozen languages, the little red book made its way into the hands of countless revolutionaries as one of the most circulated books of all time, second only to the Holy Bible. In an interview with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Emory Douglas, the first minister of culture of the Black Panther Party in the United States, recalled how the Party sold the little red book on street corners alongside the Party’s newspaper, each for 25 cents, carrying the message that art is a weapon in revolutionary struggle.[32] The little red book was also sold in bookshops and small towns in Tanzania in Swahili and English under Julius Nyerere’s leadership. Comingled with African socialist ideas, Mao’s thinking was transmitted through the radio airwaves to reach illiterate and rural communities.[33] Talks and its ideas found their own interpretations and uses in diverse places, from Mongolia to Mozambique, from Argentina to Albania, from Peru to the Philippines.

Talks is perhaps one of the most important systematisations emerging from the Third World on the role of art and culture and its theory, practice, mistakes, and lessons. It can be read as an exploration of Marxist aesthetics in the national liberation tradition, a proposal for socialist cultural policy, a manual for cadres carrying out cultural tasks, and a piece of literary theory or literature itself. Eight decades have passed since Mao gave his lectures on literature and art. Since then, China has gone from being one of the world’s poorest countries to the world’s second largest economy and a global power. So, what relevance does the Yan’an spirit hold today? In 2014, President Xi Jinping made an appeal to revive the Yan’an spirit at Talks at the Forum on Literature and Art, held in Beijing, in which he spoke about the need for writers and artists to continue Mao’s call for a socialist culture rooted in the Chinese context with an eye towards the world.[34] The legacy of Talks does not belong only to China and the Chinese people, but is a product for the people of the Global South. In an interview with Tricontinental: Institute for Social research, East China Normal University Professor Lu Xinyu made a similar reflection on this legacy and revival of Mao’s Talks:

[The Yan’an Forum] called on intellectuals to serve the people, with the development of mass culture that ensured that peasants’ subjectivity was at the centre of China’s Revolution. That has been the historical target of the CPC from that time till now. Intellectuals went to the countryside to combine forces with the peasants. Now, we see huge numbers of cadres, teachers, and intellectuals go to the countryside in the rural revitalisation and poverty alleviation campaigns.[35]

According to Lu, this migration of intellectuals to the countryside is an essential example of the Yan’an era, without which today’s polarisation between city and countryside, between the developed eastern region and the poorer western area, cannot be addressed. At the end of 2020, China announced the end of extreme poverty among its population of 1.4 billion people.[36] Despite the contradictions and ongoing difficulties that exist in the country, Lu believes that China’s rise should not be credited to the introduction of capitalist elements and market forces alone, but to the ongoing political commitment to socialism dating back to 1949: ‘The story of Yan’an is not just a China story; it belongs to the Third World, to twentieth century history, to the socialist movement, and to all the poor people in the world. Especially [given the current] the polarisation of the global situation, we need to remember the Yan’an spirit, not just for China, but for the Global South’.[37] Eight decades later, we remember the enthusiasm with which young artists and intellectuals went to the countryside with the calling to ‘Go to Yan’an’.

Image
Top/Bottom: Yangge singing troupes perform for the people at the 1943 Spring Festival celebration.
Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台] and China Youth Daily [中国青年报]



Beside the Yellow River, on the bank of the waters of the Yan,
is the yellow earth plateau.
Before the yaodong caves the millstone grinds,
it seems a return to yesterday.
I’m going to Yan’an,
to see the soft passing of time,
to see thousands of hills, everywhere red.


– ‘I’m going to Yan’an’ (2011), song composed by Xu Peidong, written by Hua Feng, and sung by Li Long for the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party of China’s founding.

https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-yanan-forum/

Extensive bibliography and End Notes at link.

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

China: Shanghai Ends COVID-19 Community Transmission

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Business to resume in Shanghai as local authorities have cut off COVID-19 transmission. May. 17, 2022. | Photo: Twitter/@chinaorgcn

Published 17 May 2022

According to a municipal official of Shangai, China's municipality has cut off the community transmission of COVID-19 in all its 16 districts.

On Tuesday, China's municipality of Shangai announced the end of COVID-19 community transmission for all its 16 districts. According to a municipal official, businesses have accelerated their resumption in the municipality.

During a press conference, Zhao Dandan, deputy director of the Shanghai municipal health commission, said that the city with 25 million people only reported 77 confirmed locally transmitted COVID-19 cases and 746 local asymptomatic cases on Monday. He said that all the confirmed cases were in quarantine or closed-off management areas.

The number of infections reported for Sunday and Monday in Shangai remained below 1 000 each day. According to the statements made during the press conference, less than 1 million people are now living in "closed-off management areas." On Monday, the vice mayor of Shanghai, Zong Ming, said that "the epidemic has been effectively brought under control and prevention measures have achieved incremental success."

In light of the new surge suffered by Shangai in early Mach, the municipality adopted the dynamic zero-COVID approach for the business hub, which classified the whole city into closed-off management areas, restrictive control areas, and prevention areas.


To fight against the wave in Shangai, more than 30 000 medics nationwide were mobilized as support to the city health care system. With the main objective of overcoming bottlenecks in logistics and helping e-commerce platforms increase their transport capacity, the city has expanded its work efforts.

In the meantime, workers and volunteers of local communities have provided supplies to cover the daily necessities of the residents, and group buying organizers also did their bit.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Chi ... -0022.html

So then:

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vs

1 million+ dead Americans

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

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat May 21, 2022 2:20 pm

Xi Jinping speech at the Central People’s Congress Work Conference
We are very pleased to publish the full text of President Xi Jinping’s speech on China’s practice of socialist democracy via the system of people’s congresses. This was originally delivered to the Central People’s Congress Work Conference on October 13th 2021. The full text has just been published in the latest Chinese and English language editions of Qiushi, the lead theoretical journal of the Communist Party of China.

President Xi dates China’s system of people’s congresses to ideas first put forward by Mao Zedong in 1945, four years before liberation, and notes that since the Party’s 18th National Congress in 2012, this system has been further developed in six aspects, namely:

Upholding the Communist Party’s leadership;
Making institutional provisions to ensure that the people actually run the country;
Advancing law-based governance;
Upholding democratic centralism;
Keeping to the path of socialist political development with Chinese characteristics;
Continuing to modernise China’s governance system and capacity.
To further improve the work of people’s congresses as China advances towards the status of a modern socialist country, Xi Jinping put forward a further six key tasks:

To ensure the full implementation of the constitution and safeguard its authority;
Improve the socialist legal system and use the law to ensure good governance;
People’s congresses should make good use of their oversight powers;
People’s congress deputies should respond to the demands of the people;
People’s congresses should intensify their self-improvement;
The party’s overall leadership should be strengthened.

In his speech, President Xi draws a powerful line of demarcation between bourgeois democracy and socialist democracy, stating:

“Democracy is not an ornament to be put on display, but an instrument for addressing the issues that concern the people. Whether a country is democratic or not depends on whether its people are truly the masters of the country. It depends on whether the people have the right to vote, and more importantly, the right to participate; what promises they are given during elections, and more importantly, how many of these promises are delivered after elections; what kind of political procedures and rules are set through state systems and laws, and more importantly, whether these systems and laws are truly enforced; and whether the rules and procedures for the exercise of power are democratic, and more importantly, whether the exercise of power is genuinely subject to public oversight and checks. If the people are only engaged with to solicit votes and then are left in the dark, if they must listen to grandiose election slogans but have no voice when the elections are over, or if they are only treated well by candidates during elections and are ignored after, this is not true democracy…

“The Communist Party of China has always upheld people’s democracy and has always adhered to the following basic ideas. First, people’s democracy is the life of socialism; without democracy, there would be no socialism, socialist modernisation, or national rejuvenation. Second, the running of the country by the people is the essence and heart of socialist democracy. The very purpose of developing socialist democracy is to give full expression to the will of the people, protect their rights and interests, spark their creativity, and provide a system of institutions to ensure that it is they who are running the country. Third, the Chinese socialist path of political development is the right path, as it conforms to China’s national conditions and guarantees the position of the people as the masters of the country. It is the logical outcome of history, theory, and practice based on the strenuous efforts of the Chinese people in modern times. It is a requisite for maintaining the very nature of our Party and fulfilling its fundamental purpose. Fourth, China’s socialist democracy takes two important forms: one in which the people exercise rights by means of elections and voting, and another in which people from all walks of life are consulted extensively in order to reach the widest possible consensus on matters of common concern before major decisions are made. Together these make up the institutional features and strengths of China’s socialist democracy. Fifth, the key to developing China’s socialist democracy is to fully leverage its features and strengths. As we continue to advance socialist democracy with well-defined institutions, standards, and procedures, we can provide better institutional safeguards for our Party and country’s prosperity and long-term stability.”


And the Chinese leader reminded his audience: “Deng Xiaoping once said, ‘The democracy in capitalist societies is bourgeois democracy – in fact, it is the democracy of monopoly capitalists.'”
This year marks the centenary of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Upon its founding a hundred years ago, our Party made the pursuit of happiness for the Chinese people and rejuvenation for the Chinese nation its founding aspiration and mission, and it has since explored every means to ensure that it is the people who run the country. During the New Democratic Revolution, our Party established people’s governments in base areas and provided practical experience for building a new political system.

Through practice and theoretical reflection, Chinese Communists, with Mao Zedong as their chief representative, put forward the original idea to implement a system of people’s congresses. As early as April 1945, Mao Zedong said, “The organizational principle of the new democratic state should be democratic centralism, with the people’s congresses at all levels determining the major policies and electing the governments. It is both democratic and centralized, that is, centralized on the basis of democracy and democratic under centralized guidance. This is the only system that can give full expression to democracy with full powers vested in the people’s congresses at various levels and, at the same time, ensure centralized administration with the governments at each level exercising centralized management of all the affairs entrusted to them by the people’s congresses at the corresponding level and safeguarding whatever is essential to the democratic activities of the people.”

Through years of fierce battles and arduous struggles, our Party led the people in founding the People’s Republic of China and accomplishing the historic mission of national independence and liberation, thus enabling hundreds of millions of people to become the masters of their country and society. The First Session of the First National People’s Congress (NPC) was convened in September 1954, and adopted the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, marking the official establishment of China’s foundational political system—the system of people’s congresses.

Since the launch of reform and opening up in 1978, our Party has remained committed to advancing socialist democracy and rule of law, kept to the path of socialist political development with Chinese characteristics, and constantly improved China’s electoral systems, systems of state institutions, systems for community-level democracy, and organizational systems and rules of procedure for the people’s congresses. These efforts have infused the people’s congress system with fresh vitality.

Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, our Party has stood at a new historic juncture, gained a deep understanding of the new changes to the principal challenge in Chinese society, and actively responded to the people’s new demands and aspirations for democracy and rule of law. It has worked hard to modernize China’s system and capacity for governance, improved the system of institutions through which the people run the country, strengthened governments at the primary level, and improved work related to people’s congress deputies. As a result, historic achievements have been made in people’s congress work, and the people’s congress system has become more mature and well-defined.

Over the 60-plus years since its inception, and particularly over the 40-plus years of reform and opening up, the people’s congress system has provided an important institutional guarantee that has allowed our Party to lead the people in creating miracles of rapid economic development and long-term social stability.

Practice has shown that the people’s congress system is a sound system that accords with China’s national conditions and realities, embodies our country’s nature as a socialist nation, ensures that the people run the country, and provides safeguards for national rejuvenation. Created by the people under the Party’s leadership, it is a great invention in the history of political institutions, and it is an entirely new political system of major importance in the history of China’s political development and even in that of the world.

Under the Party’s leadership, the people’s congress system adheres to the basic tenets of Marxist theory of the state, adapts to the state system of a people’s democratic dictatorship, and effectively ensures that China advances along the path of socialism. Under this system, all power of the state belongs to the people, the people’s position as masters of the country is protected to the greatest extent, and the unity between leadership by the Party, the running of the country by the people, and law-based governance is upheld, thus ensuring that China escapes the historical cycle of rise and fall of political orders. Under this system, major political relationships that influence the nation’s future are properly managed, social programs operate under the effective unified organization of the state, national unity and ethnic solidarity are maintained, and vigor, stability, and order prevail in the country’s political life.

Since our Party’s 18th National Congress, the Central Committee has implemented a national rejuvenation strategy against a backdrop of global change the likes of which has not been seen in a century. Taking into account the strategic requisites of upholding and improving the Party’s leadership and consolidating the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, it has continued to advance theoretical and practical innovations in the people’s congress system and put forward new concepts, ideas, and requirements, which are focused on the following aspects.

First, we must uphold the CPC’s leadership.

We must uphold the core role of the Party in exercising overall leadership and coordinating the efforts of all sides, uphold the Party Central Committee’s authority and its centralized, unified leadership, and ensure that the Party’s theories, guidelines, principles, policies, decisions, and plans are fully and effectively implemented in the work of the state. We should provide the support and safeguards that bodies of state power need to carry out their work in accordance with the Constitution and the law and in an active, independent, and coordinated manner. We must strengthen and improve the leadership of our Party so that we become better at using statutory procedures to turn the Party’s propositions into the will of the state and to ensure that candidates recommended by Party organizations assume leadership positions in bodies of state power, and so that we become better at using bodies of state power to exercise the Party’s leadership over the country and society. This will allow us to safeguard the authority of the Party and country and uphold the unity of the entire Party and country.

Second, we must use a system of institutions to ensure the people run the country.

We must remain committed to a people-centered approach, uphold the principle that all power of the state belongs to the people, and support and ensure the people’s exercise of state power through people’s congresses. We should improve democratic institutions, create more forms of democracy, and expand channels for democracy, and we should protect the people’s rights to equal participation and development, so as to promote a whole-process people’s democracy that is broader, fuller, and more robust.

Third, we must advance law-based governance on all fronts.

We must follow a path and develop a system of socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics and build a socialist nation under the rule of law. We should carry forward the spirit of socialist rule of law, advance all undertakings and initiatives of the country in accordance with the Constitution and the law, safeguard social fairness and justice, respect and protect human rights, and make sure that all of the country’s initiatives are on a legal footing.

Fourth, we must uphold democratic centralism.

We must ensure that the people exercise state power in a unified manner through people’s congresses and that people’s congresses at all levels are formed through democratic elections, are responsible to the people, and are subject to their oversight; that administrative, supervisory, adjudicatory, and procuratorial bodies at all levels are created by people’s congresses, are responsible to them, and are subject to their oversight; that there is an appropriate division of work and mutual coordination between decision making, executive, and oversight powers and that state bodies exercise their powers and perform their duties in accordance with their statutory scope of authority and procedures; and that local governments fully exert their initiative and enthusiasm under the unified leadership of the Party Central Committee, so as to ensure that all undertakings are advanced under the unified and effective organization of the state.

Fifth, we must keep to the path of socialist political development with Chinese characteristics.

The core of maintaining the unity between leadership by the Party, the running of the country by the people, and law-based governance is upholding leadership by the Party. The people’s congress system is a foundational political system for upholding this unity; it ensures that the Party leads the people in effectively governing the country in accordance with the law. We can learn from other countries’ political achievements, but we will never blindly copy Western political systems and models.

Sixth, we must continue to modernize China’s system and capacity for governance.

The people’s congress system is an important component of the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics and of China’s system of governance. We must uphold and improve the system of institutions through which the people run the country, continue to improve the institutions, standards, and procedures of socialist democracy, and do better at translating our institutional strengths into effective governance.

With the world undergoing changes of a magnitude not seen in a century, institutional competition has become an important part of competition in composite national strength, and institutional advantages are essential for winning the strategic initiative. Both the facts of history and the realities of today tell us that strong and stable institutions make a strong and stable nation. At our Party’s 18th and 19th national congresses, important plans were made to strengthen the people’s congress system and improve people’s congress work. On our new journey to build China into a modern socialist country, we must firmly uphold the people’s congress system while improving it in pace with the times, so as to strengthen and enhance people’s congress work in the new era. To this end, we should do the following.

First, we should ensure the full implementation of the Constitution and safeguard its authority and sanctity.

Ancient Chinese believed that “law is the state’s scale and society’s yardstick.” As China’s fundamental law, the Constitution is the concentrated embodiment of the will of the Party and the people, and it enjoys supreme legal status, authority, and force. I have emphasized on several occasions that to uphold the authority of the Constitution is to uphold the authority of the common will of the Party and the people; to safeguard the inviolability of the Constitution is to safeguard the inviolability of the common will of the Party and the people; and to guarantee the implementation of the Constitution is to guarantee the realization of the fundamental interests of the people. All people of China and all state bodies, armed forces, political parties, social organizations, enterprises, and public institutions must treat the Constitution as their fundamental code of conduct and assume the duty of upholding the sanctity of the Constitution and ensuring its implementation. No organization or individual is above the Constitution or the law, and all constitutional and legal violations must be investigated and dealt with.

To ensure law-based governance of the country, we must first ensure governance based on the Constitution; to ensure law-based exercise of state power, we must first ensure exercise of state power based on the Constitution. To ensure Constitution-based national governance and exercise of state power, we must remain committed to upholding the leadership position of the Communist Party of China, upholding the people’s democratic dictatorship as our state system, and upholding the people’s congress system as our system of state power, all of which are enshrined in China’s constitution.

Full implementation of the Constitution is the primary task and groundwork for building a socialist nation under the rule of law, and it is also a natural requirement for upholding and improving the system of people’s congresses. We must take the Constitution as our fundamental code of conduct and use a well-designed, effective, and complete system of institutions to ensure the implementation of the Constitution. We must enhance constitutional oversight, promote and enrich the spirit of the Constitution, and safeguard the authority and sanctity of the Constitution.

To lead the people in formulating and implementing the Constitution and the law, our Party itself must act within the scope of the Constitution and the law. People’s congresses, governments, supervision commissions, courts, and procuratorates at all levels need to work in accordance with the Constitution and the law and in an active, independent, and coordinated manner.

The NPC and its Standing Committee should improve the legal system pertaining to the Constitution and ensure that the systems, principles, and rules established by the Constitution are fully implemented. They should strengthen oversight and inspection of the implementation of the Constitution and the law, improve constitutionality reviews and recording and review of normative documents, and resolutely correct constitutional and legal violations. They should implement procedures and mechanisms for constitutional interpretation and actively attend to concerns about constitutional issues.

The NPC and its Standing Committee should improve the legal system under which the central government exercises overall jurisdiction over the special administrative regions in accordance with the Constitution and the regions’ basic laws, refine the regions’ systems and mechanisms related to the implementation of the Constitution and their basic laws, and maintain constitutional order and the rule of law in the regions as established in the Constitution and their basic laws.

Local people’s congresses at all levels and their standing committees must exercise their functions and powers in accordance with the law, ensure that the Constitution and the law are observed and implemented within their respective administrative regions, and consciously preserve the unity of law in China.

Second, we should move faster to improve the socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics, using sound laws to develop and ensure good governance.

“If good laws are established under heaven, then peace will prevail in the world; if good laws are established in a state, then peace will prevail in that state.” Since the launch of reform and opening up, under the leadership of our Party and through the hard work of all parties, our country has spent more than 30 years developing a socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics. This is a remarkable achievement in the history of the rule of law. At the same time, we must also see that the times are changing and practice has evolved, which raises new demands for the development of the legal system. The legal system must be improved in step with the times.

We must strengthen the Party’s centralized leadership over legislative work and improve the legislative framework featuring guidance from Party committees, the leading role played by people’s congresses, support from the government, and participation by all parties. We should better align decision making for reform and development with legislative decision making, both improving the rule of law through further reform and ensuring reform and innovation in all fields through better rule of law, so as to provide a legal basis for national development and major reforms. We need to advance the rule of law in domestic and foreign affairs in a coordinated manner, balance development and security imperatives, and develop a system of laws for extraterritorial application. We need to use legal means to meet challenges, forestall risks, and safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests. Applying systems thinking, we should enact, revise, repeal, interpret, and codify laws in a coordinated way and take comprehensive steps to improve the system of laws, administrative regulations, supervisory regulations, and local regulations.

As the national legislature, the NPC and its Standing Committee should speed up the pace of legislative work while ensuring quality, and they should make legislation more systematic, integrated, and coordinated and the legal system better-designed and more complete, unified, and authoritative. They should step up legislation in key and emerging sectors and concerning China’s international related activities. With a focus on imbuing legislation with core socialist values, they should work to perfect the legal systems that are urgently needed for national governance and are necessary for meeting the people’s growing needs for a better life. Codification work should be continued in mature areas of legislation.

Good laws are a prerequisite for good governance. “The law does not fall from the sky or grow from the earth; it manifests from among the people in line with their will.” Focusing on improving the quality of legislation, people’s congresses and their standing committees should fully play their leading role in legislative work and stay committed to respecting and reflecting the objective rules that govern reality, serving and relying on the people, and remaining strictly in line with their statutory scope of authority and statutory procedures as they work hard to advance more effective, democratic, and law-based legislation. They should enrich their approach to legislative work and ensure legislation becomes more targeted, applicable, and practicable. In order to guarantee the quality of regulations and rules, they must make sure that administrative regulations, supervisory regulations, and departmental rules are formulated in strict accordance with their statutory scope of authority and statutory procedures. Local people’s congresses with legislative powers must strictly remain within their scope of legislative power and do a good job in local legislation by prioritizing the implementation of the Party Central Committee’s major policies, decisions, and plans and focusing on solving practical problems.

Third, people’s congresses should make good use of the oversight powers conferred upon them by the Constitution and exercise appropriate, effective, and lawful oversight.

An important principle of the people’s congress system and a basic requirement of its institutional design is that the power of all state organs and their staff are subject to oversight and checks. We should give better play to the important role of the people’s congresses in the oversight system of the Party and the country to ensure that power is exercised under public oversight, in broad daylight, within an institutional cage, and under the reins of the rule of law.

People’s congresses at all levels and their standing committees should make use of the oversight powers conferred on them by the Constitution and the law and exercise appropriate, effective, and lawful oversight. They should maintain the unity, sanctity, and authority of law and make sure that laws and regulations are effectively implemented and that administrative, supervisory, adjudicatory, and procuratorial powers are properly exercised in accordance with the law.

In our country’s political system, people’s congresses play the role of overseeing governments, supervision commissions, courts, and procuratorates at the same level, and they coordinate the work of all state bodies to create synergies. People’s congresses should stay focused on pursuing the central task of economic development, serving the overall national interest, giving priority to key areas, following the decisions and plans of the Party Central Committee, and delivering on the people’s aspirations and expectations, and they should work hard to facilitate the resolution of prominent issues and problems that hinder economic and social development. They should make full use of multiple statutory oversight arrangements, strengthen oversight of the implementation of laws and regulations, and ensure that all state bodies perform their duties and carry out their work within the scope stipulated by the Constitution and the law. We should improve the system of oversight by people’s congresses and develop sound mechanisms and methods for their oversight of law enforcement and judicial work. Governments, supervision commissions, courts, and procuratorates at all levels must strictly implement the laws, regulations, and resolutions made by people’s congresses and their standing committees, report on their work in accordance with the law, and readily accept oversight from people’s congresses.

Fourth, people’s congresses should give full play to the role of their deputies, and see to it that they respond to the calls of the people.

“Serving the will of the people is the key to governance.” The key to the great vitality and strengths of the people’s congress system is that it is deeply rooted in the people. All state organs and their employees must foster a strong sense of service to the people, put the people above all else, maintain close ties with them, listen to their opinions and suggestions, accept their oversight, and work hard to serve them. People’s congresses should ensure that their deputies reach out to the public on a greater variety of issues and in more diversified ways, broaden their channels of contact, actively respond to public concerns, better engage with the people, observe public sentiment, gather the people’s ideas, and work to benefit their lives. Standing committees of people’s congresses at all levels should enhance their ability to carry out deputy-related work and provide support and safeguards for deputies to better perform their duties in accordance with the law, so as to make sure that the idea of the people as masters of the country is reflected in how deputies play their roles.

Deputies to people’s congresses shoulder the honorable duties entrusted to them by the people so that they faithfully represent the interests and will of the people and participate in the exercise of state power in accordance with the law. Deputies should stand firm politically, fulfill their political responsibilities, improve their thinking and conduct, set a good example by abiding by the Constitution and the law, and act with political acumen. Deputies should give full play to their characteristics and strengths of being of the people and rooted in the people, keep close ties with the people, serve as the bridge that links the Party and the country with the people, mobilize positive factors and mitigate negative ones to the greatest extent possible, and conduct themselves in ways that befit people’s congress deputies in the new era.

Fifth, people’s congresses should be more aware of their identity as political institutions and intensify self-improvement efforts.

People’s congresses at all levels and their standing committees must be deeply conscious of the need to maintain political integrity, think in big-picture terms, follow the leadership core, and keep in alignment with the central Party leadership. They must stay confident in the path, the theory, the system, and the culture of socialism with Chinese characteristics. They must uphold the core position of the General Secretary on the CPC Central Committee and in the Party as a whole and uphold the Central Committee’s authority and its centralized, unified leadership. They must continuously improve their political judgment, understanding, and execution, improve themselves in all respects, and build themselves into political institutions that consciously uphold the Party’s leadership, institutions of state power that ensure the running of the country by the people, working institutions that fully assume functions conferred by the Constitution and the law, and representative institutions that always maintain close ties with the people.

People’s congresses should optimize the composition of their standing committees and special committees and train personnel that maintain political resolve, serve the people, respect the rule of law, promote democracy, and are diligent and responsible. In order to improve the effectiveness of their work, they should improve conduct and strengthen discipline, not only strictly performing statutory duties and abiding by statutory procedures, but also resolutely guarding against favoring form over substance and excessive bureaucracy.

Sixth, we should strengthen our Party’s overall leadership over the work of people’s congresses.

The people’s congress system is an important institutional vehicle for the Party to exercise leadership over bodies of state power, and it is also an important form through which the Party fully promotes democracy and implements its mass line in the exercise of state power. Party committees at all levels should give priority to people’s congress work, improve the systems of Party leadership over the work of people’s congresses, hear work reports from Party leadership groups of people’s congress standing committees on a regular basis, and resolve major issues in people’s congress work.

We should support people’s congresses and their standing committees in performing their duties and carrying out their work in accordance with the law and guide and urge governments, supervision commissions, courts, and procuratorates to readily accept the oversight of people’s congresses. We should strengthen the leadership teams of people’s congress standing committees and the personnel of people’s congresses and promote job rotation between people’s congresses, Party and government institutions, and judicial bodies. The Party’s organization, communication, and other departments at all levels should enhance their coordination and cooperation with relevant departments of people’s congresses to create powerful synergies for carrying out people’s congress work in the new era. Party leadership groups of people’s congress standing committees at all levels should earnestly implement the systems of Party leadership and ensure that they fulfill their principal responsibilities for full and strict Party self-governance.

Democracy is a value shared by all humanity and an ideal that the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people have always upheld. As we work to translate democratic values and ideals into sound and effective institutions and concrete and real democratic practice, we need to find the right systems, mechanisms, and approaches based on the integration of history and reality, theory and practice, and form and substance.

As I have said, the best way to evaluate whether a country’s political system is democratic and effective is to observe whether the succession of its leaders is orderly and law-based, whether the people can manage state and social affairs and economic and cultural undertakings in accordance with the law, whether the public can express their needs through open channels, whether all sectors of society can effectively participate in the country’s political affairs, whether the country’s decision making can be conducted in a rational and democratic manner, whether people of all fields can join the state leadership and administrative systems by way of fair competition, whether the governing party can lead state affairs in accordance with the Constitution and the law, and whether the exercise of power is subject to effective checks and oversight.

Democracy is not an ornament to be put on display, but an instrument for addressing the issues that concern the people. Whether a country is democratic or not depends on whether its people are truly the masters of the country. It depends on whether the people have the right to vote, and more importantly, the right to participate; what promises they are given during elections, and more importantly, how many of these promises are delivered after elections; what kind of political procedures and rules are set through state systems and laws, and more importantly, whether these systems and laws are truly enforced; and whether the rules and procedures for the exercise of power are democratic, and more importantly, whether the exercise of power is genuinely subject to public oversight and checks. If the people are only engaged with to solicit votes and then are left in the dark, if they must listen to grandiose election slogans but have no voice when the elections are over, or if they are only treated well by candidates during elections and are ignored after, this is not true democracy.

In a word, democracy is the right of the people of all countries, not the prerogative of a few nations. Whether a country is democratic should be judged by its people, not by a handful of nosy outsiders. In the international community, whether a country is democratic should be judged by community consensus, not by a few self-appointed judges. There is no uniform or single model of democracy; it comes in many forms. Assessing the world’s myriad political systems against a single yardstick and examining diverse political advancement in monochrome is, itself, inherently undemocratic.

The Communist Party of China has always upheld people’s democracy and has always adhered to the following basic ideas. First, people’s democracy is the life of socialism; without democracy, there would be no socialism, socialist modernization, or national rejuvenation. Second, the running of the country by the people is the essence and heart of socialist democracy. The very purpose of developing socialist democracy is to give full expression to the will of the people, protect their rights and interests, spark their creativity, and provide a system of institutions to ensure that it is they who are running the country. Third, the Chinese socialist path of political development is the right path, as it conforms to China’s national conditions and guarantees the position of the people as the masters of the country. It is the logical outcome of history, theory, and practice based on the strenuous efforts of the Chinese people in modern times. It is a requisite for maintaining the very nature of our Party and fulfilling its fundamental purpose. Fourth, China’s socialist democracy takes two important forms: one in which the people exercise rights by means of elections and voting, and another in which people from all walks of life are consulted extensively in order to reach the widest possible consensus on matters of common concern before major decisions are made. Together these make up the institutional features and strengths of China’s socialist democracy. Fifth, the key to developing China’s socialist democracy is to fully leverage its features and strengths. As we continue to advance socialist democracy with well-defined institutions, standards, and procedures, we can provide better institutional safeguards for our Party and country’s prosperity and longterm stability.

Deng Xiaoping once said, “The democracy in capitalist societies is bourgeois democracy—in fact, it is the democracy of monopoly capitalists. It is no more than a system of multi-party elections, separation of judicial, executive, and legislative powers, and a bicameral legislature. Ours is the system of people’s congresses and people’s democracy under the leadership of the Communist Party; we cannot adopt the practice of the West. The greatest advantage of the socialist system is that when the central leadership makes a decision, it is promptly implemented without interference from any other quarters.”

Since its 18th CPC National Congress, our Party has advanced whole-process people’s democracy as a key concept on the basis of a deeper understanding of the rules governing the development of democracy. Whole-process people’s democracy in China not only has a complete set of institutions and procedures, but also has full-fledged civil participation. China’s state system is a people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and farmers; its system of state power is the system of people’s congresses; and its basic political systems are the system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the CPC, the system of regional ethnic autonomy, and the system of primary-level self-governance. Through these, China has consolidated and developed the broadest possible patriotic united front, it has formed a comprehensive, extensive, and well-coordinated system of institutions that guarantee the people run the country, and it has put into place diverse, open, and orderly channels for democracy. This allows the entire people to engage in law-based democratic elections, consultations, decision making, management, and oversight and to manage state and economic, cultural, and social affairs in various ways and forms and in accordance with the law.

Whole-process people’s democracy in China integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people’s democracy with the will of the state. It is a democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. It is a socialist democracy to the broadest extent, of the truest nature, and to the greatest effect possible. We should continue to advance whole-process people’s democracy to see that, in concrete and tangible ways, the idea of the people as masters of the country is reflected in our Party’s governance policies and measures, in all aspects and levels of the work of Party and state institutions, and in our efforts to realize the people’s aspirations for a better life.

The people’s congress system is an important institutional vehicle for realizing whole-process people’s democracy in China. Under CPC’s leadership, we should continue to expand orderly political participation by the people, strengthen legal protection for human rights, and ensure that the people enjoy extensive rights and freedoms as prescribed by law. We should ensure that the people can exercise their lawful right to vote for people’s congress deputies through democratic elections, that the people’s rights to information, participation, expression, and oversight are implemented in every area and at every stage of people’s congress work, and that the people’s voice can be heard in all aspects of the decision making, execution, and oversight by the Party and the country. We should improve the democratic platforms and vehicles of people’s congresses through which the general public can express opinions, we should refine working mechanisms for soliciting public comments and collecting ideas from the people, and we should advance consultation led by people’s congresses and consultation on legislative issues, in an effort to protect the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the people by taking into account all aspects of social conditions and public sentiment. We should enhance our study of and public communications on Chinese socialist democracy and the people’s congress system, elucidate the features and strengths of China’s political system, and share our story of democracy.

Upholding and improving the people’s congress system is the common responsibility of the whole of the Party and society. The entire Party and Chinese nation should stay confident in the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, continue to uphold and improve the people’s congress system, continue to consolidate and enhance political vitality, stability, and unity, and contribute China’s wisdom to the political advancement of humankind.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/05/20/x ... onference/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu May 26, 2022 2:30 pm

Xi: People enjoy fuller human rights
By CAO DESHENG | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-05-26 07:17

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President Xi Jinping holds a meeting with United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet via video link in Beijing, May 25, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

China advances on path that suits its national reality

President Xi Jinping highlighted people living a happy life as the biggest human right on Wednesday, reiterating that the human rights issue should not be politicized or used as a tool or a pretext to interfere in other countries' internal affairs.

He made the remarks in a meeting via video link from Beijing with United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet. The UN human rights chief and her team arrived in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, on Monday, and their six-day visit to the country will also take them to the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

During the meeting, Xi briefed Bachelet on China's human rights development and reaffirmed the commitment of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government to upholding and protecting human rights in all areas.

He said that China has successfully found a path of human rights development in keeping with the trend of the times and its national reality, and that the human rights of the Chinese people are guaranteed like never before.

Since 2009, China has formulated and implemented four national human rights action plans to promote the free, well-rounded and common development of all individuals. The latest action plan was published in September and set the objectives and tasks of respecting, protecting and promoting human rights in the period of 2021 to 2025.

"We have been advancing whole-process people's democracy, promoting legal safeguards for human rights and upholding social equity and justice. The Chinese people now enjoy fuller and more extensive and comprehensive democratic rights," Xi said.

He underlined the importance of respecting different countries' paths of human rights development, saying that any system or model blindly copied from another country-regardless of the historical, specific and practical contexts-will not only look out of place, but also bring disastrous consequences.

Xi noted that for developing countries, the rights to subsistence and development are the primary human rights. More efforts are needed to achieve development of higher quality, efficiency, equity, sustainability and security, in order to provide strong safeguards for the advancement of human rights, he said.

He stressed the importance of putting people first in promoting human rights development, saying that it is important to take the people's interests as the fundamental purpose and goal, address the most pressing issues the people face and their immediate concerns, and strive to deliver a better life to the people.

"How a country is doing on human rights is essentially gauged by whether the interests of its people are upheld, and whether the people enjoy a growing sense of fulfillment, happiness and security," he said.

Xi underlined the need to step up global human rights governance and said that when it comes to human rights issues, there is no such thing as a flawless utopia.

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President Xi Jinping holds a meeting with United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet via video link in Beijing, May 25, 2022. The photo shows Bachelet attending the meeting in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong province. [Photo/Xinhua]

"Countries do not need patronizing lecturers, still less should human rights issues be politicized and used as a tool to apply double standards, or as a pretext to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries," he said.

It is important to abide by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, advocate humanity's common values, and steer global human rights governance toward greater fairness, justice, equity and inclusiveness, he added.

Xi expressed China's commitment to actively engaging in human rights dialogue and cooperation with all other parties on the basis of equality and mutual respect to expand common understanding, reduce differences, promote mutual learning, seek progress together and jointly advance the international human rights cause for the greater benefit of people across the world.

Bachelet appreciated China for its efforts and achievements in eliminating poverty, protecting human rights and realizing economic and social development, and commended China's important role in upholding multilateralism, confronting global challenges such as climate change and promoting sustainable development across the world.

The high commissioner said she is confident that this visit will give her a better understanding of China, and that her office would like to enhance communication and explore cooperation with the Chinese side to make joint efforts for the progress of the global human rights cause.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5efe6.html

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U.S. President Joe Biden, center right, with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, center left, speaks at the Combat Operations Floor of the Osan Air Base, Sunday, May 22, 2022, in Pyeongtaek, South Korea. [AP Photo/Evan Vucci]

Biden’s trip to Asia prepares for military confrontation with China
Originally published: World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) on May 23, 2022 by Peter Symonds (more by World Socialist Web Site (WSWS)) | (Posted May 25, 2022)

Even as his administration is ramping up its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine, President Biden is on his first visit to Asia, colluding with major allies and strategic partners to step up the U.S.-led confrontation with China, to economically weaken it and prepare for war.

Biden’s trip to South Korea and Japan—U.S. imperialism’s chief military allies in East Asia—will culminate in a meeting tomorrow of the leaders of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, a strategic grouping directed against China that includes the U.S., Japan, Australia and India.

Immediately prior to departing for South Korea, Biden met with Finnish and Swedish leaders at the White House to discuss their bids to join NATO to strengthen the alliance against Russia. In Seoul on Saturday, he signed off on the $40 billion military aid package for Ukraine with the aim of enmeshing and weakening Russia through a protracted war.

From the outset of the Ukraine war, the Biden administration has made not the slightest pretense of enlisting Beijing as a mediator in negotiations to end the conflict. Rather, Washington has denounced China for refusing to condemn the Russian invasion, threatened economic sanctions, and accused Beijing, without a shred of evidence, of preparing to invade Taiwan.

The New York Times claimed that the purpose of Biden’s trip was “to demonstrate that the United States remained focused on countering China, even as his administration stage-managed a war against Russia in Europe.” There is nothing defensive, however, about the escalating U.S. military build-up and associated demonisation of Beijing.

Biden’s talks with newly-elected South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol underscored the purpose of the trip as a whole—to restart major joint military exercises, boost South Korea’s military capabilities and consolidate key supply chains, such as semiconductors, to restrict any economic reliance on China in the event of conflict.

Both South Korea and Japan are longstanding U.S. military allies and house vital American bases that are integral to the Pentagon war planning. While the supposed North Korean threat is the pretext, the consolidation and boosting of these alliances is directed against China. The two countries house U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems that are a key element in U.S. strategic preparations for a nuclear war. Significantly, discussions are underway in both countries about the stationing of U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles on their territories.

Employing the language of war, a senior U.S. defense official told the Defense One website last week that Biden’s trip was “proof positive” that the U.S. could maintain both fronts in Europe and Asia. “Everybody’s focused on Ukraine, and we understand that, but that doesn’t mean that we’ve stopped working with allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, doesn’t mean we stopped our air and naval activity in the Indo-Pacific,” the official said.

The U.S. has continued its naval provocations in the South China Sea under the guise of “freedom of navigation” and as recently as May 10 sent a warship through the narrow strait between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland.

The Biden administration’s focus on Taiwan in discussions in Asia is particularly sinister. In the same way that it goaded Moscow into a war in Ukraine as a means of bogging down the Russian military in a protracted conflict, the U.S. is seeking to exploit Taiwan as a potential quagmire for the Chinese armed forces.

Taking up where Trump left off, Biden has provocatively undermined the longstanding One China policy, under which the U.S. de facto recognises the Chinese Communist Party regime in Beijing as the legitimate government of all of China, including Taiwan. When formal diplomatic relations were established with China in 1979, the U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Taipei, downgraded contracts and removed all military forces from the island.

Over the past year, Biden has dropped the previous barriers to top level meetings, acknowledged that U.S. military “trainers” are stationed in Taiwan, and increased U.S. naval activities through the Taiwan Strait and neighbouring waters. When China responded by increasing its air activity near Taiwan, Washington accused China of preparing to invade.

Indeed, the U.S. is consciously arming Taiwan for a war of attrition against any Chinese invasion, insisting that it buy weapons for asymmetric warfare against a much larger Chinese military. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told a congressional hearing in April that Taiwan could draw an important lesson from Ukraine as a “nation in arms.”

“If your opponent tries to invade you, and every military age man [and] woman is armed, and they have a little bit of training, that can be a very effective use,” Milley said. And, one should add, especially if they are armed to the teeth with billions of dollars of sophisticated American weaponry and supplemented by crippling economic and financial sanctions.

Charles Edel, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Thursday that the U.S. strategy in the Ukraine war provided a good “template” the administration can build on when thinking about how to protect Taiwan from a potential Chinese invasion.

In reality, the U.S. is not considering how to defend Taiwan but how to use the people of Taiwan as cannon fodder in a war with China.

Biden’s trip to Asia underscores the fact that U.S. imperialism is recklessly pursuing a strategy aimed at securing control of the strategic Eurasian landmass and its resources and preventing any challenge to its global hegemony by Russia or China, which the U.S. regards as its chief threats. In its historic decline, Washington is driven to resort to military means to shore up its dominance.

For more than a decade, starting with President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” the U.S. has sought to undermine and encircle China diplomatically, economically and militarily. Now engulfed in an unprecedented social and economic crisis at home and the re-emergence of class struggles, the Biden administration has plunged Europe into war and is preparing the same in Asia, threatening the world with a clash of nuclear-armed powers.

Acutely conscious of what is looming, General Mark Milley warned cadets graduating from the U.S. Military Academy West Point on Saturday to be prepared for world war. “The world you are being commissioned into has the potential for a significant international conflict between great powers. And that potential is increasing, not decreasing,” he said.

A U.S. war with China would be a disaster for the working class in Asia and internationally. The only means for halting this headlong rush towards a catastrophic nuclear war is a unified struggle of workers in China, the U.S. and around the world on the basis of an internationalist and socialist perspective against the capitalist system that is the root cause of war.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/25/bidens- ... ith-china/

You can always count on the Trots at WSWS to fuck up a decent article with their infantile disorder.

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BIDEN WILLING TO OPEN A DOUBLE MILITARY FRONT WITH UKRAINE AND TAIWAN
May 25, 2022 , 8:26 am .

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Biden's message set off alarms in Beijing, as it was an unprecedented statement (Photo: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)

While the chessboard of the war in Ukraine continues to slide favorably towards Russia, especially after the surrender of the Azov Battalion in the strategic Mariupol , Washington seems determined to bet on an escalation of tension and provocation against the People's Republic of China.

And it is not just any bet, but Taiwan, characterized as the critical point of Asia-Pacific geopolitics.

FIRST TRIP TO ASIA
Since last week, Joe Biden has been on a tour of Asia , the first trip to this region since he became president of the United States at the beginning of last year.

The president has crossed the ocean with his sights set on strengthening the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad, as it is known in English), an informal alliance that brings together the United States, India, Australia and Japan, and whose main objective is counter China's geopolitical influence in the region.

In turn, from Tokyo, Biden launched the "Indo-Pacific Economic Framework", a free trade cooperation instrument that would be an attempt to replace, with a more bombastic name, the Trans-Pacific Treaty aborted by Trump in your moment.

With this, the Biden administration seeks to increase its presence in the geopolitical scenario of Asia-Pacific, offering a broader economic and commercial exchange with the "Indo-Pacific", while promoting its objectives of militarization of the region, through the Quad and the disputed AUKUS alliance.

Despite the new name, the publicity it has received and the Southeast Asian countries that have joined, the "Indo-Pacific Economic Framework" is far from being a practical agreement that can compete with the Regional Comprehensive Economic Association ( RCEP, its acronym in English) promoted by China at the 37th ASEAN summit, which was signed by 15 countries that account for a third of world GDP, a similar share in global trade and 30% of the population.

On the other hand, relations between the United States and India within the Quad have suffered due to the refusal of the Asian country to accompany the offensive of economic coercion against Russia. The AUKUS alliance has suffered a similar fate since its launch, receiving criticism in the ASEAN environment, due to the -not so distant- past of humiliation that Anglo-Saxon colonization produced in the region and that seems to want to repeat itself in the 21st century.

THE ALARMS WENT OFF
But all these elements were left in a second level of importance after Biden's dangerous statement on Taiwan. The Democratic president stated that, in the event of a possible military move by China on the island, the United States would also respond militarily against the Asian country in defense of Taiwan.

Biden's message set off alarms in Beijing, as it is an unprecedented statement , beyond the fact that last year the president already stated, on a couple of occasions, his intention to become militarily involved in a possible armed conflict in the area. .

However, unlike last year, this high-stakes statement was not accompanied by the traditional White House nuance afterward, in order not to draw the ire of Beijing. Even though the Democratic president has subsequently said that his statement by him does not change US foreign policy on the matter.

Chinese diplomacy, through Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, responded to Biden : "China has no room for compromise on this issue, and no one should underestimate the determination of the Chinese people to safeguard their sovereignty and territorial integrity. ".

Wenbin insisted on the central principle that "Taiwan is an inalienable part of China's territory", recognized in China's own Constitution and in the current international system, which would make any movement of military order in "defense" of Taiwan a act of war by Washington against the Asian power.

Although the declaration does not officially imply a break with the "One China" principle, that is, the recognition that there is a single legitimate government in the country to which Taiwan is subordinate, Biden seems to definitively move away from the "strategic ambiguity " that has characterized the US approach in recent decades.

"Strategic ambiguity" refers to the fact that the United States can maintain its economic and security relations with Taiwan, under the 1979 relations law, but without contravening the fact that the island is part of the territorial integrity of Taiwan. China.

In light of his statement, Biden is determined to raise his provocative geopolitical bet against China, using a tone of open hostility that clearly points to a scenario armed with incalculable consequences and impacts on the international reality.

That, recently, an influential and well-versed warmonger like Henry Kissinger warned the United States to stay away from a conflict in Taiwan, is proof enough of how the geopolitical ambitions of the hawks in Washington seek to lead us into an unprecedented geopolitical power clash for the overall peace.

DATA, IMPORTANCE AND CALCULATION
It is clear that Biden's Asian tour is intended to challenge China's regional influence in the area and highlight that the Asian power remains its strategic adversary despite the efforts invested to bleed Russia dry in Ukraine.

China's intelligent position on the Ukrainian conflict, whose approach has focused on supporting Russia while maintaining a centrist position in the international arena, has frustrated a Biden who seeks by all possible means to exasperate Beijing in order to affect its global leadership and in Asia-Pacific in particular.


The Taiwan statement would seek to extricate Beijing from this position, leading it to employ harsher and less diplomatic rhetoric. In this way, Washington aspires, a wave of fears and security concerns will be produced which will cause the countries of Southeast Asia to look to the United States for a guarantee of protection.

But beyond the tactical calculation, Taiwan represents an important vector in the global dispute for geopolitical dominance. The island produces approximately 90% of the world's semiconductors, the critical material that powers everything from smartphones to vehicles to state-of-the-art weapons. Almost all products in our daily lives carry chips and microprocessors that are made in Taiwan.

Semiconductors represent the staple supply of the 21st century, occupying as privileged a position as oil did in the last century. As a result of the effects of the pandemic, the Biden administration became aware of the high dependence of its military and technological infrastructure on semiconductors produced in Taiwan.

Biden has tried to reverse this strategic handicap with a $20 billion investment to produce semiconductors at home, however, reaching a minimum level of self-sufficiency could take years, while China advances in this field at a faster speed to create an alternative source of supply.

The superiority in the production and distribution of semiconductors grants a vital comparative advantage over international trade, technological development and the productivity of economies, which translates into an evident geopolitical and geoeconomic differentiator.

Knowing that China is advancing more solidly in this field, Biden plays with the possibility of a military outcome whose fundamental purpose is to control the main global source of semiconductors and weaken China.

THE UKRAINIAN "HANDBOOK"
The conflict taking place in Ukraine has revitalized the paradigm of hybrid warfare in the decision-making centers of the Pentagon and the CIA, who, since February 24, the date on which Russia's special military operation in Donbas began, have led to the ground the premises of indirect war taking advantage of the threshold of a conflict that began under the rules of conventional combat.

As POLITICO reported , in view of Biden's tour, the United States is drawing on the "success" that has brought with it the provision of Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine to reshape Taiwan's military infrastructure under an eventual conflict with Beijing.

Quoting high-ranking US defense officials, the outlet indicates that Washington is urging Taiwan to acquire asymmetric weapons, expand its civil reservist system, and turn its defense apparatus toward small tactical units capable of handling the "correct weaponry," with the interest of replicating the experience of the Ukrainian board.

Bonnie Glaser, an American analyst quoted by POLITICO , said that "the Pentagon would really like Taiwan to learn some lessons from Ukraine, as everyone has seen that putting up resistance can be one of the most decisive factors in times of war."

The media confirmed that, when the fighting began in Ukraine, US advice with Taiwan intensified, leading to more intense training of reservists.

Already last April, at a hearing, General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, referring to the "cultural change" required by the military in Taiwan, stated: "If your opponent tries to invade you, and all men and women of military age are armed and have a little bit of training, that can be a very effective use."

With regard to the military calculation against China, the confirmation bias resulting from the enormous profitability that the frantic sale of arms to Ukraine has brought to the military-industrial complex is leading to wild geostrategic conclusions.

The attempt to replicate the military coordinates of the Ukraine in Taiwan, beyond prolonging the speculative crazy hour of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, implies a gap at all levels, considering that Taiwan, strictly geographically, does not offer the supply advantages by land that Ukraine has had.

But if these movements indicate anything, it is that Washington seems willing to prepare the way to play a risky bet: open a double military front, centered on China and Russia, outsourcing the sacrifice to proxy entities .

The extensive literature of imperialist thinkers, from Zbigniew Brzezinski to Henry Kissinger, dictates that forcing communion between the two geopolitical giants will be the grave of the US empire.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/bi ... a-y-taiwan

Google Translator

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Russian, Chinese Strategic Bombers Complete 13-Hour-Long Patrol Over Sea of Japan, East China Sea

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Strategic bombers. © AP Photo / Russian Defense Ministry Press Service.

The bombers were escorted by the Japanese and South Korean jets during certain parts of their patrolling route. No incidents in the air have been reported.

Russian Tupolev Tu-95MS (NATO reporting name: Bear) and Chinese Xian H-6 strategic bombers have successfully completed the 13-hour-long patrol during which the aircraft crossed over parts of the Sea of Japan (also known as East Sea) and the East China Sea. The Russian and Chinese bombers were covered along their path by Russia Air Force 4+ generation fighter jets Sukhoi Su-30SM (NATO reporting name: Flanker-H).

The ministry stressed that the patrolling was not conducted against any specific state and was carried out in full accordance with international laws.

At the same time, South Korean and Japanese Air Forces accompanied the Tu-95SM and Xian H-6 bombers on certain stretches of their route. Seoul sent F-2 jets, while Japan deployed its F-15 fighters to escort the Chinese and Russian aircraft, which stayed away from the two nations’ airspace.

South Korean media reported that the bombers entered the country’s air defence identification zone (KADIZ), which extends beyond the borders. Russia does not recognise KADIZ since its establishment is not regulated by international laws.

Tupolev Tu-95 bombers are fit to travel up to 15,000 kilometres without refuelling, and can stay in the air even longer if they undergo air refuelling mid-flight. Chinese Xian H-6, designed after Soviet Tupolev Tu-16, has more modest flight range of 6,000 kilometres, but can also refuel in the air extending its flight time.

https://orinocotribune.com/russian-chin ... china-sea/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat May 28, 2022 1:09 pm

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On the sinicization of Marxism

We are very pleased to publish (for the first time in English) this detailed and insightful article by Carlos Miguel Pereira Hernández, Cuba’s ambassador to China. Comrade Pereira delves into the meaning of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, carefully noting that it should be understood on its own terms, rather than being compared against a one-size-fits-all model: “There is no unique definition of socialism, and any analysis on the issue must start by accepting that visions of it are diverse.”

Pereira analyses the trajectory of sinicized Marxism-Leninism, noting that this begins not with the Reform and Opening Up period from 1978 but with the early development of the Chinese Revolution. The author cites Mao Zedong’s 1956 speech, On the Ten Major Relationships, as a turning point in the development of a specifically Chinese socialism that rejected the “mechanistic copying of foreign models.”

Pereira does not shy away from the contradictions of modern Chinese socialism, including the existence of a capitalist class, a large private sector, and stark inequality. The danger always exists that these by-products of market reforms will corrode the economic foundations of socialism. Yet, the author notes, China’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the fact that “political criteria were weighted above market mechanisms”, highlight the reality that the capitalist class is not the ruling class. The same is true of the government’s commitment to poverty alleviation and its renewed emphasis on common prosperity.

Comrade Pereira concludes that “the current model in China, including the corrections introduced at each stage, remains on the path to socialism”, and indeed that sinicized Marxism deserves to be widely studied, as many of its innovations may well have relevance beyond China.

This article was first published in Spanish – La sinización del marxismo, las ciencias sociales y la cuestión del modelo propio – in the Cuban journal Política Internacional. The English translation was kindly provided to us by the author.

ABSTRACT
The present analysis begins with a call for attention to the discussion about the existence or not of a “Chinese Marxism”, that is, the sinicization of Marxism, an officially coined formulation within the Chinese narrative and understood as the adaptation of the Marxism to the conditions and particularities of China and which comes to life in the notion of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The above-mentioned element is key to understand, and even to clarify, how both nature and the national peculiarities of each country affect – or might affect – and if that gives rise to the existence of their own models of socialist construction.

The analysis focuses on the period from 1978 to the present, which coincides with the beginning and development of the reform process, considered by Chinese sources as a “driving force” for the improvement and development of the socialist system within the Chinese conditions. For this, it has been considered essential to provide criteria that allow establishing, without any doubt, that the current model in the Asian country –which includes the corrections introduced at each stage– remains on the road to socialism; also to verify how the political narrative produced and reproduced by Western theoretical development has been contrasted with another Chinese-own narrative, based on the concepts that are analyzed in this work and that reflect the important role of social sciences and theoretical and academic debate as an important regularity of the Chinese socialist process.

Keywords: China/Reform/Socialism/Marxism/Social science

INTRODUCTION
For obvious reasons, China has become an unavoidable case study both for liberal theorists, who consider it a paradox, and for Marxist theorists, who identify it as the center of the current debate on the validity of Marxism and socialism. Studying and debating on what has happened in China during the last 40 years have become a dialogue between contenders located at the opposite sides, and in which it is not easy to find an objective or unbiased analysis framed in the molds of traditional Political Theory.

The raised controversy is related both to the way in which socialism has been conceived (or interpreted) since its origins, and to the limitations of Western-origin political science, whose conceptualizations are insufficient and contradictory to try to explain what happened in China in the last four decades.

Due to its vast size and the level of development reached, the Asian giant has come to the forefront of the analysis of the global transition to socialism, and it has therefore received an objectively critical look. It is that, for this very reason and on its own merit, China has become the fundamental force that drives the establishment of a multipolar system of international relations and a new international economic order, while at the same time, consolidates itself as a world leader in the fight against the pandemic and for preventing climate breakdown. It is for the above-mentioned elements that the consolidation of Chinese socialism becomes crucial not only for China, but for all of humankind.

The reformist praxis of these more than four last decades reflects both the complex trajectory that some authors appreciate as a result of the peculiar orientation of the Chinese political leadership, and those ones who consider it incomprehensible and contradictory and “without a defined course” (Gilley, 2003).

The academic discussion on the aforementioned issues has focused, mainly, both on the reasons and objectives of the Chinese political leadership to get involved in those changes and on the real effect that the reforms have had and still have on national political life; also on whether or not there is confusion between the “means” and the “ends” and, of course, on the features that should exist to formulate a valid hypothesis on the legitimacy of the developing socialist model.

Although we do not intend to carry out an exhaustive assessment on the turns occurred within Chinese theory and social sciences during these years, we can state, from the beginning, that since there is no monolithic thought or, at least, a totally consensual thought regarding those issues, the theoretical and academic debate became an important regularity of the process, which together with the historical practice, executed by its political leadership, of synthesizing and learning from mistakes and failures, of exploring, experimenting and then gradually generalizing those experiences which are most successful or fit for initially-expected purposes, gave the Chinese process a peculiar combination of legitimacy, credibility and predictability.

Starting from the aforementioned premises, the performed analysis was developed in two fundamental directions:

The first one is to verify whether and how, within the evolution of contemporary China, it get intertwined diverse aspects such as the intensive use of market levers, the development of new and several forms of management and ownership, and the processes related to the transition to socialism which, due to their very nature, have been and continue to be a source of profound and various controversies over time.

The second is to assess the importance and contextualize the theories, currents of thought and policies that, arising against the grain of Western hegemonic attempts and with roots within the Chinese culture and tradition, could be considered contributions to the cause of socialism and the practical implementation of Marxist ideas in specific contexts and realities.[1]

ARGUMENT
In the course of its development as a social economic formation, Socialism has experienced mistakes made in more than one attempt –it must be included here the universalized Soviet model since its inception as a unique socialist economic model– to modify the economy and society inherited from Capitalism.

Fernando Martínez Heredia refers to the above-mentioned element when he expresses: “the profound differences between the Socialism built in regions of the developed world and that one built in the world that was overwhelmed by the global expansion of capitalism have led to great theoretical and political mistakes during the 20th century and no less serious practical misunderstandings”. These same circumstances have determined that the concept of Socialism has been charged with meaning from a wide range of ideological and political orientations over more than a century and a half, which has made difficult to work with it from a social science perspective (Heredia, 2014).

It must be added to the previous statement that, in a retrospective look to the theory of the construction of socialism, the founders of Marxism did not intend to design a scheme of society; therefore, we only find, in their works, the fundamental theses of the model that would necessarily replace the still-developing capitalism. That is why there is no mistake when, coinciding with Che, it is stated that “some of the affirmations made by Marx and Engels were never sanctioned by the practice, especially because the period foreseen for the great transformation of society turned to be short” (Guevara, 2006).

In his reflections rooted within the manuscripts of the classics, Che theorizes on the peculiarities of the transition period and its significance for the history of Marxism and its evolution, and reaches very sharp conclusions regarding the damage inflicted by dogmatism; the monopoly of theories and the lack of specific analyzes to assume Socialism.

In particular, he warned about something that is relevant to the topic we address: to avoid the absence of creativity in the theory since this would cause instability and lead to a useless apology of the existing one and to the postponement of questioning and discussions on fundamental problems to be debated in the development of the new society, and even to face the new tasks with pre-established indications.

Lenin had pointed to the same direction when he warned so many times about the importance of defending Marxism, its essence of revolutionary teaching, of liberating its revolutionary side, of transcending its revolutionary side as a doctrine and its revolutionary soul; when instead of suggesting dogmas, he showed us that Marxism reveals to us the scientific nature of its analysis and its political function as a “guide to action.”

Also by his theory of unequal development and the one of the “weakest link”, he made sure of ratifying the bases that the classic founders had defined on socialism and enriched their study, not only in the theoretical order but also in the practical one. It is not idle to remember that it was Lenin who first referred to the “transition period or period of construction of socialist society”, and also to the existence of socioeconomic heterogeneity and the existence of monetary-commercial relations during that period.

The persistent attempts of the Soviet leaders to attach an exclusive character to the model implanted in the USSR, to the point of trying to impose it as the “socialist model” par excellence, distorted from the beginning the discussions on the alternatives of functioning of socialism. Already after the death of Lenin, the controversy unleashed between the constituted leadership of the Bolshevik Party and the so-called left opposition, contributed to the emergence of different theories about the model that should rule the Socialism and, consequently, the parameters to assess it.[2]

The well-known warning about the existence of two economic-social formations during the transition period and, therefore, the question of “who beats whom”, is essential for the study of the problems related to current Socialism and to understand how, decades later, Deng Xiaoping strongly returns to that issue and points out that the superiority of Socialism could not remain in theory, but it had to be demonstrated through its ability to promote the development of the productive forces at a higher speed and with a qualitatively superior quality.

Before continuing, it is necessary to make some clarifications. Firstly, and since there is not a unique definition of socialism, any analysis on the issue must start by accepting that the visions of it are diverse and that, in some cases, they may even be opposed. It should also be added here that, in the Chinese political narrative, there has been no attempt to assume Socialism as a specific concept or a finished fact, hence the very formulation of Socialism with Chinese characteristics is considered a theory under construction, reflecting in turn the incessant search for its own path of development and, in frank opposition to the “Soviet model”. In other words, it is an own vision, a Chinese vision; it is a breaking with conventions, based on a new practice, exploration and renewal of Marxism.[3]

Secondly, that the socialist construction in China has had, since its inception, its own peculiarities that distinguish it from other processes. Instead of proclaiming the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as the USSR and later other Eastern European countries had done before, its historical leadership opted for the construction of a sui generis democratic system based on the alliance among peasants, workers, petite bourgeoisie and nationalist bourgeoisie with the CPC, which was called by Mao: “a dictatorship against the enemies of the Revolution and the national and foreign reactionaries…” (Mao, 1969, 430 and 432).[4] It was maintained in the system, with a decisive influence, the small and medium-sized mercantile production, since private businesses were never suppressed, but their permanence and development were encouraged within certain limits, preserving at the same time the absolute control of the State over key sectors such as banking, foreign trade and wholesale trade.

Thus, at the end of the initial stage of socialist construction, China had a mixed economy made up of the State-owned sector (socialist), the cooperative sector (with State participation), the private and individual sector (artisans) and the peasant sector (small farmers), that prioritized the development of State-owned branches.

Thirdly, under the imprint of its historical leader Mao Zedong , the CPC called for a careful observation of the national situation, its own characteristics, the degree of economic, social, cultural and political development and the phase of the construction of socialism, which in its case it was defined, early on, as the “primary stage of socialism”[5]. Therefore, the model of socialism with Chinese characteristics is considered an ongoing process within its long route towards the materialization of socialist construction.[6]

The sinicization of Marxism
“Marxism is the fundamental guiding thought which our Party and our country are based on, and which invigorates the first one and strengthens the second one. Since it is not a dogma, but a guide for action, Marxist theory must be developed along with practical assessment, and its rooting in our country and in people’s consciousness is only possible through its sinicization and adaptation to our situation”, states the “Resolution of the Central Committeeof the CPC on the significant successes and historical experiences of the Party in its centenary struggle”, announced at the end of 2021.[7]

While describing the process of historical symbiosis, it is important to highlight as an important starting point the early claim made by Mao to adapt Marxism-Leninism to concrete Chinese reality. The term “sinicization” of Marxism was coined for the first time in 1938, when, on the reissue of the “Selected Works of Mao Zedong”, he changed the original phrase of “concretion of Marxism in China” by that other formulation.

In this regard, the renowned scholar Li Shenming, former vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and director of the World Socialism Research Center, states that, by this change, the founder of the Chinese Revolution made clear the historical mission of the CPC to integrate “the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism and the concrete situation in China”. From his point of view, the term “sinicization” would be the most correct, since the basic principles of Marxism, or the universal truth that it embodies, belong to the world, not only to China, as they are universal truths. In this regard, he considers that the reference to “Chinese Marxism” often implies the misunderstanding that the current theoretical guide of the CPC has nothing to do with its “old ancestor” (Marxism-Leninism).[8]

The question of the own model acquired the dimension of official policy after 1956, when in his historic speech on the “10 Relationships”, Mao publicly criticized the mechanistic copying of foreign models and settle down the foundations for new efforts that would lead to the formulation of the own model. He then made clear that Socialism with Chinese characteristics should be the result of a practical experience that sought the truth within the facts.

The historical investment raised by Lenin regarding the role of plural subjects in the transformation of the new society and, in particular, of the peasantry as a historical revolutionary subject, together with other practical experiences such as the New Economic Policy (NEP, for its acronym in Russian), are considered by Chinese scholars as reference assumptions and starting points for the conceptualizations that have given theoretical support to the process of socialism construction in China.[9]

The state of the art confirms that the way of assessing Socialism with Chinese characteristics varies according to the understanding of different authors regarding socialism itself and the transition process that leads to its constitution. There are Marxists who affirm that the process which initiated in 1978 has irreversibly altered the foundations of Chinese socialism after assuming that many of the adopted measures have broken the limits of the system and have strengthened the forces of the market and the capitalist social relations of production that are inherent to it, suggesting that a process of gradual return to capitalism is underway (Petras, 2005 and Díaz, 2013).

Other more liberal authors, attached to “bourgeois rationalism”, accept as valid the thesis that the Asian giant and its political leadership opted for a capitalist model, although in their politicized narrative, they assert that the measures adopted are not sufficient for the purpose of reimplanting capitalism in the country, and seem to be anxious about what they consider a supposed lack of democracy or growing authoritarianism (Shambaugh, 2008; Ríos, 2012 and Villafañe, 2012).

All of them converge in the idea that in the Chinese case, controversial historical, political and cultural concepts and conditions concur, according to the theses already exposed, hence they label it as “capitalism”, while they cover up in their reflections the intention of granting the successes of the Chinese model to the implemented “capitalist” actions and not precisely to the new socialist experiment carried out during the last 40 years.

Martin Hat-Landsberg and Paul Burkett state, for example, in the introduction of their book “China and Socialism” that “China’s market reforms have not led to a socialist renewal but rather to a full-fledged capitalist renewal.” (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett, 2004), while Thomas I. Palley asserts that China is “a non-market economy, with significant State control, a large public sector, and a private sector subject to a significant State intervention and control” (Palley, 2012).

Marshall Meyer, for his part, warns that “having taken over Western capitalism and mirroring many of its superficial characteristics, China today poses a profound and unprecedented challenge to that kind of capitalism, which scholars and government policymakers are only just beginning to grasp” (Meyer, 2011). For Lin Wenli and Curtis J. Milhaupt, China “seems to show us a new variety of capitalism, frequently described as “State capitalism” which has, as the most characteristic feature, the crucial role played in its economy by around 100 large State-owned companies controlled by government agencies in strategic sectors (Li and Milhaupt, 2013).

For his part, in his well-known paper Chinese Communists?, the Spanish author Xulio Ríos questions the Chinese leaders’ insistence on maintaining the Party’s label as communist, which in his opinion is a simple political alibi to perpetuate their monopoly on power. However, in an interesting way, he accepts that, even if it wanted to, China could not deviate from its socialist path, nor sacrifice the political hegemony of the CPC, since both factors are decisive in prolonging “the legitimacy of a project that today wanders its antipodes”. For this author, by reiterating their commitment to socialism and Marxism, Chinese leaders have also claimed the right to adapt them to their national conditions, making prevail a criterion of utility that is also present in contemporary political science.[10]

Homar Garcés, in his analysis “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: Market Socialism or Capitalist Restoration?”, states that “Chinese market socialism” does not appear to contravene the fundamental principles of Marxism, but there is evidence of growing degrees of exploitation, surplus value and social inequality that equate it with capitalist neoliberalism”. He also adds that “the emergence of a privileged class, composed by the high bureaucracy of the State and the CPC, in the light of the classic theorists of socialism, would constitute a deviation from the traditional revolutionary parameters” (Garcés, 2019).

In a recent interview made by Studies on Marxism, the journal of the Chinese Academy of Marxism, to Robert Lawrence Kuhn, considered by the source as “one of the few people outside of China who really understands it”, he refers to 11 principles that in his opinion explain the “miracle” of the Chinese development, including the importance the CPC attaches to opinions inside and outside the Party, to public opinion in general, to its ability to admit and correct mistakes, and to its system of central leadership combined with hierarchical management of provinces , cities, cantons, townships and villages, as well as the priority given to education, training, supervision and evaluation of talents, and the organizational skills of the CPC, its ability to generate development plans with a long-term vision, medium-term goals and short-term policies, in addition to specific long-term policies for those issues that require more time to be resolved or to mature.[11]

Once we get to this point, it can already be affirmed that socialism with Chinese characteristics stands out and distances itself from the vision of socialism applied in the disappeared Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. It can also be stated that the development of the productive forces in the conditions of socialism with Chinese characteristics, while it promotes the very possibility of socialism, also generated a capitalist class that is committed to the prevalence, preservation and defense of capitalism and, therefore, provokes the inevitable emergence of antagonistic contradictions within Chinese society.

Thus, the reforms have made Chinese society much more complex, heterogeneous and volatile, while moves from a monolithic, rigid and egalitarian structure to a highly dynamic and contradictory one where there is evidence of a significant deepening of social differences, the fracturing of society into social classes and the advance of social strata of an anti-systemic nature. Aspects such as the growing economic and social polarization and the legitimation of material interest as the supreme value inherent to mercantile relations turn into powerful and increasingly complex challenges for the current Chinese leadership.

However, the reforms adopted in the field of the economy, which were considered by many people a prediction of the expansion of neoliberal capitalism in the immense Chinese territory by providing advantageous and more lucrative conditions to the companies that worked there, did not lead to such results by maintaining the Chinese State control over key economic elements.

In turn, the central role assumed by the CPC along the entire line and at all levels extended, to unprecedented degrees, the consensus within and outside the Party, which managed to build bridges and avoid major divisions between the different currents or political tendencies, between the coastal and inland regions, between the economic sectors and the social sectors.

The recent handling of the pandemic unleashed by Covid-19, when political criteria were weighted above the usual market mechanisms, revealed the careful handling that the political leadership did on this issue, reflecting in turn the process of gradual strengthening of the reforms, particularly their political and social components, which has made possible to guide strategic issues such as the gradual transformation of the current development model, the redistribution of wealth, the reduction of the gap regarding incomes and regional development, the fight against poverty and the promotion of new concepts such as scientific development, the harmonious socialist society, the moderately prosperous society, the social economy and common prosperity, among others, aimed towards new paths.

China: the debate on Chinese socialism and economic determinism
For Francisco Fernández Buey, “those who reduce his works to economic determinism are reading Marx backwards”. In his analysis “Marx without isms”, this author considers that one of the great contributions to the understanding of social processes was to identify the influence exerted by economic factors and modes of production in the structures assumed by each society. According to this author, it was not Marx who extolled the essential role of economics in the modern world, since he barely limited himself to taking note of what was happening in front of his eyes in the XIX-century capitalism, and called for rebelling against the determinations of the economic (Fernandez Buey, 1999).

Strictly speaking, Marxism has not been exempt from distortions in the interpretation of the original idea, sometimes confusing “conditioning” with “completely determining”, which explains that the variant that most strongly assumed an economic determinism, mainly of Soviet influence, put the focus on the ownership of the means of production as the only and definitive explanation to identify the characteristics of a society.

We receive a similar warning from Eric Hobsbawm, who in his work Marx and history, points out that “historical materialism is not economic determinism and that not all non-economic phenomena of history can be derived from specific economic phenomena” (Hobsbawm, 1986 , pp.73-81).

One of the most notable consequences of the burden posed by economic determinism is the lack of analytical elements to understand and explain other cultural, ideological and symbolic phenomena that equally influence on social structures and the exercise of power. Hence, several Marxist thinkers have tried to settle this debt from different theoretical approaches, highlighting among them the concepts of “civil society” and “hegemony” of the Italian Antonio Gramsci.

One of the aspects that most tends to confuse Western analysts about China is the existence of blurred borders between the State and “civil society”, between the collective and the individual, which are issues that acquire special lucidity in Gramsci’s theory, while managing to avoid the trap of separations, concluding that the construction of power (hegemony) goes through both the State and the relationships established in society (religion, school, traditions, value systems, family, etcetera).

Applied to the Chinese case, especially during the reforms, the analysis of social relations, value systems, symbols, education and cultural productions, in conjunction with the resources of the State, offers us important clues about the consolidation of the national project of the Asian giant and the strengthening of the leadership of the CPC.

To the question regarding the criteria that could allow determining whether or not a specific model remains on the path to socialism, Barry Naughton proposes a set of characteristics that should exist in a socialist economy, among which he mentions the sufficient “socialized control” over resources by the State (which starts from recognizing the important role of public property, socialized property, the regulatory capacity of the State and its capacity to redistribute the incomes); adherence to a policy that seeks results different from those generated by a market without any intervention (one where the market laws do not blindly prevail); an adequate development of the productive forces that benefits the population and improves their quality of life, in conditions of environmental sustainability; as well as the central participation of the population in economic decision-making processes at both the macro and micro levels, that is, a democracy with a strong role for the population (Naughton, 2017).

Samir Amin, for example, considers that, in the period of transition towards socialism, it should prevail the support for collective ownership of the land; the construction of a modern industrial system; the maintenance of State ownership over key sectors of the economy and, above all, over the financial-credit sector; the preservation of planning criteria together with the use of commercial relations; as well as a way of integrating into the world market, in which economic sovereignty is preserved, technology transfer is taken advantage of and an important part of the surplus is retained (Amin, 2013).

Of course, in the analysis of the socialist economic functioning model, there is no lack of half-truths or truisms, such as when, for example, the different types of property are mentioned without specifying them, or the management, although without proposals on how to perform it, or the organization, without any proposal, and even the distribution of wealth without explaining how to produce it… to conclude that the best model will be the one that creates the optimal conditions to achieve the transition to a higher stage of society from the starting conditions. (Fernández Estrada, 2011).

Of course, there are elements that are also present in capitalist models, such as the weight of forms of property, regulation mechanisms, and sources of distribution of wealth, insofar as the principles that govern the capitalist and socialist systems are different. For this reason, the social relations of production, although essentially responding to property relations, have been set limits in China, which has prevented the spontaneity of their operation, which, consequently, has not prevented socialist construction.

The examination of the assumptions, as well as their limitations and challenges, acquires greater relevance when the achievements reflect an important awareness and continues to generate important consensus in the Chinese leadership regarding the need to reorient the reforms towards new directions when this has been necessary. In this sense, it should be noted that the clash between extreme visions on the type of socialism to be built in the country, far from having been overcome, has been replicated in a wide universe of social and even ideological contradictions that underlie within current Chinese society and within its own political superstructure.

Despite that, it has been proved that the Chinese political leadership has not only known how to draw the appropriate lessons and experiences from its setbacks -which has been decisive when conceptualizing its own model of socialism- but it has also reinforced the certainty that the socialist potential cannot be materialized without adequate economic policies and operating mechanisms that propitiate, at the required and adequate level, the elevation of efficiency and scientific-technical progress.

The abovementioned has established guidelines regarding the recomposition of the complex framework of beliefs and practices associated with socialist construction on the basis, at each stage, of open and consistent debate on its postulates, which has allowed the development of novel and unique proposals. Thus, although the reforms have affected equally the economic system and the political system, the CPC has managed to preserve its leading role and has ensured, at the same time, the political orientation of those reforms.

The successes achieved in the recent battles against the pandemic and for overcoming poverty clearly show important parallels, and the results reflect, in both cases, the common key: the leadership, organizational skills, and mobilizing capacity of the CPC. It is essentially that, in the exercise of power, the Party has demonstrated that its vitality depends on its own capacity for adaptation, self-regulation and strict management, to which is added the systematic emphasis, during Xi Jinping’s mandate, on the the need to constantly deepen the “self-revolution” within the CPC, while not forgetting its original intention, its historical mission, the strengthening of its standardized rules and procedures, the constant supervision of the people, the ability to adapt itself and to focus on solving practical problems to make true the goals that have been set.[12]

Strictly speaking, the objective analysis on the effects of the reforms on Chinese society shows that they have transformed core aspects of the country’s economic, political and institutional functioning, such as property relations, the role of the market and its relationship with the government, and of the latter with the decision-making in economic matters; the treatment of foreign investment; the transformation of government functions (including the delimitation of Party-Government and Government-Business functions); the deepening of the reforms in the agricultural, business, tax and financial fields; the central government-local government relations; the country-city relations; the improvement and expansion of socialist democracy, the promotion of the rule of law and the principle of governing in accordance with the law; the supervision and control mechanisms; the defense of culture and the increase of cultural soft power; the channeling of the demands and concerns of the population; environmental protection; the fight against corruption and the improvement of the CPC work system according to its role of a ruling political force.

The practice of formulating strategic and Five-year plans articulated in all directions, top-down and bottom-up, has allowed CPC to combine the different dimensions of structural changes in the economic, political, institutional, social and environmental orders, turning them into guides for the fulfillment of its vision as a nation. This has allowed the Party to conveniently lead the orientation of development and even resolve structural and institutional imbalances with a strategic and consensual vision for the medium and long term, to guide development towards the fulfillment of the Vision of the Nation (socialist, modern, prosperous, democratic, civilized, harmonious and beautiful), to define and to use the strategic axes as pillars and driving forces of the development strategy and to promote the development of strategic sectors and local development, as well as to use industrial planning and State capital to obtain economies of scale and competitive advantages.

It cannot be ignored that the term “democracy” in the Chinese case acquires a broader and different meaning than the one attaches to it in the Western macro world. It is about democracy throughout the process and not just electoral: the design, conception and operation of the system of political consultations and multi-Party cooperation led by the CPC shows that its democracy is stronger and more concrete than the one of many Western countries who introduce themselves as their paladin. The CPC not only demonstrates that represents the vast majority of the people, but for that very reason it feels responsible for being advised and consulted by the best and brightest of Chinese society, whether or not they are members of the CPC.

Understanding how Chinese democracy works presupposes as an essential element to delve into the functioning of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which has been consolidating itself over time in the exercise of inter-Party cooperation and political consultations under the leading of the CPC. Its members are mostly top-level experts in their respective fields, who are listened to while their research and proposals are taken into account.

The timely readjustment of the Popular Assemblies system and its growing role in defense and promotion of the rule of law and institutionalism, the improvement of the system of consultations and democratic supervision, the expansion of the channels of expression of the people’s opinion and the improvement of multiparty cooperation, administrative decentralization processes, the granting of greater rights of autonomy in favor of regions and localities, the execution of specific experiments for the development of democracy at the local level, the recognition of private property and the joining of private entrepreneurs to the CPC as a way to broaden its social base,[13] are expressions of the gradual and systematic process of institutionalization which is considered decisive for China’s aspiration to become a modern socialist country.[14]

The leadership capacity of the CPC is evidenced when, after taking the decision to merge the political leadership (of the CPC) with the administrative leadership at some localities and institutions of the country and at the most important State-owned companies, which was first applied experimentally with the clear purpose of reinforcing the leadership of the Party as the leading force in society and ensuring a more homogeneous implementation of the reforms, this same decision was later revised to once again separate the highest Party and administrative positions, under the policy of reducing the government and Party apparatuses at regional level; however, it remained in force at Government institutions and large business groups, where the top manager or administrative head is, at the same time, Secretary of the local or grassroots committee of the CPC. Strictly speaking, such methods and ways of doing things have made the Party not only the leader but also the manager of socialist work at all levels.

In political terms, the CPC has demonstrated the ability to quickly and successfully implement key policies and sound strategies that require long-term commitment. In the “new era”, as Chinese sources often refer to the period which began in 2012, the Party has successfully continued to face major and new challenges such as continuing to promote reforms, transforming the economic system, guiding development and social transformation, improving transparency and establishing new self-correction mechanisms.

The previous element is important and worth to be emphasized because it is often tried to reduce democracy and politics to the action of parliamentary fractions, parties, and the written and unwritten press and, in general, to any action that is carried out in the frameworks of “representative” democracy. Gramsci calls our attention to this issue by reminding us that politics is “the art of governing men, of procuring their permanent consensus and therefore the art of founding the great States” (Acanda, 2002).

Thus, the concept of civil society from bourgeois liberal thought is demystified, which essentially assumes it as something independent and opposed to the State, abandoning a very useful analytical tool for understanding how the supposedly private spaces of the individual are actually a battlefield for the construction of hegemony, the creation of consensus and the consolidation of power. That in the so-called West the interrelationships appear to be less clear, that the lightening of the bourgeois State in its neoliberal stage has transferred functions to civil society and that the deification of the individual and the rejection of the collective have become the official religion, does not mean that their schools, cultural productions and media function as something different from sounding boards of the power and domination.

A similar analysis deserves the question of the legitimacy of the political system, which in the Chinese context does not appear to be associated with the electoral game, but with other important historical, institutional, political and economic factors. The elections in China would not be more legitimizing than the reforms that, subjecting the Chinese political system to a constant scrutiny, add a system of institutionalized popular consultations, in which it is identified and unified the popular will, as well as the professionalism of the State, further guaranteed by the meritocratic system that selects the most capable and prepared persons.

It also influences and determines the Chinese democracy the ability of the CPC to channel, from its position of power, the legacy of 5,000 years of civilization and culture in favor of a national project of liberation, rejuvenation and development, which in turn becomes one of the keys that explain its success in leading the reforms, its resilience to cushion the social unrest caused by certain measures and its effectiveness in maintaining hegemony and majority support in leading the country’s destinies.

The analysis indicates that it is possible to establish, therefore, that the Chinese political system, under the leadership of the CPC, has managed to incorporate an effective feedback mechanism, which in addition to promoting innovation, encourages improvement and real-time monitoring of results and helps identify errors and correct them in a timely manner. The presence of various complementary Parties and the several counterbalance mechanisms in force as part of the multi-Party cooperation system function as a permanent evaluation of the functioning of the ruling CPC and as a resource for capturing “suggestions” for decision-making through very diverse proposals. In fact, this kind of platform operates as a consultative resource, collective leadership and access for the membership of other Parties or non-Party-affiliation people to various leadership positions, regardless of whether there is a professional representative of the CPC in State and private institutions.

Also, it is extensively used, as part of the democratic process, scientific surveys to capture and understand what ordinary people think and care about. Thus, without the need for Western-type elections, it is ensured the manipulated feedback that is typical of “Western” societies.

It cannot be ignored that, as part of the appointment processes for public officials and Party cadres, they are obliged to listen to and consider the comments and recommendations of their colleagues, subordinates and superiors. Nor that when a new policy is formulated, scientific surveys evaluate and probe the opinions and attitudes of the population that it will affect, that is, the capacity to assimilate it.

To the above-mentioned element, it should be added that it is not risky to incorporate the idea that the current Chinese leadership seems increasingly determined to accept what some authors call “significant economic damage” in order to achieve non-economic objectives, which in the Chinese media are highlighted as necessary steps to stop “antisocial tendencies” and curb “capitalist excesses”. It is obvious that the country has gained a lot in terms of development and economic growth, but also it has lost a lot in terms of philosophy and values. Consumerism, for example, has become, as in Western societies, an important part of its modus operandi, and with it, the cult of money, of individualism, of a frivolous, apathetic and disinterested mentality.

According to the Mexican researcher Flora Botton, the so-called Chinese “middle class” has assumed habits similar to those of the middle class of any other country with an emerging economy, that is, they are ostentatious, competitive, send their children to private schools, acquire luxury real estate, frequently travels abroad, and above all, is highly consumerist (Botton, 2008).

Far from trying to hide the aforementioned adverse realities, the CPC government has been increasingly aware of and determined to face them in order to maintain its legitimacy and, with it, the reins of political power. It must be considered that in China there is strong resistance to the thrust of these factors, especially in the universities where even an important sector of its youth has been forcing the government to introduce important adjustments, moving the educational model further and further away from the deeply competitive models of Western education, and trying to recover their own models.

Regarding the features of the Chinese own model, Cheng Enfu, former president of the China Academy of Marxism and honorary member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Ding Xiaoqin, director of the Center for Political Economy with Chinese Characteristics, present a paper entitled “A Theory of China’s Miracle” that is relevant for the present analysis as it summarizes what socialism should represent.

For the authors, socialism requires as a basic element a level of material and technological development capable of promoting the protection of the environment and the promotion of society, of improving the level of satisfaction of the needs of the population, of advancing in the distribution of wealth by fighting exploitation and polarization and closing the income gap, continuing productive growth and productivity; guaranteeing the priority of public property in the existing property system; reinforcing the principle of the State-led market; ensuring rapid development with high performance and balance; and guaranteeing openness to the outside world with ever greater economic sovereignty.

As additional data, it should be added that China has been a pioneer in the development of small and micro-enterprises, the popularization of education, the relocation of entire villages, the ecological compensation[15] and social security, all of which has been carried out transversally, although according to the characteristics and needs of each area or region of the country, in an affirmative top-down strategy.

The Chinese culture has never been based on absolute truths or immutable principles. Even the very concept of preserving harmony, according to the Chinese conception, does not imply having to discern between what is good or bad, but rather between what is convenient and what is necessary for the greater good, whose decision has always fallen on the government institutions, which on the past was represented in its government of scholars. Surely, for this reason, knowledge is a notion that belongs to everyone and people must share it without the need to be given prizes or be rewarded for it.

China’s achievements in these areas show indisputable progress, but also important goals yet to be achieved. In terms of poverty reduction, the great results achieved are well known when the total eradication of extreme poverty was proclaimed last year, even 10 years earlier than planned in the Sustainable Development Agenda. Also the improvement of its location in the Human Development Index, moving from a low level to a high level between 1988 and 2015. However, in terms of income distribution, the inequalities remained, although registering lower levels year after year. In 2016, the GINI coefficient was 0.465, lower than the 0.491 registered in 2008 (Naughton, 2017:14-19)[16].

At the end of 2021, according to WTO figures, the dependency rate of its foreign trade (particularly its exports) was reduced from 64% to 31.5%, a trend that should be consolidated in the coming years to the same extent continue to increase the middle income segment of its population. According to estimates for 2035, the so-called Chinese middle class will add 800 million, which will allow the rate to continue falling to 25%.

For the abovementioned, it will be necessary to continue generating conditions that are more inclusive so that people might obtain a better education and improve their development capacities; also set up a development environment that provides opportunities for more people to improve their standard of living. In other words, to continue emphasizing essential priorities such as promoting high-quality development, raising the incomes of urban and rural residents, reducing the income distribution gap, and preventing the polarization of wealth beyond certain limits.

The theories and thoughts that pay tribute to Socialism with Chinese characteristics, including the most recent ones aimed at the culmination of socialist modernization and the great revitalization of the Chinese nation in the new historical conditions, on the basis of the comprehensive construction of the “moderately prosperous society” and the reinforcement of the institutionalism, the legality and the socialist rule of law, reflect at least a critical path for the final conversion of China into a modern, prosperous, democratic, civilized and harmonious socialist country, by the middle of this century.

The important role of social sciences in Chinese socialist construction
The very evolution of the process of socialist construction in China under the leadership of the CPC, particularly during the reformist period, has been accompanied by a strong push for the development of Marxism and Social Sciences in general, as a basic premise for the construction of an own model of socialism adjusted to the peculiarities and national conditions.

The capacity for theoretical elaboration developed by the CPC and the role given to the social sciences has been one of the distinctive features of the Chinese process. Each political generation has made its own contribution to what has been called the “theoretical system of socialism with Chinese characteristics”, which has made possible to synthesize the main experiences of each stage of the process, with special emphasis on new concepts and theories arisen in the heat of the reforms, without excluding the preceding doctrines, integrating them into a single body with the strategic objective of adapting the theoretical thinking of the CPC to the new realities and adequately handling the contradictions and problems that arise at every period, while preserving the continuity and the socialist orientation of the process.

It is particularly important to know, in this regard, the assessment made by Li Cheng, director of the John L. Thornton Center for Chinese Studies of the Brookings Institution, on the “four integralities” that characterize the process of socialist construction in its current stage, those that arise right in the time when China pays more attention to improving governance after consummating the “economic miracle” and social justice becomes an important goal and the “rule of law” becomes relevant. For Li, the “moderately prosperous society is a shared dream for the great majority, while the deepening of economic reform is the aspiration of Chinese businessmen, mainly of private businessmen”.

Under Xi Jinping, the traditional Marxist definition of the fundamental contradiction of the socialist system regarding the satisfaction of the growing needs of the population was reformulated as the contradiction between the growing demand for a better life of the people and the unbalanced and insufficient development (Jinping, 2017). In this sense, the current orientation of development and the emphasis in favor of common prosperity seem aimed at resolving this fundamental contradiction. By emphasizing “common prosperity”, a recent comment published in an important Chinese digital media, China.org, called not to confuse this term with that of egalitarianism. It pointed out that in China’s conditions it implies an “abundance shared by all”, both in material and cultural terms, but does not mean egalitarianism.[17]

When establishing the theory of Deng Xiaoping as a theoretical guide at the XV Congress of the CPC in 1997, in conjunction with the Marxism-Leninism and the thought of Mao Zedong, it was presented as a new development of Marxism in the conditions of China on the basis of four basic arguments: first, because it embodied the principles of “emancipating the thought” and “seeking truth in facts”; second, because it reflected the theory and practice of scientific socialism and exposed its essence; third, because it managed to explain correctly and from a Marxist perspective the international situation as a whole, that is, the success or failure of other socialist countries, the gains or losses of the poorest countries in the search for ways to develop themselves, the development trends, as well as the contradictions between developed countries; and fourth, for constituting a new guiding scientific theory for the construction of Chinese socialism in new historical conditions, that is, with peace and development as prevailing global trends, the process of reforms and opening in full swing, and the synthesis of historical experiences of socialism in China and in other countries of the world.

In this sense, Chinese theorists have not only tried to settle in the Marxist dialectic, and especially in the Leninist dialectic, but they have also sought to extend it axiologically to the field of politics, on the basis of assembling thought and practical action into new and highly innovative ideas, proposals and behaviour. As the reforms deepened and expanded to new areas, the priority was given to the creation and improvement of the political, economic, social, mass, state and legal institutions of society, with the aim of expanding the active participation of all citizens in political life and incorporate, in turn, new mechanisms for debate, political consultation and consensus-building, which would end up granting greater rigor and legitimacy to the decision-making process, reducing its opacity and improving the control of the CPC over the functioning of society as a whole.

The most significant readjustments focus fundamentally on the economic, institutional, normative and functional aspects, since at the ideological level, the transformations implemented have been aimed at reinforcing the political-ideological limits of the system, in particular, the preservation of the leading position of the CPC as the framework for the realization of political and economic changes, endorsed by the Constitution and other laws of the country, making it an immovable premise. In this process, however, it has not been spared in adapting Western institutions and concepts to the peculiar Chinese historical and cultural reality.

Starting from this political philosophy, both the political leadership and theoreticians and scholars have tried to grasp reality on the basis of general theoretical principles referring to the human being and the social dynamics established by social classes and political institutions, advocating a specific way of explaining the development of society and politics, especially from what is desirable or what should be, through the development of their own conceptualizations and categories, adjusted to their historical and national peculiarities, which explains that many of the policies implemented over time, particularly during the reformist period, have not been explicitly stated from the beginning, but have been reached as a result of the readjustments introduced, with a deep sense of pragmatism, experimentation and calculated risk.[18]

Concepts such as opening-up and modernization suggest by themselves the self-perception they had of themselves. In the Chinese case, for example, the Rule of Law (Fa zhi) has been focused on the search for transparency, political control and legislative regulation of the government and the public administration in general and only over the years, it began to emphasize its socialist character and its differences from the traditional capitalist referent

From the very beginning of the reform, Chinese scholars and researchers have had a decisive participation in this process of designing the new policies, their proposals for adjustments, as well as their theoretical postulates, from more than a hundred important academic research centers, universities or specialized press media, which cover more than 260 disciplines and sub-disciplines, in which multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches prevail today. These institutions have been becoming true think tanks associated with the decision-making of the CPC and the Government. Some have even served or serve as advisers and members of governmental or Party work groups and commissions, contributing their experiences, appreciations and conceptualizations to the processes of designing and implementing new policies. In this sense, their role have been decisive in achieving a national consensus regarding the need for reforms and changes, and mainly, to accommodate the different interests that have arisen in the country due to the reforms.

An important step in the previously described efforts was the decision to unify, on March 2018, the CPC Central School and the Academy of Governance, in the context of the institutional reform of the CPC and the State and as a result of the XIX Congress of the CPC held in 2017. Its objective is none other than to materialize the consolidation of the leadership of the CPC, defined in the statutes of the CPC and in the preamble of the Constitution since 2018, as an essential feature that defines socialism with Chinese characteristics. [19]

However, even though what has been achieved so far represents an important awareness of the need to continue promoting the independent development of the Social Sciences as an essential theoretical support to continue reorienting the reform towards new directions, at the same time it also opens a moment of pause regarding the scope and content of the academic debate in which, in addition to the most consistent Marxist exponents, the supporters of neoliberalism, social democracy, and the reduction of the role of the State have also made their way, advocating to redirect the reformist effort towards the dismantling of socialism and its most consistent institutions.

Within the academic debate itself, the clashes between both currents of opinion constitute also an immediate reflection of the social and even ideological contradictions that underlie within current Chinese society and its own political superstructure.

Likewise, the significant interest in avoiding the obvious impact that the socio-economic transformations have had and still have on the improvement and updating of the current political system has led some authors not to recognize the country’s advances as a result of the reforms because these changes are gradual and difficult to be tracked down, and not spectacular and abrupt transformations or aimed at altering the foundations of the political system, but at strengthening the system and not replacing it.

(Continued on following post.)
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Mon May 30, 2022 2:04 pm

The United States is arming Taiwan, preparing a provocation against China, as in Ukraine
May 30, 9:24 am

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The United States is arming Taiwan, preparing a provocation against China, as in Ukraine

US President Biden has again sharply highlighted the growing tensions with China over Taiwan. For the third time since the beginning of his presidency, Biden pointed out that the US has a "commitment" to support Taiwan by military force in the event of a conflict with China - abandoning years of US policy.

When the US established diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1979 and severed formal ties with Taiwan, it adopted the One China policy, effectively recognizing Beijing as the legitimate authority in all of China, including the island of Taiwan. The consequence of this was "strategic uncertainty" - the rejection of a clear commitment to side with Taiwan in the war against China. Such a policy was aimed not only at preventing aggression from China, but also at blocking Taiwan's provocations against China.

While the White House insists that this policy has not changed, the US, first under Trump and now under Biden, is deliberately undermining the status quo regarding Taiwan, which could become Asia's hottest spot. High-level visits to Taiwan, the open presence of US military instructors on the island, increased arms sales, and passage of US warships through the Taiwan Strait are calculated provocations against China.

Having created a protracted armed conflict in Ukraine to weaken and destabilize Russia, US imperialism is setting a similar trap for China in Taiwan. Based on the experience of Ukraine, the media and military circles openly discuss arming Taiwan for a protracted conflict with China.

An article in the New York Times on May 24 reports:“U.S. officials are taking into account the lessons of arming Ukraine to work with Taiwan in building a military force that can repel an invasion from the sea by China, whose army is one of the largest in the world. The goal is to turn Taiwan into what some officials are calling a "porcupine" - a land bristling with US weapons and other forms of support - so that it becomes too painful for an attacker."

As with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the US portrays the military plans as defending a "democratic Taiwan" from Chinese aggression. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a reaction to the fact that the United States armed Ukraine for many years and then provoked Russia. In the case of Taiwan, which Washington recognizes as part of China, the US has many opportunities to provoke conflict.

Any move by the Taiwan authorities, such as declaring formal independence from China, and/or the growing inclusion of the island in the US sphere of influence is a direct threat to Beijing. Not only is Taiwan located off the coast of China, but the Taiwanese firm Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has a virtual monopoly in the production of high-performance computer chips.

Encouraged by the “success” in Ukraine, the US plans for a protracted military conflict in Taiwan against the Chinese army are rapidly moving forward. As the New York Times explains, " U.S. officials are discreetly urging their Taiwanese counterparts to buy weapons for asymmetric warfare, a conflict in which a smaller army uses mobile systems to deliver lethal strikes against a much larger army, according to U.S. and Taiwan officials."

The article goes on to say: “Recently purchased US-made weapons – mobile rocket launchers, F16 fighter jets and anti-ship systems – are better suited to repel invading forces. Some military analysts say Taiwan may later buy naval mines and armed UAVs. And like in Ukraine, the US authorities can also provide intelligence to increase weapon damage even if they don’t send their own soldiers.”

Washington not only "persuades" but insists that Taiwan buy weapons in accordance with the Pentagon's military plans.

The Financial Times reported in May that U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Mira Reznick told defense executives in March that the Biden government wants to “drive Taiwan more strongly” into buying weapons for asymmetric warfare and will not allow arms companies to sell weapons beyond that.

In the article, “Washington told Taipei it would not approve the sale of 12 MH-60R anti-submarine helicopters if requested. The US also thwarted Taiwan's plan to buy E2-D early warning patrol aircraft."

The hysteria flaring up in the media and official circles in the United States about the immediate "threat" of a Chinese invasion speaks more about the plans and deeds of the Pentagon than about evidence of China's aggressive intentions. Taiwanese military analyst Su Tzu-Ying told the Financial Times: "I think the likelihood of military action from China is very low right now."

Nevertheless, military plans and their gambling discussions do not stop, not only in the military field, but also in the economic war against China. According to the New York Times, "U.S. officials are already debating the extent to which they can copy economic sanctions and troop deployments to protect Ukraine in the event of a conflict over Taiwan."

The New York Times points out that the number of passages of US warships through the Taiwan Strait has risen to 30 since the beginning of 2020, not counting the increase in the number of such passages by ships from Australia, Britain, Canada and France. US arms sales to Taiwan have also grown, with $23 billion announced since 2010, with $5 billion in 2020 alone.

It is well known in US political and military circles that Washington's moves towards Taiwan are highly provocative and could ignite conflict. In a New York Times commentary, analyst Bonnie Glaser, head of the US/Germany Marshall Fund's Asia program, acknowledged this, though indirectly. “Are we clear what will deter China and what will provoke?” she asks. "The answer is no, and it's dangerous."

According to the New York Times, "President Biden's strong language during a visit to Tokyo this week approaches provocation, according to Mrs. Glaser and other analysts in Washington." In other words, everyone in Washington is well aware that the rejection of "strategic uncertainty" could lead to a war in Asia, which, as in the case of Ukraine, could turn into a direct clash of nuclear powers.

China's deliberate provocations in Washington over Taiwan are part of a growing confrontation with China that dates back to the Obama era. For more than a decade, the US has tried to undermine China's influence diplomatically and economically, along with a growing number of weapons in the region, in preparation for war.
US imperialism is in historical decline, and is desperately trying to weaken and destabilize potential strategic rivals to its hegemony - Russia, and above all China - and gain free access to colossal resources and a strategic position in Eurasia. As events in Ukraine show, the United States is criminally indifferent to the ruins and mass deaths that have resulted from this war. Now the US is preparing the same in Taiwan.

(c) Peter Symonds

Translation from English

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/0 ... s-m26.html - original in English

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/7645313.html

Google Translator

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Rapid progress in China-Nicaragua relations

Since China and Nicaragua resumed their diplomatic relations towards the end of last year they have made rapid and comprehensive progress and in the process have also boosted China/Latin America relations more generally and specifically the unity and cohesion of the progressive forces.

Two events in late May served to underscore these developments.

On May 20th Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held a telephone conversation with his Nicaraguan counterpart Denis Moncada, in which he noted that since the resumption of diplomatic relations, “we have enabled bilateral cooperation to get off to a good start at a fast pace and of a high standard.” Wang Yi further noted that “both China and Nicaragua are committed to safeguarding fairness and justice, opposing unilateralism and power politics, and supporting greater democracy in international relations.”

For his part, Moncada noted that, “Nicaragua hopes to deepen practical cooperation with China in various fields, strengthen coordination and collaboration with China in international affairs, and jointly oppose hegemonism, advance multipolarity in the world, and safeguard  world peace and security.”

This was followed on May 24th by the first joint webinar for cadres of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) of Nicaragua, with the opening ceremony addressed by Song Tao, Minister of the International Department of the CPC Central Committee (IDCPC), and Gustavo Porras Cortés, a member of the national council of the FSLN and Speaker of the National Assembly of Nicaragua.

Song Tao noted that “Sharing a profound traditional friendship, the CPC and the FSLN are the pioneers in promoting the relations between our two countries and have made active efforts in bringing China-Nicaragua relations back to the right track.”

For his part, Porras noted that “The FSLN values the friendly relations with the CPC, and hopes to strengthen exchange with the CPC, learn experience and practice of economic development and poverty alleviation from the CPC, and take a development path suitable to Nicaragua’s national condition… The Nicaraguan side is ready to work with the Chinese side to uphold multilateralism, oppose hegemony and external interference, and push for world peace and development together.”

The following reports were first published on the websites of the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the IDCPC.

Wang Yi Speaks with Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada on the Phone

On May 20, 2022, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi had a phone conversation with Nicaraguan Foreign Minister Denis Moncada.

Wang Yi said, since the resumption of diplomatic relations between China and Nicaragua six months ago, we have enabled bilateral cooperation to get off to  a good start at a fast pace and of a high standard. This fully demonstrates  that the resumption of diplomatic relations between China and Nicaragua  follows the general trend of history and the times, and serves the fundamental interests of the two countries and two peoples. China regards  Nicaragua as a reliable and important partner, firmly supports its  sovereignty, independence and national dignity, and respects the development path it has independently chosen. Nicaragua adheres to the one-China  principle, opposes any form of “Taiwan independence” and firmly supports China’s position on issues concerning China’s core interests. China appreciates that.

Wang Yi said, China is ready to work with Nicaragua to seek greater synergy between the two countries’ development strategies within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, so as to turn the complementary advantages into cooperation momentum. China firmly supports Nicaragua’s economic and social  development and will continue to provide assistance to Nicaragua in its fight   against the COVID-19 pandemic. China expects the two sides to speed up the  negotiation and conclusion of an “early harvest” arrangement of a  bilateral free trade agreement (FTA), and on this basis, launch the  negotiation on the FTA. China encourages enterprises with strength and good   reputation to take an active part in Nicaragua’s economic development, and  stands ready to work with Nicaragua to push forward cooperation in culture,  education and other fields. China supports establishing Confucius Institutes  in Nicaraguan universities and boosting sub-national exchanges, so as to  constantly cement public support and the social foundation for the amicable relations between the two countries.

Wang  Yi said, both China and Nicaragua are committed to safeguarding fairness and justice, opposing unilateralism and power politics, and supporting greater  democracy in international relations. China is ready to strengthen communication and collaboration with Nicaragua in international affairs, jointly hold high the banner of multilateralism, promote international  solidarity and cooperation, implement in earnest the Global Development  Initiative (GDI) and the Global Security Initiative (GSI), and promote the  building of a community with a shared future for mankind.

Moncada  said, there is but one China in the world and Nicaragua will continue to  unswervingly adhere to the one-China principle. Since the resumption of  diplomatic ties, bilateral relations have witnessed rapid and high-quality development. Nicaragua thanks China for providing enormous help for Nicaragua’s pandemic response and economic and social development. Nicaragua  highly recognizes a series of international initiatives put forward by China  and stands ready to support and join the GDI and the GSI. Nicaragua hopes to deepen practical cooperation with China in various fields, strengthen  coordination and collaboration with China in international affairs, and  jointly oppose hegemonism, advance multipolarity in the world, and safeguard  world peace and security.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/05/27/r ... relations/

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China to provide South Pacific countries ‘what US, Australia failed to offer’
This article by Yang Sheng and Liu Caiyu, originally published in the Global Times, exposes the hypocrisy of Western propaganda regarding China’s expanding cooperation with the nations of the Pacific. This cooperation is taking place in numerous fields, including trade, environmental protection, poverty relief, tourism, education, culture and sports; however, the West chooses to only pay attention to security agreements, implying that China is acting in a hegemonic manner, using Pacific island countries as pawns within a big-power competition with the US. In reality, these countries are finding that China is “a major power which is willing to treat them equally and can provide win-win cooperation and seek no control over them.” This stands in stark contrast to US and Australian hegemonism.
As China and South Pacific island countries are going to strengthen their cooperation to better serve local people’s demand for development, some voices from the West or Western media have started to distort the cooperation and hype the fear of a new “Cold War.” Chinese experts said the US and Australia always see the island countries as their puppets. So when China help them to become independent and prosperous, the West will definitely feel anxious.

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will pay an official visit to the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and East Timor upon invitation from May 26 to June 4, and will also visit Micronesia via video and have a virtual meeting with leaders of Cook Islands and Niue. Observers believe this trip will be a milestone for relations between China and the entire region.

Wang’s trip will cover cooperation and deals in many fields including economy, infrastructure, climate change, public health, policing and security.The reason why China’s presence has been welcomed by the regional countries is that China could promote the livelihood of the locals and activate the economic potentials of those islands, experts said. However, some Western media have focused only on the cooperation about security, and tried to exaggerate that the cooperation could spark “new Cold War” between China and the West in the region.

“I totally disagree with the saying that the cooperation between China and the South Pacific island countries could spark a ‘new Cold War,'” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a routine press conference on Wednesday.

He cited the fact sheet published by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Tuesday reflecting the broad cooperation between the two sides in the fields of economy, trade, maritime environmental protection, poverty relief, tourism, education, culture and sports and said that “the relationship between China and the island countries has become an example of unity and cooperation between the countries with different scales and political systems.”

Chen Hong, president of the Chinese Association of Australian Studies, told the Global Times on Wednesday that Washington and Australia have been hyping the “China threat” mythology with fabrications of the so-called Chinese military base in the region.

“However, the slightest effort of fact-checking would show that the security cooperation between China and the Pacific Island countries aims to maintain social order as a way to guarantee a stable business environment, to prevent riots and violent disturbance from taking place again,” noted Chen, also director of the Australian Studies Center at East China Normal University.

The Solomon Islands’ security cooperation with China is based on real security concerns. The riots in 2021 incurred huge damage to the country’s public order and political security, and threatened the safety of local people and expatriates, including Chinese businesspeople in the country. So if the security cooperation has brought about anxiety to the West, it means they are trying to harm the independence and safety of the Solomon Islands and other South Pacific Island countries, said analysts.

Control vs cooperation

Penny Wong, Australia’s new foreign minister, said she would travel to Fiji on Thursday, a trip that will coincide with Wang’s tour of the eight Pacific Island countries. According to the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday, Wong said that “China has made its intentions clear. So too are the intentions of the new Australian government.”

Chen said Australia apparently regards the South Pacific as its exclusive sphere of influence and has attempted to ostracize China. But China’s successful cooperation with the island countries based on mutual respect and reciprocal benefits has been accepted and welcomed by the island countries. “China believes that countries, no matter big or small, should be treated equally – they are not there for anyone to win over and to control.”

Shen Shishun, an Asia-Pacific expert with the China Institute of International Studies, said that “the most prominent manifestation of Australia’s colonial mentality toward the South Pacific region” is that it always assumes itself as “a leader of South Pacific countries” or “a head in a family” that everyone must obey.

So the idea of Australia developing ties with the South Pacific Island countries is about “control” while China’s idea is based on “win-win cooperation,” and if Australia wants to compete with China in the region, it’s about the competition between “control” and “cooperation,” said analysts.

Yu Lei, chief research fellow at the Research Center for Pacific Island Countries of Liaocheng University, told the Global Times on Wednesday that “Western countries, especially Australia, not only require South Pacific countries to copy the Western political and legal systems, but also force them to become a ‘voting tool’ to serve the West in the international organizations.”

“Western troops or military advisers even have de facto control of some countries’ army and police such as Palau. Economically, the Western countries have made sure they can enjoy priority to exploit local resources such as mining and fishing wantonly,” Yu continued.

The aid from Western countries to the South Pacific, mainly ideological training and indoctrination on civil servants and military or police personnel, is to make sure the governments of these islands are under control, while very few aid was poured into livelihood and local economic development, which is different from the China’s cooperation with the South Pacific countries, Yu said.

No one wants to be controlled and made use of by others while receiving very limited benefits. So the West, or Australia’s presence in the region, was not welcome. But due to the weak national strengths, the island countries didn’t have many choices in the past, analysts said. But now these countries have found that China is a major power which is willing to treat them equally and can provide win-win cooperation and seek no control over them.

Liu Ze, general secretary of Solomon Islands Chinese Business Council, told the Global Times on Wednesday that Australia in recent months has been refocusing on the Solomon Islands, looking to scale up investment to counter what it claimed as “growing Chinese influence.” But investments from the West do not bear much attractiveness when compared with those from China, a country known for world-leading infrastructure building capacity and the aquatics industry.

“The economic structure of the Solomon Islands has not made any progress in the past 15 years, which made the ruling party realize that cooperating with the West did not result in development. On the other hand, China – home to the world’s most complete industrial and one of the world’s largest markets – could not only be an export destination for the island countries’ products but also aid them to integrate into the global supply chain,” Liu explained.

Help needed

China could explore the possibility to work with the Pacific Island countries in how to provide them with economic development aid, technical training in climate change, ecological protection of mangroves, and infrastructure construction such as power, bridge, and roads which are areas that China is particularly good at, Yu said.

Shen believes that cooperation on the COVID-19 epidemic should be a top priority as the pandemic continues to wreak havoc around the world. China could continue to provide necessary aid.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, China has provided the Pacific Island countries nearly 600,000 doses of vaccines and more than 100 tons of anti-epidemic supplies, according to the fact sheet published by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Although China is geographically far from the Pacific Island countries, it has paid great efforts to support relevant countries in disaster prevention and mitigation. In December 2021, the China-Pacific Island Countries Reserve for Emergency Supplies was officially launched in South China’s Guangdong Province, according to the fact sheet.

China provided immediate humanitarian aid when the island countries were hit by natural disasters.In January 2022, a volcanic eruption struck Tonga, which triggered a tsunami and ash fallout. The Chinese government was greatly concerned and acted immediately, making China the first country to provide assistance to Tonga.

Most of this help was ignored by Western media as they were interested only in exaggerating the security cooperation into a sign of “new Cold War” since they are anxious about China getting more popular in the region. But they can’t stop the development of the relations between China and the Pacific Island countries, experts said.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/05/26/c ... -to-offer/

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IPEF viewed as effort to box in China
By YIFAN XU in Washington | China Daily | Updated: 2022-05-27 09:58


Asia trade comes across as secondary goal for US-led initiative, forum hears

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US President Joe Biden delivers remarks along with India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japan's Prime Minister Kishida during the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) launch event at Izumi Garden Gallery in Tokyo, Japan, May 23, 2022. [Photo/Agencies]

The objectives of the so-called Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, or IPEF, seem less about being conducive to trade in the region as they appear to be about restricting China's sphere of economic influence.

That was the consensus emerging at a recent webinar themed "Indo-Pacific Economic Framework: New Model of Regional Trade Liberalization or One-Time Aberration", hosted by the Institute for China-America Studies.

Panelists at the event wondered whether the IPEF is aimed at further decoupling US and Asian supply chains from China-centric ones.

From Beijing's perspective, the framework understandably raises concerns about Washington's intentions, especially so at a time when there has been scant bilateral engagement on the economic and trade fronts, experts said.

"It should be underscored that China is the world's largest trading partner of every potential IPEF member," said Craig Allen, the president of the US-China Business Council. He said that China had applied to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP, which "has done a lot to improve regional integration within the Asia-Pacific region".

Allen said the IPEF is "not offering more reciprocal market access".Rather, "it's really a focus on trade defensive measures that would be export controls, import screening, secure supply chains and other defensive measures", he said.

He also said the framework may be "an awkward fit" with existing economic and trade agreements in the region, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

US President Joe Biden announced the IPEF on Monday in Tokyo, with the US' Asian partners Australia, Japan and South Korea. According to Biden, it is a broad plan designed to help expand the "economic leadership "of the US in the region.

Facing political pressure from both Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress to avoid free-trade deals, the White House stressed that the IPEF is not a free-trade agreement.

Mary Lovely, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said during the webinar that none of the IPEF structures would be embedded into existing structures in the region, so it is unclear how they could function with those treaties.

Lovely said that the divisions in US domestic politics might affect the credibility and role of the IPEF, as exemplified by the US withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the forerunner to the CPTPP.

"We see continuing, in some sense, disagreement and even disarray in terms of what the Asian strategy is," she added.

From the perspective of members or potential members of the IPEF, Lovely said that if the US asked them to choose a side between the US and China, it would have a negative effect, alienating some of those countries from the US because of China's "magnitude and importance".

"The US is trying to shape the environment around China, but it's doing it in a way that is indicative of US domestic politics and the difficulty of getting a clear strategy that would allow the US to actually lead," Lovely said.

Denis Simon, a professor of China business at Duke University, said that it will be hard for Beijing to trust the IPEF in light of "the Senate's Innovation and Competition Act and its counterpart in the House, and… a rather broad range of anti-China initiatives regarding investment, export controls, technology transfer (and) semiconductor policy that keep creeping into the mainstream of public policy in the United States".

'Thinly veiled'

"Many experts have said that Biden's IPEF strategy is no more than a thinly veiled effort to counter China in the Asia-Pacific region. And I think there's some substance to that," Simon said.

He stressed that it is not beneficial to the US to marginalize China.

"If you're talking about multilateralism and talking about, you know, integrated trade regimes, how can the exclusion of China help to place the global and regional trade system on a more stable integrated path?" Simon said.

Simon said he is concerned that the current level of engagement between the US and China is becoming very limited.

"We need to understand where this is all headed, because what's happening is that we may be driving off a cliff, and we're getting closer and closer to the edge, and we won't realize it until it's too late," Simon noted.

Allen said: "China is so large and so important, and the lack of dialogue we are facing right now is really deleterious and is leading to isolation, actually for both the United States and China."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5f581.html

FM: Sino-Solomon security deal helps maintain public order
By MO JINGXI | China Daily | Updated: 2022-05-27 06:55

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State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (L) meets with Solomon Islands' Foreign Minister Jeremiah Manele in Honiara, capital of the Solomon Islands, on May 26, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

Wang defends cooperation agreement, says countries can make own choices

Security cooperation between China and the Solomon Islands does not target any third party and China has no intention of building a military base there, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Thursday.

He made the remarks in Honiara, capital of the Pacific Island country, in a news briefing with Solomon Islands' Minister of Foreign Affairs and External Trade Jeremiah Manele following their bilateral talks.

When asked about the framework agreement on security cooperation signed between the two countries last month, Wang said it is a cooperation deal by two sovereign countries that aims to assist the Solomon Islands in boosting its law enforcement capabilities.

It will help the country maintain public order while protecting the safety of Chinese citizens and organizations there, Wang said, describing the cooperation as "reasonable, legitimate and lawful".

Severe unrest broke out in the Solomon Islands in November, putting the lives and property of the people at great risk. China provided multiple shipments of police equipment and sent an ad-hoc police advisory team to the country to conduct training and help its police strengthen capacity-building, which was widely praised by the Solomon Islands government and all sectors of society.

Wang refuted smears against normal China-Solomon Islands security cooperation, saying that any attempt to disrupt such cooperation will not succeed.

The Pacific Island nations are sovereign and independent countries and are not the "backyard" of anyone, Wang said, noting that all of these countries have the right to make their own choices instead of being vassals of other nations.

He said that China never coerced the cooperation agreement and never interfered in the Solomon Islands' domestic affairs or undermined the interests of other countries.

Such practice does not conform with China's foreign policy and is not the way that Chinese people deal with things, Wang said, adding that security cooperation between the two countries does not contradict but rather can complement other regional arrangements.

China supports Pacific Island countries to strengthen security cooperation and jointly deal with regional security challenges, he said.

The Solomon Islands is the first leg of Wang's 10-day tour of the Pacific, which will also bring him to Kiribati, Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste.

Earlier on Thursday, the Acting Governor General of Solomon Islands, John Patteson Oti, and the country's Prime Minister, Manasseh Sogavare, met with Wang.

Chen Xiaochen, executive deputy director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Studies at East China Normal University in Shanghai, said that Wang's visit to Honiara shows China's firm support to the Solomon Islands, which had the lowest GDP per capita among Pacific Island countries before it established diplomatic ties with China.

"The China-Solomon Islands cooperation is indicative in that China would help countries with urgent development needs," he said.

Chen said the root reason that some people in the West view China-Solomon Islands cooperation through a geopolitical lens is because of their outdated "sphere of influence" thinking, which should be rejected.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5f3ae.html

Samoa, China agree on mutually beneficial, win-win cooperation
Xinhua | Updated: 2022-05-28 18:04

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Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi speaks with Samoan Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Fiame Naomi Mata'afa on May 28, 2022. [Photo/fmprc.gov.cn]

APIA - Samoan Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Fiame Naomi Mata'afa met with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi here on Saturday, with both sides reaffirming commitment to the mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation.

During their talks, Fiame congratulated the Communist Party of China (CPC) on its centennial last year and wished the 20th National Congress of the CPC a great success.

The prime minister said that she has paid many visits to China whose development path and people-centered concept she appreciates, and expressed hope that her country can conduct exchanges with China on the experiences on economic growth and poverty alleviation.

Meanwhile, she reaffirmed Samoa's steadfast commitment to the one-China principle as well as non-interference on the Taiwan question.

The Samoa-China cooperation has reaped remarkable results in various fields, with Samoa's infrastructure effectively improved and agricultural modernization enhanced, said Fiame.

Samoa will continue its efforts to boost the bilateral partnership featuring mutual respect, mutual trust, mutual benefit and win-win results.

For his part, Wang congratulated the Pacific island nation on the 60th anniversary of its independence, and expressed appreciation for the development of friendship between China and Samoa over the past nearly half a century since their establishing diplomatic ties, and for Samoa having adhered to the one-China principle unswervingly and supported China safeguarding its core interests.

China has always advocated that all countries are equal regardless of their sizes and strengths, Wang said, noting that as the world's largest developing country, China has always stood on the side of the developing countries and worked to seek justice for smaller nations, Wang said.

He said developing countries need to strengthen unity amid the once-in-a-century changes.

China is willing to spare no effort in supporting developing countries, including Pacific island nations in speeding up their development and revitalization, Wang said, adding that, in doing so, China has never interfered in the internal affairs of any country, has never added political conditions, and has never sought geopolitical interests.

China is willing to achieve development and prosperity together with other developing countries and hence make the world fairer, said the Chinese foreign minister.

He said the cooperation between China and other developing countries including Pacific island nations targets no third party and seeks no exclusive rights or interests.

China has no intention of competing with other countries, and has always opposed the zero-sum game, said Wang, adding that China is willing to enhance communication with whichever country that cares for Pacific island nations, Australia and New Zealand in particular, to conduct more trilateral cooperation, giving full play to the parties' respective advantages, and based on respecting the island nations' will.

The two sides also exchanged views on climate change during the meeting.

Wang said the Chinese side has established a cooperation center for China and Pacific island countries on climate change, and that China is willing to continue to help small island countries strengthen their capacity building in tackling climate change within the framework of the South-South cooperation.

Wang, in the meantime, urged developed countries to earnestly take on the historical responsibilities in emissions reduction and fulfill their obligations.

The Samoan prime minister expressed her approval of Wang's remarks, and said that coping with climate change has become an important field of cooperation between Pacific island countries and China, expecting that the cooperation center between China and Pacific island countries on climate change will play an active role.

The pair, after the meeting, attended a signing ceremony of documents on economic, technical and cultural cooperation.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 5f8e9.html

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Russian Tu-95 strategic bomber.

Indo-Pacific power dynamic in radical shift
By M. K. Bhadrakumar (Posted May 28, 2022)

Originally published: Indian Punchline on May 27, 2022 (more by Indian Punchline) |

The joint air patrol over the waters of the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea on Monday by an air task force composed of Russian Tu-95MS capable of carrying nuclear weapons and Chinese H-6K strategic bombers couldn’t have been a knee-jerk reaction to U.S. President Joe Biden’s Asia tour, leave alone his provocative remarks conjuring up an apocalyptic U.S.-China war over Taiwan.

The Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Senior Colonel Wu Qian pointed out that this has been the fourth strategic patrol jointly conducted by Russia and China since 2019, with the purpose of testing and improving the level of coordination between the two air forces, and promoting the strategic mutual trust and practical cooperation between the two militaries. As he put it,

This operation does not target any third party, and has nothing to do with the current international and regional situation.

That said, perceptions do matter in strategic posturing and Japan’s defence minister Nobuo Kishi has enthusiastically rushed to endorse an interpretation that the timing of the Chinese-Russian operation had something to do with the QUAD summit taking place in Japan on that very same day.

Conceivably, Kishi was on a cover-up, distracting attention away from the new geopolitical reality in the Far East. Indeed, the rebirth of militarism and revanchist sentiments in Japan, in a historic departure in the country’s post-World War 2 pacifist posture, with overt American encouragement and backing, provides the broader context for a Sino-Russian congruence. Ominously enough, Japan has lately switched to a diplomatic idiom to refer to the Kuril Islands as “occupied” territory, implying that Russia is an aggressor–although the historical truth may be vastly different.

Again, Japan has been flexing muscles lately as a ‘front-line state’ in imposing sanctions against Russia (including against President Putin) although in all of its history or politics or geography, the land of the rising sun has had nothing to do with the Russian borderlands in Ukraine. Above all, Japan has been overzealous in drawing a fanciful comparison between the situation around the Taiwan Straits and Ukraine.

Whichever way one were to look at it, Monday’s operation displayed a very high level of military cooperation between China and Russia at a juncture when the two countries are facing new provocations and added pressure from the U.S.. Quite obviously, Beijing pooh-poohs the U.S. Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin’s declaration in late April that Washington wanted to see Russia weakened militarily “to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine” and will be unable to recover quickly.

Given the close foreign-policy coordination between China and Russia, it is entirely conceivable that Beijing has an insightful knowledge of the actual state of play in Russia’s special operation in Ukraine.

On the other hand, it is a reasonable surmise after Monday’s joint strategic air patrol by China and Russia on Monday that Beijing has pushed back the Western attempts to browbeat it on the Ukraine issue. Clearly, on Monday, Beijing was risking “a major reputational damage,” in the western world–to borrow the threatening words of the EU’s executive president Ursula von der Leyen after “a very frank and open” videoconference with the Chinese leadership in early April.

What emerges are three things. One, Beijing continues to adhere to the letter and spirit of the joint statement of February 4 with Russia on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development which was issued during President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing. Two, in the Chinese perspective, the three-month old Russian operation in Ukraine, which began on February 24, has not changed the current imperatives of the international situation characterised by rapid development and profound transformation where “Some actors representing but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they interfere in the internal affairs of other states, infringing their legitimate rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences and confrontation, thus hampering the development and progress of mankind, against the opposition from the international community.” (February 4, 2022)

Third, Moscow and Beijing are circling the wagons, so to speak, in the Far East. Evidently, the Ukraine conflict is not preventing the U.S. from pushing ahead with the NATO expansion and there is every reason to believe that the alliance’s next ‘line of defence’ will be moved to the South China Sea. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pointed out on Thursday that belligerent western politicians are stating publicly that the alliance should have global responsibility, and that NATO should be responsible for the security in the Pacific region. Moscow and Beijing cannot be faulted if their anticipate that major decisions in this regard are expected at the forthcoming NATO summit meeting in Madrid on June 28-30.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Thursday that “NATO has publicly stated on many occasions that it will remain a regional alliance, it does not seek a geopolitical breakthrough and it does not seek to expand to other regions. However, in recent years, NATO has entered the Asia-Pacific region repeatedly. Some NATO member states keep sending aircraft and warships to carry out military exercises in waters off China’s coast, creating tensions and disputes. NATO has been transgressing regions and fields and clamoring for a new Cold War of bloc confrontation. This gives ample reason for high vigilance and firm opposition from the international community.”

Russia and China have given up hopes of any moderation in the U.S.’ adversarial mindset. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said today, “The West has declared total war against us, against the entire Russian world. Nobody even hides this fact now.” For the first time since 2006, Russia and China on Thursday vetoed a U.S.-drafted United Nations Security Council resolution to strengthen sanctions on North Korea.

In and address on Tuesday at Georgetown University, titled The Administration’s Approach to the People’s Republic of China, designed to rally the international community to deter and counter China, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the coalition that Washington mustered to counter Russia in Ukraine presents a model both agile and well-resourced in how to face future challenges from China.

https://mronline.org/2022/05/28/indo-pa ... cal-shift/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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