China

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 04, 2022 2:56 pm

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Power shortages in September triggered a debate about China’s climate policy (Photo: Alamy)

Year in review: China’s climate goals withstand heat
Originally published: China Dialogue by Ma Tianjie (December 21, 2021 )

It’s been a dizzying period for watchers of China’s climate and environmental scene. President Xi Jinping’s carbon neutrality pledge at the United Nations in September 2020 set in motion a massive build-up of national policy, legislation and regulation on decarbonisation, with unprecedented speed. Barely two months later, Xi announced a set of more ambitious 2030 targets at the Climate Ambition Summit. And then, in March 2021, China’s top legislators approved the 14th Five Year Plan (FYP) with a whole host of climate and energy targets for 2025.

The policymaking did not stop there. Just as some observers were commenting on the slightly underwhelming near-term FYP targets, a top leadership meeting in mid-March called for the building of a power system “centred around renewables,” raising hopes that the FYP is a floor for China’s ambition and not a ceiling.

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By July, it was clear the government was making a more elaborate policy framework for achieving the “dual carbon” goals of peaking and neutrality. Xie Zhenhua, China’s special envoy for climate, revealed at a conference that policymakers were busy creating a “1+N” policy framework to guide the decarbonisation journey for the next four decades. (The “1” stands for a top-level Guiding Opinion, which was issued in October, while the “N” refers to a set of more than 30 sector-specific decarbonisation plans.)

But July 2021 is now remembered more for the devastating flood that inundated much of Henan province in central China. In the 24 hours between 20 and 21 July, a whopping 622.7 mm of rain fell in the provincial capital of Zhengzhou, nearly equalling total rainfall for a regular year in this relatively arid place. Across the province, hundreds of people died or went missing in the flood.

While the relationship between extreme weather events and climate change did get a more serious discussion in mainstream Chinese media, especially after the immediate shock of the disaster had receded a little, a part of the Chinese internet was visibly giddy. For the writer of a viral post on WeChat, increased rainfall in central and northern China was a wonderful sign of a return to a glorious past, when warmer, wetter weather aided the rise of the Tang Dynasty.

Climate change is a good thing for China, the writer told his excited followers, water nourishes the land and brings prosperity. The post spread so far that China Environment News, the official outlet of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, felt the need to publish an extensive rebuttal emphasising that rapidly changing meteorological conditions are far from a blessing for northern China. “Climate change’s disruption of the water cycle is exacerbating droughts in parts of Ningxia, Shanxi and Gansu, while sending violent rainfall elsewhere,” it warned. “For the northwest’s sensitive and vulnerable environment, higher temperature and more humidity are hardly good news.”

The exchange provides a snapshot of the state of confusion in Chinese society about climate change, where tension always exists between a “climate-enlightened” leadership and a climate-agnostic public that usually just goes along with the former’s policy initiatives without asking too many questions. But with emission-slashing actions getting more serious in 2021, Chinese society was forced to confront some of the real impacts of climate and energy policies that would test its buy-in to the decarbonisation agenda.

As floods were devastating large parts of Henan, the Chinese energy market was showing alarming signs of a cramp. Electricity usage rose significantly thanks to a strong recovery in manufacturing and export, but the supply of coal (still a main source of electric power despite its dwindling role) was not catching up, sending the price of coal skyrocketing to the highest level in a decade. All kinds of downstream users, from coal-fired power plants to steel mills, felt the pinch. At the end of July, the Party leadership issued an unusual opinion to try and stabilise the energy market and rein in what it saw as “decarbonisation frenzy.” Some experts interpreted that phrase to mean moves by local governments that prematurely dismantled the old coal-based energy infrastructure when the new, renewable-based one was not ready to take over.

It was the first sign of a serious policy recalibration since the 2020 carbon neutrality pledge. And its exact message took some deciphering. For energy regulators, it meant a green light to ease some of the controls put on coal production. Previously closed mines were ordered back into operation, with the hope that additional supply would stabilise prices. On the other hand, the central government doubled down on its campaign against polluting projects with high energy intensity, claiming there is legitimate work to do to tame those wasteful electricity users.

But a crisis had already been set in motion. By September, severe power shortages hit multiple provinces and led to outright blackouts in major urban centres in the northeast.

Compared to the more fanciful back-to-Tang-dynasty brand of climate denialism, concerns about energy security and economic well-being remain a much more serious challenge for climate policy to grapple with. As the power shortage occupied the headlines, some commentators tried to pin the blame on China’s long-standing “dual controls” policy–of capping total energy consumption and setting energy intensity targets–to achieve carbon reduction goals. They claimed that a tightening of the controls was forcing local governments to turn off electricity supplies in order to meet quotas. However, further analyses showed the power cuts to energy-intensive industries were the result rather than the cause of a tightening power supply situation, highlighting the rigidity and irresponsiveness of China’s power market. Still, the controversy inevitably put China’s carbon policy in a tough spot.

And it could not have happened at a more delicate time. The overarching climate policy framework–“1+N”­– that Xie Zhenhua previewed in July was originally expected to be released at about this time, to set the tone for a season of intensive climate diplomacy ahead of the UN’s COP26 climate talks in Glasgow at the beginning of November. International pressure on China to further raise the ambition of its climate targets, which included bringing forward its effort to peak carbon to before 2030, was already heating up in September. At the beginning of the month, John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, visited China for a second time in the year to meet with Xie Zhenhua and senior Chinese leaders to discuss new climate commitments. He was followed by Alok Sharma, the UK’s president of COP26, days later.

Few Chinese domestic policy issues are as entangled with international diplomacy as climate policy. This entanglement has only deepened in the past few years as Chinese policymakers realised that projecting an international leadership role on protecting a key global “public good”, namely the climate system, may also boost “performance legitimacy” at home. The carbon neutrality goal was unveiled at the UN General Assembly, the 2030 targets were announced at the UK-organised Climate Ambition Summit. John Kerry’s April visit to Shanghai probably paved the way for President Xi’s appearance at the U.S.-organised Leaders’ Summit for Climate, where he announced a peaking date for coal consumption. And as Glasgow approached, people were wondering whether COP26 may be another international forum for domestic policy creation.

Indeed, at the end of September, the UN became the venue for China to unveil yet another big new policy: its exit from building coal power plants overseas, reportedly a key item on Kerry and Sharma’s “wish list” when they visited China. The announcement was received very positively internationally, but no new domestic targets were put forward. In fact, when China finally published its much anticipated “1+N” policy framework in October, it mostly contained pre-existing goals and targets.

By then, Chinese policymakers were more concerned with consolidating existing policies than piling on new ones. They have argued on multiple occasions that achieving the already promised pace of emissions control is a Herculean undertaking. The international politics ahead of COP26 were not entirely conducive to more collaborative raising of climate ambition. And for the first time in China’s climate policy discourse, the 1+N document contained a call for “international struggle” on the climate issue. Though it did also call for “international cooperation”, inclusion of “struggle” reflected a hardening world view. The sentiment found its way into China’s cyberspace, where a heightened mistrust of Western advocacy for climate action revived popularity in the theory that the climate message is but a veiled attempt to thwart Chinese prosperity.

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In a way, it is an achievement that China’s climate ambition has stood firm against concerns about energy security and the nationalist insistence on not giving way to Western demands. Not a single target announced over the past year was watered down in the 1+N document; they were formalised and promulgated as top-level policy. The fine balance Chinese policymakers had to keep manifested itself vividly at COP26 when China did not sign the U.S.-led Global Methane Pledge, which contains a commitment to a 30% emissions cut in ten years, but instead committed to take actions on the potent greenhouse gas in a surprise Joint Declaration with the U.S. near the end of the conference. “With the Global Methane Pledge, the U.S. is trying to unfairly divert responsibility to developing countries when it has failed miserably on cutting methane over the past few years,” researchers from the official climate think tank NCSC wrote at the beginning of the COP. China is serious about addressing this pollutant, as the later joint declaration shows, but it has to do so on its own terms and following its own pace.

In spring this year, when China Dialogue interviewed Wang Yi, a senior lawmaker and climate advisor, he argued that rather than fixating on squeezing more from near-term emissions cuts, China should place greater emphasis on its preparations for an epic 40-year journey that will entail fundamental reforms to its economic system. Other Chinese experts concur: getting near-term results is important, but the right system should be in place first to shape the emissions trajectory for years to come. And that should be the priority. At COP26, Wang Yi was still frustrated that the message hadn’t got through. “To reach our targets, we have outlined a change to our entire system, not just in the energy sector but across society and the economy”, he told the Guardian’s Jonathan Watts. “Nobody knows this.”

If system building is more important than crowd-pleasing promises to cut emissions, China’s climate policy scene certainly did not stop mattering post-COP26. The last few weeks of 2021 have seen the central bank rolling out a massive relending facility to support low-carbon industries and new signals on reforming the national power market that was at the bottom of September’s power shortages. None of these made international headlines. China still has a long way to go to convince the world why, at this critical point in its decarbonisation journey, it should be given space to walk quietly for a few more steps before it talks again.

https://mronline.org/2022/01/04/year-in-review/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 05, 2022 3:33 pm

China takes decisive action to suppress spread of covid and CNN throws shade...
The latest on coronavirus pandemic and Omicron variant
By Helen Regan, Adam Renton, Joshua Berlinger and Ed Upright, CNN

Hong Kong is tightening restrictions over one untraceable Omicron case

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Thousands of passengers and staff held on cruise ship over Covid outbreak fears in Hong Kong

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Nearly a dozen neighborhoods locked down in Chinese city of Zhengzhou

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China's Xi'an will ease lockdown if city reaches "zero community Covid," officials say

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/omi ... cc14fb69f1
As though controlling a pandemic is a bad thing...One look at the number of cases, hospitalizations, fatalities tells the story here, that is, if human need is your priority. Such is apparently not the case in the US and other capitalist countries, where the necessities of capital are primary and libertarian individualism is effectively a religion.

At the same time that CNN bad-mouths China for doing what is necessary like the good stenographers of the State Dept that they are, they simultaneously boost the arguments of the deluded that social measures of pandemic control are infringement of their freedom 'cause look what them commies are doing....'
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 07, 2022 2:51 pm

CPC leadership must be upheld
By CAO DESHENG | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-01-07 06:39

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A ceremony marking the centenary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) is held at Tian'anmen Square in Beijing, capital of China, July 1, 2021. [Photo/Xinhua]

Party secures China's modernization, rejuvenation, key meeting emphasizes

A key Party meeting underlined on Thursday the need to uphold the Communist Party of China's overall leadership-particularly the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee-to realize China's modernization and rejuvenation.

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, presided over the daylong meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and gave a speech.

The top Party leadership heard a series of work reports from leading Party members' groups of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the State Council, the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the Supreme People's Court and the Supreme People's Procuratorate, as well as from the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee.

The meeting's participants reaffirmed that the Party's leadership in all areas and all aspects, especially the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, must be upheld in order for the Party, with more than 95 million members, and for the country with a population of more than 1.4 billion, to be well managed, according to a statement released after the meeting.

The underlying reason for the historic transformations and achievements that the Party and the State have secured since the 18th National Congress of the CPC in 2012 is that the country unswervingly upholds the Party's leadership and the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, they said.

The CPC Central Committee's hearing of the work reports each year has played an exemplary role in upholding the committee's authority and its centralized and unified leadership, and such a practice should be sustained, the statement said.

The meeting's participants commended the work of the leading Party members' groups of the top legislature, State Council, top political advisory body, top court and top procuratorate, as well as the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, in the past year and acknowledged their contributions to making a good start in implementing the country's 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25), as well as creating a sound environment for the celebration of the Party's centenary last year, the statement said.

New and greater progress has been made in all aspects of their work, it added.

The meeting's participants urged the State bodies to remain vigilant about the risks and challenges on the way ahead, enhance their governance capacity, shoulder their responsibilities and assume their duty with solid efforts.

They also noted that this year marks a milestone toward the country's modernization in all aspects and achieving the second of the "Two Centenary Goals"-to turn China into a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious by the time the People's Republic of China celebrates its centenary in 2049. They further noted that this year will witness the 20th National Congress of the CPC.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 7f95d.html

Capitalist China, huh?

The capitalists who still profess this belief are, a)profiting in China now, and/or b) 'true believers' in the 'end of history' and all that nonsense. The common thread being the indomitable optimism which seems to dominate their thought, a virtual pre-requite of the successful capitalist. Essentially, if a capitalist can conceive of profiting from any resource, human or natural, they automatically assume it's their's and consider any infringement on this a denial of their rights.

OTOH, there are some on the left who also maintain that opinion, both the infantile far left and some other parties who ought to know better yet succumb to vulgar, superficial analysis. To be sure Chinese privately owned corps can play capitalist hardball overseas, and if it's in your country, say Greece, then your animosity is somewhat understandable. But if you are the astute Marxist that you usually are the longer view provides better perspective.
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 15, 2022 1:57 pm

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Wang Yi’s Africa and Asia tour further debunks ‘debt trap’ conspiracy theory
This article by Stephen Ndegwa, first published in CGTN, discusses the ‘debt trap’ narrative in the context of Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent trip to several countries in Africa and Asia. Ndegwa notes that, although Western media and politicians often decry Chinese infrastructure loans as being exploitative, these accusations don’t stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, the debtor countries don’t share these criticisms and are highly appreciative of China’s support for their sovereign development.
One of the most popular rules of power says if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. Well, that could be so. But those who religiously apply this maxim, which purportedly emanated from Nazi Germany’s Joseph Goebbels, forget that it carries a rider. The lie can only be maintained for as long as the originator shields people from the truth.

This has been the case with the so-called debt trap, a phrase generally coined by Western countries that alleges that China ensnared developing countries with unserviceable debt to take over their national assets. China’s aim, so goes the lie, is to enable China to get a foothold in various strategic locations around the world.

Interestingly, even after the United States-led Western bloc’s warning that choices have consequences, China’s partners do not seem to be relenting in expanding and deepening their Sino cooperation. The stress-free partnership has given developing countries much-needed breathing space that has helped them make economic choices best suited to their needs, rather than experimenting with high-blown models that have no practicality.

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi was warmly received by the host countries on his first foreign visits in 2022, and the respective partners celebrated the fruits of their cooperation so far and committed themselves even further into the long term.

Kenya in Africa and Sri Lanka in Asia will suffice here to show how the debt trap is a ridiculous theory. China’s development model with developing countries is based on simple economics. For instance, one of Kenya’s recent flagship projects nearing completion, the Nairobi Expressway, is a perfect model of a successful Public-Private-Partnership (PPP).

It is a joint partnership between the public Kenya National Highways Authority and the China Road and Bridge Corp. (CRBC) and involves the construction of a 27-kilometer roadway overpass to bypass the capital city’s perennial gridlock that has been the bane of many businesses in the country. The beauty of it is that the CRBC has shouldered virtually all the design, financing and construction costs of the expressway, which will be repaid with the road’s user fees in the coming years.

On June 25, 2018, “The New York Times” published an article that claimed Sri Lanka’s government had surrendered the Hambantota International Port to China after the former was unable to service its loans. The article twisted well-known and accepted economic practices like concessions and leasing to a de facto take over. Now, why would China throw good money after bad if the feasibility studies had shown that there was no possibility of recouping its investments?

What do the debt trap theorists have to say after Wang and Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on January 9 pledged to strengthen cooperation with China in the fields of economy, trade, finance, tourism and infrastructure? Does such camaraderie denote bad blood between the two partners after the so-called ceding of Sri Lanka’s port to China?

These arrangements are actually a boon to China’s development partners due to the technology transfer and impeccable management skills passed on during the duration of co-ownership of projects. Furthermore, after the contract is over, the host countries are bound to enjoy revenues from these projects in perpetuity.

The debt trap theory is also an attack on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Chinese global infrastructural project that has met with unprecedented success within a relatively short time for its magnitude. The West, the debt trap propagandist, has now realized that the BRI has stopped its hegemonic game in its tracks.

The overarching impact of the BRI’s links to trade, investment, debt, procurement, environment, poverty reduction and infrastructure has made the West increasingly irrelevant as a development partner. It is not really the role of development partners to dictate what kind of projects are viable for developing countries. Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.

Experts are of the view that, most likely, the U.S. has been crying louder than the aggrieved to hide the fact that it would actually be the one trapped in Chinese debt if such a trap were to exist. China is now the world’s leading global creditor, most of which is owed by the U.S.

Analysts see this scenario as the main factor behind U.S. growing insecurity with China’s growth. Ironically, it is China that should be getting jittery about the superpower’s increasing economic woes, as it will increase the repayment period of its burgeoning debt.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/12/w ... cy-theory/

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https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/08/w ... velopment/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 18, 2022 2:44 pm

China expands international medical solidarity to fight COVID
January 17, 2022 Scott Scheffer

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A delivery of Chinese COVID vaccines arrives in Cambodia.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has overseen a failed effort to combat COVID-19, and in fact, appears to have thrown up its hands in surrender. As of this writing, 843,000 people in the U.S. have died, and the omicron variant is now overloading hospitals with COVID patients, including thousands of children.

The symptoms may or may not be less severe – assessments in the media are contradictory. But in Chicago, Boston and New York City, where the earliest surges of omicron took place, patients are dying on only a slightly smaller scale than during previous waves of infections – because of the sheer number of cases.

In spite of all this, capitalist government institutions are pulling back control efforts. Millions of parents are worrying that the premature return to in-school studying will send their children to the hospital.

Two weeks ago, just days after a Dec. 21 letter from the CEO of Delta Airlines requesting that the isolation period be lessened, the CDC did exactly that. The isolation guidelines were lowered from 10 days to five days.

Had there been a higher level of global cooperation early in the pandemic, it’s questionable whether omicron would have even come into existence.

U.S. capitalists block cooperation

The means to vaccinate the world through a cooperative international plan existed, and as the U.S. spewed hateful propaganda and anti-communist conspiracy theories, the Chinese government repeatedly called for a cooperative effort. But the chance to move forward was squandered by capitalist greed and vaccine nationalism promoted by U.S. big money.

Giant corporations that own health insurance companies, hospital chains and drug manufacturers, as well as the banks that invest in them, are so dominant in the U.S. economy that the availability of health care has historically compared miserably even to other major capitalist countries.

That U.S. capitalism produced one of the most resourceful scientific and medical communities in history didn’t help, because it also has commodified all of science to an extent never seen before. Life-saving medical care and even preventive medicine is a privilege that communities of color and poor people in general are often denied.

Further, instead of going all-out to produce and distribute vaccines globally, the U.S. ruling class’ nationalist and genocidal hoarding of life-saving science is what gave SARS-CoV-2 all the time it needed to mutate and for the omicron variant to emerge in Africa, where the vaccination rate is in the single digits.

Even the design of the mRNA vaccines – whose development and production was funded by the U.S. government – points to the nationalist orientation of giant capitalists. Regardless of how effective they are, the required cold storage and transportation makes them impractical for a global vaccination campaign.

That didn’t have to be the case. For instance, once the science, research, development and manufacture of the vaccines was accomplished, redirecting the resources normally devoted to the U.S. imperialist war machine might have made short work of COVID-19.

Many other countries with far fewer advantages than the United States have done a much better job protecting lives and controlling the spread of the disease.

Socialist countries’ achievements

Cuba and China have stood out as models of how a pandemic should be dealt with.

Every revolution of the 20th century that set out to build socialism, at its onset, exhibited an all-out effort to improve health care. This history of prioritizing health instead of profit is the foundation of the remarkable achievements by both countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

China and Cuba used every resource possible to produce vaccines and treatments to protect their own populations. At the same time – because a pandemic cannot be ended by vaccinating within the borders of one country – they both have shared medical teams, vaccines, treatments and supplies internationally, even while combating the disease at home.

When the 1949 Chinese Revolution ended what they called the “century of humiliation,” the early days in the process of rebuilding saw an unprecedented determination to eradicate diseases that were associated with deep poverty.

Beginning in 1949 and growing during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s army of “barefoot doctors” received basic medical training and set out for the countryside to promote preventive care and treat common illnesses.

Over the decades, China has beaten back or eliminated numerous communicable diseases that had run rampant throughout the country, such as plague, smallpox, cholera and typhus. In addition, cases of malaria and schistosomiasis have been reduced dramatically.

Schistosomiasis – a parasitic disease from freshwater snails – infected 10 million Chinese people in the mid-1950s. Mao was so elated as the eradication campaign began showing signs of success that he wrote poetry about it and spoke about it frequently.

China’s Health Silk Road

While it is true that the Communist Party of China has prevailed on many capitalist corporations operating there to contribute to health care and the general welfare of the population, the Chinese health care system itself is almost wholly state-owned, and the “Health Silk Road,” as China’s international medical solidarity has come to be called, is a longtime CPC initiative.

Notably, and to great praise by international health agencies, China has been working hard to replicate this success against diseases of poverty as part of the Health Silk Road, particularly against schistosomiasis in Africa, where 90% of cases exist today.

This drive to help spread health care internationally has ramped up during the pandemic. When COVID began killing people in droves during March 2020, Chinese medical teams went to hard-hit Iran and Italy. By June 2021, the foreign ministry announced that China had delivered more than 350 million vaccine doses to more than 80 countries.

Last August, President Xi Jinping pledged a $100-million donation to Covax, an international agency coordinating global vaccine distribution, but added a pledge of 2 billion vaccine doses to be provided internationally outside of Covax.

By October 2021 the China International Development Cooperation Agency reported that over 1.5 billion doses have already been delivered to 106 countries, focusing on Africa, Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific.

While there is still much to be done to safeguard the Global South from this deadly disease and possible new variants, China continues its own medical internationalism and its call for global cooperation instead of Cold War slander and capitalist greed.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... ght-covid/

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Syria is now the eighteenth Arab state to join the ambitious Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (Photo Credit: The Cradle)

Defying U.S. Caesar Act, China admits Syria into BRI
Posted Jan 18, 2022 by Helen Yaffe

Originally published: The Cradle by Giorgio Cafiero (January 14, 2022 ) |

Marking a major boost to Sino-Syrian relations, on 12 January, Syria joined the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s ambitious infrastructure development strategy stretching from East Asia to Europe.

For analysts with an eye on Syria, the development was expected. In November 2021, President Bashar al-Assad discussed his country gaining membership in the BRI with his counterpart in Beijing, Xi Jinping, following high-level meetings between officials of both states in previous months.

The move will likely help Syria deepen its cooperative and economic ties to other countries in the BRI, and enable it to circumvent the effects of harsh U.S. sanctions on the country.

China clearly seeks to bolster the government in Damascus. Over the past decade, and for various reasons enumerated here on The Cradle, conflict-ridden Syria has been a country of increasing interest to Beijing.

Economy and the long game

China’s BRI agenda has been one main point of mutual interest: As Beijing sees it, Syria represents a corridor to the Mediterranean Sea which bypasses the Suez Canal and revives ancient trade routes connecting China to the African and European continents.

The incorporation of coastal Tartus and the capital city of Damascus into the BRI could boost Beijing’s economic footing in the Levant and Mediterranean.

Although nearly 11 years of warfare in Syria have prevented the Chinese from leveraging the Arab state’s geostrategic location to advance Beijing’s BRI, China’s leadership has carefully focused on playing the long game.

Now, in the post-conflict era, with Syria in need of massive reconstruction and infrastructure projects, China’s BRI has been brought into play.

Ancient links and modern opportunities

As a BRI member, Syria will look to further integrate itself economically into West Asia. In desperate need of foreign investment for the process of redevelopment, the Syrian leadership views China as a key investor and partner to rebuild the war-ravaged nation.

Importantly, during this period, China’s good will has grown among Syrians, in large part because of Beijing’s bold initiatives to thwart direct western military intervention at the UN Security Council and other institutions.

It is safe to assume that China will, at least eventually, be able to leverage its popularity among Syrians to take advantage of new economic opportunities in the country’s post-conflict future.

At the ceremony of Syria’s admission into the BRI, held this month in Damascus, Fadi Khalil, who heads Syria’s Planning and International Cooperation Commission, hailed the initiative. He invoked the historic roles of Aleppo and Palmyra in the ancient Silk Road and spoke about the potential for future Sino-Syrian relations within the framework of greater bilateral and multilateral cooperation.

Khalil and Feng Biao, Beijing’s ambassador to Syria, signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Syria’s admission into this Chinese initiative, which other Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, have previously joined at different levels of commitment.

Other recent developments underscore the extent to which Syria and China are deepening their ties. At the start of this year, Beijing aided Syria by sending over more than a million COVID-19 vaccine doses, according to Syrian state-owned media.

Despite the many ways in which Syria sees itself benefitting from membership in the BRI, the West Asian framework for this project will be no bed of roses.

A geographic wrench in the works

For Beijing, it is important that Iraq establish a long-term BRI corridor to both Syria and Jordan. While the BRI route between Iran and Syria–that traverses Iraq–has yet to be agreed upon with Baghdad, the Chinese must have many valid concerns about the security risks of doing business in Syria and Iraq.

China recognizes that “Iraq continues to top the list of high-risk investment destinations” in this grandiose project. Obviously, the same can be said about Syria where ISIS and other extremist militants continue to wage acts of terrorism, notably on the country’s borders with Iraq and Turkey.

With serious issues stemming from terrorism, social unrest, economic woes, and violent political instability, Iraq and Syria are two countries plagued by countless security uncertainties.

Although Chinese firms tend to accept higher levels of security risks than western companies, securing the BRI in Syria’s volatile neighborhood will prove no easy task for Beijing and its West Asian trade partners.

A far more stable and secure BRI economic corridor to Europe would be via northern Iran–a route already secured–then extending directly from Iran into Turkey. Yet the ice-cold state of Ankara-Damascus relations, China’s view of Turkey as an uneasy BRI partner, and NATO pressures on Ankara to avoid Beijing and Tehran, all contribute to practical challenges that will not be easy for the BRI’s financiers to quickly overcome.

But the Sino-Syrian deal this week shows that China is moving forward with its West Asian framework, despite these obstacles. One wonders whether Beijing has reason to believe Iraq’s acquiescence to the BRI is already in the bag. There is little point of developing the Syrian part of the project, without the Iraqi bridge necessary to secure Iran’s connectivity to Syria.

Washington’s reconstruction obstacle: The Caesar Act

On 17 July, 2020, the U.S. began implementing the most sweeping sanctions which Washington has ever imposed on Syria.

Formally known as the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019 (or Caesar Act), the Biden administration continues to target Syria with Trump-era sanctions which pursue entities or individuals worldwide–including third-party actors–conducting business with government-dominated bodies of the Syrian economy, such as gas, oil, construction, engineering, and banking.

When China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Damascus in July 2021, he met with Assad and other high-ranking Syrian government figures.

That visit by Beijing’s top diplomat was an early indication of China’s seriousness about strengthening ties with Syria, despite Washington’s continued imposition of wide-ranging sanctions on the state.

During his visit to Syria, Wang emphasized his government’s staunch opposition to the foreign-backed ‘regime change’ agenda targeting the Assad government. Beijing frames its pro-Assad stance within the context of supporting Syria’s sovereignty as an independent nation-state.

Throughout the past 11 years of warfare in Syria, China has maintained four core beliefs on the conflict: First, that the Syrian people need to reach a political solution; second, that a political transition in Syria is necessary; third, that top priorities include nation-wide reconciliation and unity; and fourth, that the international community has an obligation to help Syria.

The BRI, while initiated and heavily financed by the Chinese, is ultimately a multinational project involving dozens of countries, many of them U.S.-allied, and interconnected with Syria via history, religion, culture, and economy–past and present.

A project this global is unlikely to come to a grinding halt because of a domestic U.S. government ruling on trade formulated thousands of miles away from the activity.

Fighting terrorism in Syria and China

Another issue that has driven the Beijing-Damascus joint agenda in recent years is China’s ‘securitization campaign’ or ‘pacification drive’ in Xinjiang.

Assad’s government has publically condemned western efforts to use the plight of Uighurs for the purpose of creating a wedge between China and Muslim-majority countries.

Syria, like most Arab-Islamic countries, has defended Beijing in the face of the U.S. and other western governments which allege that Chinese authorities are guilty of waging ‘genocide’ in Xinjiang, where about 12 million Uighurs, mostly Muslim, reside.

Mindful of the fact that Uighur jihadists came from Xinjiang to Syria to fight the Syrian government in the ranks of Islamic State and other violent extremist groups, Damascus and Beijing see themselves as having common cause in a struggle against terrorism and extremism.

In 2017, Syria’s ambassador to Beijing said that roughly 5,000 terrorists from Xinjiang were transported, mostly via Turkey, to Syria during the conflict. Chinese authorities have voiced serious concerns about the now battle-hardened and indoctrinated extremists potentially returning to China to carry out acts of terrorism.

Likewise, Beijing rejects the view of western governments that Assad is guilty of serious crimes. China’s leadership believes that the Syrian government deserves praise for its fight against forces which sought to overthrow Assad and his government.

When Wang was in Syria last summer, he said that “the Syrian government’s leading role in fighting terrorism on its soil should be respected, schemes of provoking ethnic divisions under the pretense of countering terrorism should be opposed, and Syria’s sacrifice and contribution to the anti-terror fight should be acknowledged.”

The future of the Sino-Syrian relationship

Currently in the U.S. there is strong support from both sides of Washington’s political aisle for stringent Trump-era U.S. sanctions on Damascus. In fact, this year, Biden’s administration has come under bipartisan pressure to intensify the U.S. government’s enforcement of the Caesar Act.

Given the existing polarization and hostility in West Asian geopolitics, it is difficult to imagine Washington lifting the Caesar Act in the foreseeable future. Ultimately, this means that the U.S. will probably continue to target Syria’s economy with crippling sanctions.

Within this context, Damascus has all the reason in the world to pursue strategies that can help it minimize the harm caused by Washington’s financial warfare.

“China can play an important role in weakening the impact of the Caesar sanctions,” said Dr. Joshua Landis, head of the Middle East department at the University of Oklahoma, in an interview last year with The Cradle.

“In Iran, China has done this,” Landis explained.

Iran’s oil exports, which were devastated by sanctions, have begun to grow again, largely because China is purchasing Iranian oil again. China is the workshop of the world so it can supply most of the goods that Syria needs. China is also strong enough to thumb its nose at U.S. sanctions. As the U.S. increasingly forbids U.S. companies from dealing with Chinese firms, China has greater incentive to punish the U.S. by breaking sanctions on countries like Iran and Syria.

Now that Syria has joined the BRI, it is safe to conclude that the Chinese will play an increasingly important role in terms of Syria’s strategies for withstanding sanctions imposed by the U.S..

The odds are good that, as time passes, China and Syria’s geopolitical and geo-economic value to each other will only expand.

https://mronline.org/2022/01/18/defying ... -into-bri/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 20, 2022 2:23 pm

Triumph of socialism with Chinese characteristics: ex-East German premier
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2022-01-20 11:30

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File photo shows a view of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China. [Photo/Xinhua]

China's remarkable achievements are important to not only China but the rest of the world as well. This is the sum of what Hans Modrow, former premier of the German Democratic Republic (erstwhile East Germany), said in a recent dialogue with two Chinese scholars on Party history studies, which was published by Cankaoxiaoxi, a newspaper affiliated with Xinhua News Agency.

Talking about the historical significance of the resolution of the Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Communist Party of China Central Committee in November, Modrow, who is also the former chairman of the Party of Democratic Socialism, said that he has been interested in China's accomplishments ever since the launch of reform and opening-up.

Hugely impressed by the plenary session, held in the new era, and heartened to see many ordinary people participating in the plenum, the 94-year old statesman said the CPC carries out work in a transparent and open manner.

Modrow still remembers that day in September 1956 when Chairman Mao Zedong met with Walter Ulbricht, then head of state of the German Democratic Republic. During the meeting, according to Modrow, Ulbricht said that socialist society was a long historical period, an expression that has been mentioned in the plenary session's resolution.

And the fact that the resolution also says the CPC should take a two-step approach to "build China into a great modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced, harmonious, and beautiful by the middle of the 21st century" signifies that building a socialist country in the true sense of term requires a lot of energy and time. But Modrow has no doubt that China will ultimately realize that goal.

Besides, the resolution states that Mao Zedong Thought represents the creative application and advancement of Marxism-Leninism in China. This is something, Modrow said, Ulbricht has mentioned way back in 1956.

The CPC has a clear, long-term plan to deal with the changing world and adapt Marxism to the Chinese context, Modrow said. The CPC has been moving forward on the socialist path with Chinese characteristics and has realized that freeing of minds, and reform and opening-up are processes without an end.

Emphasizing that the brotherhood and friendship between socialists in Germany and China have lasted decades, he said the plenum's resolution, by reflecting on the past and reviewing the Party's major achievements and historical experience over the past century, has encouraged thinkers around the world to further develop and advance socialism in the 21st century.

Modrow voiced special support for one of the ideas in the resolution: that the Party must always remain on guard against the erosive influence of Western political thoughts. And since the CPC is right in saying that traditional and nontraditional security threats are intertwined, he said, it is politically correct and necessary to safeguard national security.

The resolution aptly analyzes the real situations in China and the world, sets the Party's tasks required to develop and enrich socialism with Chinese characteristics, Modrow said, adding that, though the plenum focused more on China's domestic problems, it can help promote building a fairer, more equitable world.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 8243e.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 22, 2022 3:29 pm

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Western experts should understand China’s building of socialism from China’s perspective
In this article, originally carried by CGTN, Keith Lamb makes the cogent point that it is not only Western specialists that need to make more effort to understand China and its rise on its own terms. Western socialists and Marxists do, too.
On January 11, Chinese President Xi Jinping, addressing the opening study session at the Party School of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, called for a greater effort to deepen the review, study, education, and promotion of the CPC’s history so as to better understand and make good use of the historical experience of the Party over the past century. With China’s rapid rise, this advice is also applicable to Western socialists and China observers.

China’s rise will usher in multi-polarity yet, bizarrely, few Western experts, including Western socialists, understand China from its own historical standpoint. This is highlighted by the many prophetic calls that have thus far proved wrong.

For example, that China would become more like a Western liberal democracy never came to pass. The “China collapse” theory fails regularly, only to get put on “life support” to extend it indefinitely into the future. Then, the “China is a neoliberal state working towards capitalist restoration,” posited by some Western Marxists, looks like a historical inaccuracy today.

Why then has the West, including Western socialists, failed to understand China’s rise? One reason is the contested nature of socialism where malfeasance and inequality stand in the way of the aims of socialism. However, resolute action against corruption and the efforts to eradicate absolute poverty have shown that China can counter these forces.

Today, it is an irony of geopolitics that the West, claiming to stand up for justice, is now more belligerent towards a China that has achieved positive results against the forces of graft and poverty. Indeed, while no one would, from a moral standpoint, say that inequality and corruption are positive, history may prove that these diabolic forces acted as a temporary smokescreen for China’s rise which clouded the perceptions of imperialist powers who today seek China’s downfall.

Not studying China’s theoretical and governing system is not only about China’s material conditions not equating with future ideals, it also comes down to a general disengagement with knowledge produced under non-liberal democratic systems. Many Western socialists seeking to build socialism within the confines of liberal democracy, loaded towards the interests of capital, have been co-opted by the “universal” application of this governing system and so disparage knowledge arising outside this “political container” as being inauthentic.

While Western socialists have made progress at home, such as the building of universal healthcare in Western Europe, these advances are constantly threatened by capital. Even more devastating is that when socialist parties, like Britain’s Labor Party under Tony Blair, came to power they did not prevent neo-colonial wars, like the plunder of Iraq, from taking place. It is this global context that undermines the prospect of real socialism and democracy not only in the Global South but also in the West.

When I pointed out the hypocrisy of Blair’s concerns for “China’s abuses in Xinjiang” in the British newspaper The Morning Star, the social democrat organization “Workers’ Liberty”, which denies that states like China, Cuba, and Vietnam even belong to the socialist camp, attacked me for “whataboutery” spuriously accusing me of being an employee of the Chinese state. They then shamefully supported the claims of genocide and slavery concocted by the military-industrial complex.

Firstly, the claim of whataboutery is too often a way to limit the boundaries of an argument because it denies contextualization which highlights imperial contradictions. Secondly, I am not justifying one “evil” (genocide and slavery) against another (the invasion of Iraq) because the claims of genocide and slavery, just like Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, are false claims which seek to ignite more atrocity against the Global South which could, through nuclear war, lead to Armageddon. Needless to say, if the mainstream Western left are captured within the framework of imperialist propaganda then they are hardly going to see any value in theory arising from states demonized by the same system.

Another problem is that the West has been dominant for so long and so it seems hard, even for genuine socialists, to grasp the momentous changes that are occurring in the world and that demand a look at other theoretical systems. Some view Marx’s writings more as a religion than a historical method that needs to be constantly updated.

As such, they do not recognize that the nature of capitalism and class relations has changed dramatically. Needless to say, they have difficulty recognizing the contributions of Chinese Marxism, which is conscious not only of theory predicated within history but its cultural and spatial aspects too where the building of socialism in present-day China requires different methods to Western Europe.

Of course, one doesn’t have to agree with the conclusions of China’s governing philosophy but one has to recognize that this philosophy, which is dynamic and heavily mixed with strategy, deeply informs China’s governing system and development process. When Europe arose, bringing momentous changes to the world, all manner of theories arose out of Europe, including the writings of Karl Marx, which were put forward to explain this phenomenon.

Likewise, China’s rise is bringing momentous changes too, and consequently, its material success demands to be studied not just from the aforementioned theories, that have proven to be wrong, but from its own theoretical outlook premised on its own historical, cultural, and spatial conditions.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/16/w ... rspective/

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Platts: 2030 nonfossil fuel goal will be reached ahead of schedule
By ZHENG XIN | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-01-22 09:50

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A wind farm in Northwest China's Gansu province, Nov 3, 2020. [Photo/IC]

China is likely to achieve the target of increasing the share of nonfossil fuels in primary energy to 25 percent ahead of the scheduled deadline of 2030, according to a projection by Platts Analytics, an industry research provider.

China will also have wind and solar capacity of over 1.2 billion kilowatts by 2030, Platts Analytics projected.

"China will comfortably reach these targets, likely ahead of schedule, and may not characterize them as particularly ambitious," said Ivy Yin, an analyst with Platts Analytics.

"China's key Five-Year Plan has also set a carbon intensity of GDP target, to reduce intensity by 18 percent by 2025 from 2021. Platts Analytics also projects China will achieve this target," she said.

According to Platts Analytics, China's 2060 net zero goal requires a massive reduction in emissions, and the biggest challenges that China faces in decarbonization are in the use of coal by industry in general and the power generation sector in particular.

By 2050, carbon dioxide emissions in these sectors need to decline by nearly 70 percent from the current levels, it said.

Platts Analytics projects that industrial emissions will decline by 20 percent by 2050, while those in power generation will decline by 25 percent.

In order to speed up the pace of reducing coal consumption, China has pledged it will promote the use of alternative energy sources and spur an industrial upgrade in the sector.

The country also plans to strictly and rationally limit the increase in coal consumption during the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25) and phase it down during the 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-30).

Lin Boqiang, head of the China Institute for Studies in Energy Policy at Xiamen University in Fujian province, said as coal-fired power generation accounts for about 65 percent of the total power generated, long-term efforts alone can help lower the share of coal in China's energy structure while ensuring energy supplies to both households and industries.

Companies in the coal-fired power sector are already taking measures in this direction, including phasing out outdated capacity and adopting technology-led production procedures.

For instance, State Power Investment Corp has said it will continue reducing the use of coal in its power generation. It has invested 490 billion yuan ($77 billion) over the past five years in clean energy.

China leads the world in wind and solar installations. Clean energy is on its way to exceeding total energy demand growth in the country.

On the other hand, the country has recently begun a carbon emissions market, which will also support and facilitate the necessary decarbonization in order to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.

Chinese policymakers need to bridge short-term goals of economic development with longer-term environmental goals, said Platts Analytics.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 82955.html

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Trust in govt hits record of 91% in China
By ZHANG YI | CHINA DAILY | Updated: 2022-01-22 07:23

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A medical worker takes a swab sample from a citizen for nucleic acid test at a testing site in Dongli district in North China's Tianjin, Jan 15, 2022. [Photo/Xinhua]

Performance on key issues takes figure to high level in recent Edelman survey

The Chinese government's performance in tackling COVID-19, ensuring economic growth, fighting corruption and pollution, and enhancing its own governance capacity and its quicker response to public concerns are all reasons behind a record high level of trust among Chinese citizens in the nation's government, according to a global survey and experts.

As much as 91 percent of Chinese citizens interviewed by Edelman, a top global public relations consultancy firm, said that they trust their government. That is a striking comparison to the United States, where about 39 percent of respondents said that they trusted their nation's government, according to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, the annual trust and credibility survey, released earlier this week.

About 36,000 respondents from 28 countries participated in the 30-minute online interviews in November, the report said.

Of all the four categories the survey covers, namely business, nongovernmental organizations, government and media, the trust index of Chinese citizens increased, while that of US citizens declined. Overall, the trust index of Chinese people increased 11 points to 83 while that of people in the US fell five points to 43, it showed.

The report said that China was the first major economy to thrive after the COVID-19 outbreak. It was also the only major economy to see growth in 2020, with that momentum continuing throughout most of last year.

The Chinese government also made progress in other areas last year, such as the fight against pollution and its anti-corruption campaign, according to the report.

The findings are consistent with those of a 10-year survey by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government on China. This said that the Chinese people's rate of satisfaction with their government's performance has been over 90 percent for years in a row.

"As a Chinese citizen and a civil servant, I'm not surprised at all," Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Thursday at a news conference. "The reason is that the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government actually deliver for the people."

"They put people front and center, and follow the philosophy of all for the people and by the people, including in governance and development," he said, adding that the country is also soberly aware that various risks and challenges lie ahead and it must be vigilant even in times of tranquility.

Deborah Lehr, the CEO of Edelman, said that "success in rapidly bringing the pandemic under control created confidence with Chinese citizens" and "China has since helped vaccinate the world", which "contributed to confidence in the government".

Liu Leming, an associate professor of political science at East China University of Political Science and Law, said that the government's effective tackling of the epidemic, increasing governance capacity and quicker response to public concern resulted in people's increased trust.

The Chinese government has a strong performance legitimacy, Liu said, adding that, "It emphasizes actual results and has the ability of accomplishing goals it wants to, ranging from economic development to people's livelihoods, which makes the people feel proud and increases their trust."

When problems occur, authorities at all levels in recent years can usually respond to issues within 48 hours, or even 24 hours after they occur, he said. "This has greatly increased people's trust in the government."

Liu said in the future the government should continue to adhere to the people-centered philosophy and govern in a scientific and democratic way to maintain such a high level of trust.

The report also showed that many people are losing faith in the validity of capitalism, with about 52 percent of respondents in 27 countries saying that capitalism does more harm than good in the world.

Liu said that parties take turns in power in Western political systems, which leads to an unstable and unsustainable implementation of policies. In contrast, China has much longer-term planning and people have stable expectations about the government's policies.

"In Western-style political systems, it's difficult to reach a consensus in society. Instead of doing practical things, the politicians are often quarreling and the public know it is a political show," he said.

When a political party comes to power, it tends to favor certain interest groups and is unable to introduce fair policies, resulting in social inequality, especially the gap between rich and poor, he added.

Liu said that the poor government performance in Western nations, especially the weak response to the pandemic and the economic slowdown, is contributing to people's growing distrust.

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20220 ... 828ea.html
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 29, 2022 2:48 pm

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China launches Global South economic alliance to challenge US unilateralism
We are very pleased to republish this article by US anti-imperialist journalist Benjamin Norton discussing how China is taking the lead in fashioning an international united front of developing countries against imperialism and in favour of independence, peace and development on both the political and economic fronts. Benjamin notes that the Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations has a stronger core of anti-imperialist and progressive governments promoting its explicitly political agenda whereas the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative, launched earlier this month, embraces a considerably broader range of developing countries.

In republishing this article, we also take this opportunity to warmly welcome Benjamin’s new Multipolarista media platform. We wish it every success and look forward to cooperating.
China is leading an international effort to develop alliances to counter US hegemony.

In March 2021, 17 nations — many led by anti-imperialist and progressive governments, including Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia among others — formed a diplomatic alliance called the Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations, which seeks to defend sovereignty and multilateralism against the unilateral domination of the United States and Western Europe.

This January 20, China’s mission to the UN launched a new, economic version of this diplomatic alliance, called the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative.

This new Group of Friends seeks to promote China’s “Global Development Initiative” (GDI), and complements China’s massive international infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative.

Chinese President Xi Jinping announced the creation of the GDI at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2021. He said the campaign aims at promoting “people-centered,” environmentally friendly development, with the primary goals of reducing poverty, helping formerly colonized countries in the Global South, and eventually achieving carbon neutrality.

To this end, Beijing has sought to merge the GDI with the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.


The new Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative launched this January 20 consists of countries who have joined China in its GDI.

In the founding meeting, Beijing’s ambassador cautioned against “unilateralism” and the “resurgent Cold-War mentality and the clamoring for ‘decoupling’” — a clear reference to the aggressive campaigns waged by Washington and Brussels.

The Chinese ambassador explained that the GDI “is a platform for mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation.”

While the United States and European Union have tried to recruit countries in a global Cold War Two alliance against China and Russia, Beijing made it clear that the GDI “is open and inclusive, and will not create any kind of small circles.”

Representatives of the following nations participated in this founding meeting of the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative, alongside China:

Belarus
Benin
Bolivia
Burundi
Cambodia
Cuba
Chile
Djibouti
Dominica
DPRK
El Salvador
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gabon
Guinea
Indonesia
Iran
Kazakhstan
Nicaragua
Pakistan
Peru
Qatar
Russia
Saudi Arabia
Serbia
Singapore
Syria
Tajikistan
Thailand
United Arab Emirates
Uzbekistan
Venezuela
Vietnam
Yemen
Zimbabwe

Unlike the Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations, the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative is not clearly anti-imperialist. It includes, for example, the reactionary Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, which collaborate with Western imperialism. And some other members are certainly not progressive friends of national-liberation struggles.

But this new economic alliance shows the foundations for the structure of the new multipolar world being built, which is no longer dominated by US unipolar hegemony.

In this increasingly multipolar world, we can expect to see more contradictory moves by countries like the Gulf monarchies, which are trying to balance the rise of China against the United States to their mutual benefit.

This process is full of contradictions, but it part of a general weakening of US imperialism, and creates more political, economic, and diplomatic space for progressive and revolutionary forces in countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and beyond to not only survive but to thrive and advance.

At the founding meeting, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, explained Beijing’s thinking behind the new Group of Friends:

As we speak, the world today is faced with many grave challenges. We are witnessing profound changes and a pandemic both unseen in a century. The wealth gap, recovery gap, development gap and immunity gap keep widening. Global development is under severe impact. The pandemic has left many countries, especially developing countries, high and dry. People of all countries are eager to get back onto the right track of sustainable development.

Against this backdrop, the GDI proposed by President Xi aims at addressing the pressing challenges facing all countries, especially developing ones. And it is committed to practicing true multilateralism, putting people front and center, fully implementing the 2030 Agenda, and realizing the aspiration of all people for a better life.



Recent years have witnessed setbacks in global development, and widening wealth gap and increasing inequality among and within countries. The pandemic has further eroded the global poverty reduction gains in the past decade, one hundred and forty million people falling back into poverty, the number of people living in hunger reaching eight hundred million. We are also facing food security, energy security, climate change and other prominent issues. The implementation of the 2030 Agenda is confronted with serious challenges. Against such backdrop, the GDI adheres to the people-centered philosophy, prioritizes development, and promotes the international community to place development at the core of the global macro policy framework. I’m sure it will provide stronger and more targeted support to developing countries, making sure no one is left behind.

It is important to note that the Initiative, with development as its priority and commitment to people-centered development, aims to protect and promote human rights through development, especially the right to subsistence and development of all people, including women, children and other vulnerable groups.

The creation of the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative is just one of a series of very interesting diplomatic moves happening behind the scenes. These developments don’t get coverage in mainstream corporate media because they’re not very sexy, but they are important.

The launch got zero coverage in the mainstream English-language corporate media. Chinese state-backed media outlets did cover the event though.

The Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations, the diplomatic complement to the Group of Friends of the Global Development Initiative, was formed in March 2021 by the following 16 UN member states and Palestine (a UN observer state):

Algeria
Angola
Belarus
Bolivia
Cambodia
China
Cuba
DPRK
(Equatorial Guinea later joined)
Eritrea
Iran
Lao
Nicaragua
Palestine
Russia
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
Syria
Venezuela

Both the diplomatic and the economic alliance are still very young, but expect to hear more about these Groups of Friends in the future. These are the seeds that have been planted for a new multipolar international order.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/27/c ... ateralism/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 01, 2022 3:15 pm

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Sanctions in the New Cold War on China
The following article by Carlos Martinez features as a chapter in the forthcoming book Sanctions Kill – The World Stands Up. The article provides a detailed analysis of the sanctions imposed by the US and its allies on the People’s Republic of China and exposes the role they play within the escalating New Cold War.

Sanctions Kill – The World Stands Up will be published by World View Forum in early Spring 2022.
Background

The instinctive attitude of the United States towards the Chinese Revolution was of course one of hostility. In a protracted war between progress and reaction, between the future and the past, the governments of the US and the People’s Republic of China were, and are, are on opposite sides of the barricades. Hence shortly after the formation of the PRC in 1949, the US maintained a strict embargo on China.

With the move towards rapprochement in the early 1970s and a tacit agreement to ‘peacefully coexist’, the embargo was finally removed. Then with China’s strategic shift to integrate into the global economy, the trickle of trade and investment gradually expanded into one of the largest and most important economic relationships in the world, with bilateral trade volume currently standing at just over half a trillion dollars annually. Thousands of US businesses have generated enormous profits from their investments in China and (particularly in recent years) from selling to a vast and growing Chinese market.

Ruling classes in the West were, to a considerable extent, comfortable with incorporating China into globalised capitalism, to the extent that China’s role was limited to providing cheap, competent and well-educated labour. However, it was never the intention of the Chinese leadership to remain permanently at the lowest rung of the global economic ladder. China has pursued a patient strategy of welcoming foreign investment, setting up joint enterprises with Western companies, learning the latest technologies and management techniques, and building up its own advanced industry. Meanwhile it has invested very heavily in education and innovation. China’s R&D spending reached 378 billion USD in 2020 – 2.4 percent of its GDP and nearly three times the figure for the US.

As a result, China is on its way to becoming “a moderately developed socialist country by the middle of the 21st century”, as Deng Xiaoping predicted some 35 years ago.1 China has become a world leader in network technology, in renewable energy, nuclear energy, high-speed rail, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, quantum computing, and several other important areas. It is increasingly competing with the US in spaces that the US is used to dominating, such as cloud computing and industrial automation.

The US ruling class has not responded favourably to all this. These uppity Asian communists refuse to stay in their lane! Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs recently described the response of US elites to China’s emergence as a science and technology powerhouse: “The basic attitude, if I could paraphrase, was: ‘how dare they do that? That’s what we do, not what they do. They’re a workshop, we’re the technology leader.’”2

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has caused further discomfort. The Belt and Road, described by British political analyst Jude Woodward as “a vision of continental integration on a historic scale”,3 is a growing economic network underpinned by rapid infrastructure development – particularly high-speed rail, ports, and energy production and transmission. Beijing leads the financing and macro planning for this historic initiative. The expansion of the Belt and Road into large parts of Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa and further afield has become a major source of concern for those that seek to preserve US hegemony. In the words of US ‘elder statesman’ Henry Kissinger, the practical significance of the BRI will be to “shift the world’s centre of gravity from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”4 That is, China is creating a development path that isn’t defined by the US or US-controlled institutions.

In summary, the US ruling class finds itself in a position in which its role as sole economic, political and military superpower is under threat. To make matters worse, the source of this threat is a socialist, non-white, developing country which is working in concert with other countries towards the democratisation of international relations.

This is the overall context for the New Cold War, in which the US is the principal antagonist and China is the principal target. Just like the original Cold War (waged against the Soviet Union, the socialist countries and the Global South), the New Cold War is being fought on multiple fronts: political, military, ideological, propagandistic and economic.

Wave of sanctions under Trump and Biden

Then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton wrote in 2011 that “one of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will be to lock in a substantially increased investment – diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise – in the Asia-Pacific region.”5 These words heralded the launch of the ‘Pivot to Asia’, which clearly identified China as the primary concern of US foreign policy in the modern era. But it was under the Trump administration that the New Cold War started to escalate in a serious way, with the initiation of a trade war – supposedly to put a stop to “the greatest theft ever perpetrated by anyone or any country in the history of the world.”6 Trump imposed a wide range of tariffs, unprecedented since the lifting of the trade embargo some 50 years ago.

Alongside the tariffs, the Trump administration imposed new US sanctions against China for the first time since 1989. In 2018, two of China’s top technology companies, Huawei and ZTE, were banned from providing equipment to any federal US agency. A year later, US companies were prevented from doing business with Huawei or its subsidiaries unless they had specifically been provided with a government licence – due to Huawei allegedly violating the US’s unilateral (and illegal) sanctions against Iran.

In the summer of 2020, the Trump administration announced two new sets of sanctions against China. Under the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, several senior Chinese officials were subjected to visa restrictions and asset freezing. Under the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, a number of top Hong Kong officials (including Chief Executive Carrie Lam) plus all 14 Vice Chairpersons of the National People’s Congress were subjected to similar punishment.

Things have only got worse in the first year of the Biden administration. In June 2021, Biden signed an executive order banning US citizens from investing in Chinese companies with alleged ties to the defence or surveillance technology sectors. The list of banned companies includes Huawei, China Mobile Communications Group, and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC) – a key player in China’s bid to develop its homegrown semiconductor industry (semiconductors are a crucial component of modern electronic devices). The list of banned companies purportedly connected to the “Chinese military-industrial complex” was expanded in December 2021 to include SenseTime, which develops facial recognition technology.7

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act was signed into law on 23 December 2021. Startlingly, this Act inverts the principle of presumption of innocence, since it contains “a rebuttable presumption that goods mined, produced, or manufactured (wholly or in part) in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are made with forced labor, where goods designated as such will be subject to an import ban into the United States.”8 That is, there is a starting assumption that any item produced in Xinjiang incorporates forced labour. Any importer will have to provide “clear and convincing evidence” that goods have not been made with forced labour – a sufficiently high legal bar that, in practice, makes the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act a blanket ban on all goods produced in Xinjiang.

Aside from these economic sanctions, the White House announced in December that it would be conducting a ‘diplomatic boycott’ of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, in light of “China’s egregious human rights abuses and atrocities in Xinjiang.”9

The State Department has also been strongly encouraging US allies to join its growing system of sanctions and boycotts. Britain, Canada and the EU imposed travel bans and asset freezes over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, in parallel with the US’s sanctions.10 Canada, Britain and the European Union have also followed the US lead in passing Magnitsky legislation, providing for sanctions against individuals alleged to have committed human rights abuses. This essentially means that under a “unified set of rules”, US-imposed sanctions on individuals are automatically applied in those countries.11 Meanwhile, Australia, Britain and Canada have announced their support for Biden’s ‘diplomatic boycott’ of the Olympics.12

The overall picture then is one of steadily escalating sanctions against China over the course of the last four years, with the changed occupancy of the White House not impacting this trajectory in the slightest.

Sanctions as New Cold War propaganda

The typical motivation for imperialist sanctions is to foment popular unrest by causing serious economic harm; “making the economy scream”, like the CIA did in Chile when it had the temerity to elect a Marxist government.13 Sanctions against Zimbabwe, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, Syria, Belarus and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) are manifestly designed with such a purpose in mind. Needless to say, such a strategy would have no chance of success in China, which is the second largest economy in the world and which is more than capable of imposing counter-measures that would cause significant damage to US business interests.

Sanctions against Chinese individuals over alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong will have very little effect on China’s economic growth; rather, such sanctions form part of a propaganda ‘full-court press’ designed to vilify China, to cultivate broad anti-China sentiment, and to build public support for the New Cold War. This propaganda is already having an impact; in the US, it has produced “a bipartisan consensus in Washington towards getting tough with China that is now extending to the broader public.”14

The propaganda surrounding the treatment of the Uyghur Muslim population of Xinjiang is particularly pernicious. This web of lies has been comprehensively debunked elsewhere, for example in an academic study by Eurispes,15 an extensive report by the International Action Center,16 and numerous investigative reports in the Grayzone.17 Suffice here to briefly note the following points:

1) While the State Department has accused China’s government of perpetrating a genocide in Xinjiang,18 absolutely no credible evidence has been supplied. As Jeffrey Sachs points out: “The charge of genocide should never be made lightly. Inappropriate use of the term may escalate geopolitical and military tensions and devalue the historical memory of genocides such as the Holocaust, thereby hindering the ability to prevent future genocides. It behooves the US government to make any charge of genocide responsibly, which it has failed to do here.”19

2) The reports and data analysis implicating the Chinese government in genocide, cultural genocide and forced sterilisation come almost exclusively from two sources, both utterly devoid of credibility. One is Adrian Zenz, a professional anti-China fanatic and senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation who is apparently “led by God” to spread slanders about China.20 The other is the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). ASPI is an Australian government think tank which receives funding from, among others, NATO, the US Department of Defense, the US State Department, Britain’s Foreign Office, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems and Raytheon. In short, it is deeply involved in the business of New Cold War and the militarisation of the Pacific, and obviously cannot be relied upon to carry out unbiased research on China.

3) The Uyghur population from 2010 to 2018 increased from 10.2 million to 12.7 million, an increase of 25 percent. In the same period, the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang increased by just 2 percent (the differential is explained largely by the fact that national minorities were exempt from the One Child Policy).21

4) As to claims of ‘cultural genocide’, there are over 24,000 mosques in Xinjiang, a higher number of mosques per capita of Muslim population than Turkey.22 All schools in Xinjiang teach the Uyghur language. All road signs have both Uyghur and Chinese writing. Pakistan’s Ambassador to China, Moin ul Haque, returning from an observer mission to Xinjiang, described the region as “a mosaic of 50-plus ethnic minorities, and these ethnic minorities exist in a very peaceful and harmonious manner.”23

Western sanctions against China over human rights abuses in Xinjiang can thus be clearly understood as part of an elaborate campaign of information warfare. Nobody that has researched the question can seriously believe that a genocide is taking place in Xinjiang. Any sanctions are not designed to punish Chinese officials for misdeeds but to support an overall structure of disinformation portraying China as a malevolent force.

Trying to slow China’s rise

Thanks to China’s economic strength, the West can’t starve the Chinese people into submission through economic warfare. However, one important motivation for the steadily escalating sanctions regime is to attempt to decelerate China’s emergence as the world’s pre-eminent leader in advanced technology. The authors of a recent report by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs observe that “China’s rapid rise to challenge US dominance of technology’s commanding heights has captured America’s attention.”24 The report notes that China has already established a leading role in several key areas and, “in others, on current trajectories, it will overtake the US within the next decade.”

One ‘choke point’ the US can leverage is its head start in the design and manufacture of semiconductors. As noted above, semiconductors are at the core of all electronic devices. Advances in semiconductors are driving – and will continue to drive – transformative change in a wide range of industries, from energy to medicine to space research. The Belfer Center report estimates that China is on course to become “a top-tier player in the semiconductor industry by 2030.” As such, preventing (or at least slowing) China’s emergence as a semiconductor superpower is a key priority for the US.

This issue goes beyond economics. If China outpaces the US in technological innovation, it will shift the entire global balance of forces; it will significantly weaken the ability of the imperialist powers to impose their will on the rest of the world; and it will showcase the fundamental validity of socialism as a means of propelling human progress. As Deng Xiaoping stated in 1984, “the superiority of the socialist system is demonstrated, in the final analysis, by faster and greater development of the productive forces than under the capitalist system.”25

Indeed, developments in technology in the coming decades form a crucial component of the material basis for the progression to a more advanced socialism. British researcher Keith Lamb writes: “China’s goal of building a modern socialist country by 2049 is predicated on mastering semiconductor technology which is the linchpin of the modern age, making innovations such as self-driving electric vehicles; fully-automated AI production systems, and supercomputers possible.”26

Such are the reasons for the wave of sanctions connected to the semiconductor industry. The US wants to restrict China’s ability to import semiconductors and, more importantly, to prevent China achieving self-sufficiency in semiconductor production. Blacklisting SMIC, China’s biggest manufacturer of computer chips, in December 2020, means that it is no longer able to source supplies from US companies. Chinese chip designers have been cut off from access to leading-edge chip design tools.27 Meanwhile Huawei has been prevented from importing chips, impacting its production of high-end smartphones.28 The US has been able to enforce many of these sanctions on an international scale, by virtue of its ‘long-arm jurisdiction’ – sanctioning non-US chipmakers that use US-made components. One notable absurdity here is that Taiwan, a region of China, complies with the US sanctions regime, and therefore Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) – the world’s most valuable semiconductor company – has been forced to stop its exports to the companies on the US Entity List, including Huawei.29

Unfortunately for US imperialism – but thankfully for China and the peoples of the world – this campaign of economic warfare is doomed to failure. As Radhika Desai notes, “US efforts to restrict chip supply to China will only increase its resolve to develop the necessary technology to produce the chips it needs domestically.”30 Indeed, according to market analysis firm GlobalData, US coercion is fomenting a “high octane, whole nation, everything-it-takes campaign to create a de-Americanized domestic semiconductor supply chain able to supply 75% of its needs by 2025” and achieve full self-sufficiency ten years later.”31

In the meantime, while stimulating China’s fast track to semiconductor self-sufficiency, sanctions are adversely impacting technology companies outside China, which for the last two decades has been the largest market for computer chips, in addition to being the ideal hi-tech manufacturing location. In recent years, the US semiconductor industry has derived over a third of its revenues from sales to China.32 These revenues have in turn fed into the R&D cycle and contributed to an impressive pace of innovation. It seems the US has settled on a ‘lose-lose’ strategy to replace the framework of cooperation that had brought significant benefit to both sides in recent decades.

Another area in which the US is using sanctions to gain a competitive advantage is solar power. China is by far the world’s largest producer of solar energy, with an installed capacity of 254 GW – more than three times that of the US, and growing fast.33 China also produces the bulk of the global supply of polysilicon (a key material in the production of solar panels). Johannes Bernreuter, author of the Polysilicon Market Outlook 2024, predicts that “China’s share in the global solar-grade polysilicon output will approach 90 percent in the coming years.”34

Unable to compete on price or productivity, the US has resorted to imposing sanctions on large parts of China’s solar panel industry35 – ostensibly on the basis of evidence-free and comprehensively debunked claims of the manufacturers using Uyghur forced labour.36 This is profoundly irresponsible and short-sighted behaviour. Chinese investment in solar technology over the course of the last 10-15 years has pushed the entire industry forward, and has brought prices down to a level where solar power is more cost-effective than fossil fuel alternatives in many parts of the world. This is an important contribution to the global struggle to prevent climate breakdown. The Western powers should be working closely with China and other countries on developing and deploying clean energy, rather than imposing sanctions with a view to gaining some fleeting economic advantage.

Unite to oppose hegemonism and Cold War

China is a leading voice opposing the West’s illegal sanctions regime, consistently using its role in international forums (including the UN Security Council and the G20) to oppose unilateralism and bullying. China has added its voice to the global demand to end the blockade on Cuba. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian demanded last year that the US “immediately and completely lift unilateral sanctions against Cuba in compliance with the purposes of the UN Charter and basic norms governing international relations”, adding that China “resolutely rejects any external interference in other countries’ internal affairs, imposition of unilateral sanctions, and attempt to gang up on other countries.”37 China has consistently opposed unilateral sanctions against the DPRK,38 Zimbabwe,39 Eritrea,40 Afghanistan,41 Venezuela,42 Nicaragua,43 Syria,44 Iran45 and Belarus.46

With its strong opposition to sanctions, war, interference and hegemonism; through its pursuit of multilateralism and its support for the principles of the UN Charter; and through its consistent engagement with the countries of the world on the basis of equality, friendship, solidarity and mutual benefit, China is an indispensable force in the development of a new, multipolar system of international relations. Such a framework is desperately needed by the peoples of the world, and those of us living in the belly of the imperialist beast should do what we can to support it.

References

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20.Singh, A; Blumenthal, M 2019, China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by US-backed NGO and far-right researcher ‘led by God’ against Beijing, The Grayzone, accessed 11 January 2022, <https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/chin ... esearcher/>. ↩︎
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24.Pan, C 2021, US-China tech war: China to overtake America in core 21st century technologies within next decade, Harvard report predicts, South China Morning Post, accessed 12 January 2022, <https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/arti ... st-century>. ↩︎
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29.Feng, C 2021, US-China tech war: supercomputer sanctions on China begin to bite as Taiwan’s TSMC said to suspend chip orders, South China Morning Post, accessed 13 January 2022, <https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/arti ... te-taiwans>. ↩︎
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35.Angel, R 2021, US bans target Chinese solar panel industry over Xinjiang forced labor concerns, The Guardian, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... r-concerns>. ↩︎
36.Rumors of ‘forced labor’ in Xinjiang refuted, Global Times, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1182815.shtml>. ↩︎
37.O’Connor, T 2021, China Backs Cuba in Saying US Should Apply Sanctions To Itself, Newsweek, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://www.newsweek.com/china-backs-cu ... lf-1612735>. ↩︎
38.China opposes ‘unhelpful’ unilateral U.S. sanctions on DPRK, CGTN, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://news.cgtn.com/news/2022-01-13/D ... index.html>. ↩︎
39.Liu, C 2021, China, African countries call on US to remove illegal sanctions on Zimbabwe, Global Times, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1237275.shtml>. ↩︎
40.China stands against any unilateral sanctions on Eritrea: Chinese FM, Global Times, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1245253.shtml>. ↩︎
41.Chinese top diplomat calls on US, other Western countries to lift sanctions on Afghanistan, TASS, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://tass.com/world/1354583>. ↩︎
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43.Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s Regular Press Conference on January 12, 2022, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xwfw_66539 ... 81428.html>. ↩︎
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46.Majeed, Z 2021, Belarus Strengthens Ties With ‘ironclad Friend’ China As West Slaps Sanctions On Regime, Republic World, accessed 14 January 2022, <https://www.republicworld.com/world-new ... egime.html>. ↩︎

https://socialistchina.org/2022/01/27/s ... -on-china/

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BOOK REVIEW “UYGHURS: TO PUT AN END TO FAKE NEWS”
Posted by Roger Keeran | Jan 31, 2022 | Featured Stories | 0

Image

Uyghurs: To Put and End to Fake News

Ouighours: pour en finir avec les fake news. By Maxime Vivas. France: La Route de la Soie—Editions, 2020. 14 Euros. Pp. 175.


REVIEWED BY ROGER KEERAN
January 20, 2022


The United States government is ratcheting up a cold war against China. The Biden administration’s agreement to supply Australia with nuclear submarines, its decision to create a new department in the CIA aimed at countering China, and its recent decision to impose a diplomatic boycott on the Chinese Winter Olympics are just three recent signs of the aggressive posture taken by the U.S. in the new cold war. A key part of the new cold war is a tidal wave of ideological attacks on China aimed at showing that China is a threat—to human rights, democracy, women’s rights, labor rights, and American security. All of this is geared to justify American belligerence toward China and generate support for this belligerence and a frightened public’s willingness to pay for it. (Recently the Senate passed a bill previously passed by the House calling for $768 billion appropriation of Defense Department, $24 billion more than either Biden or the Pentagon sought.) A centerpiece of this ideological offensive that the mass media amplifies on a daily basis is that China is committing genocide against its Moslem Uyghur minority in the Xinjiang autonomous region.



Even though most politicians, as well as the general population, have no idea who the Uyghurs are, where Xinjiang is on a map, what Chinese policy toward the Uyghurs is, or even how to pronounce Uyghur, they buy the idea of Uyghur genocide. The widespread ignorance makes Maxime Vivas’s book so valuable. Vivas not only provides a primer on the Uyghurs and Xinjiang, but also explains the Chinese policy in Xinjiang, and makes a forceful argument that the charge of genocide is of apiece with other lies like those about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that serve to justify American imperial belligerence.



Vivas’s book provides an antidote to the anti-Chinese poison. Since Vivas’s book is only available in French, it deserves a summary in English.



Xinjiang is the largest province of China, embracing a largely uninhabitable 620,000 square miles, located in the far northwest of China next to central Asia, and containing 25 million inhabitants of which 45 percent of whom are Uyghurs. The Uyghurs are largely rural and Moslem. Like many European countries, China has faced a problem of growing Islamic fundamentalism and the repeated terrorist attacks it has fostered. Since 2008 terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists that have taken scores of lives. These included an attack preceding the Chinese Olympics in 2008 that killed sixteen, a 2014 knife attack on passengers in a railroad station that killed thirty-three, and most horrifically a machete attack on Han miners in Xinjiang in 2015 that killed thirty-one.



Since 2015 China has moved forcefully to combat the threats of Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism, and separatism in Xinjiang. Part of this policy has involved increased surveillance and arrests. Between 2014 and 2019, China arrested 12,955 alleged terrorists and confiscated 2,052 explosives. For the most part, however, the policy has been to combat Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism and separatism by raising the cultural, educational, and economic level of the Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples. This has involved investing in factories and mines in Xinjiang, building mosques and museums, and establishing educational centers to teach the Uyghurs vocational skills.



The western media have treated the Chinese policies as if they constituted a nefarious policy to eradicate the Uyghur people and their culture. Sources in the West portray the education centers as concentration camps and the training brainwashing. Vivas catalogues the charges: the Chinese have imprisoned Uyghurs for not eating pork or not drinking alcohol, have herded millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, have harvested organs from living people to sell abroad, have sterilized women, have raped women and men, have brainwashed people, have made children denounce their parents, have demolished mosques, and so forth. China has flatly denied these charges.



Vivas demonstrates that some of the most sensational charges are demonstrably false, are contradicted by verifiable facts, or have been dismissed by independent investigators.



Take the case of Adrian Zenz, a Christian fundamentalist, who calls himself an independent German researcher. In 2019 Zenz claimed that 1.8 million Uyghurs were interned in concentration camps and that the falling number of births among the Uyghurs is evidence of genocide. The birth rate among Uyghurs has fallen, but Vivas points to several benign causes including the growing urbanization, the rising living standards, and the increased educational level of the Uyghur people. Moreover, Vivas points out that the death of Uyghur children has declined dramatically from 420 to 600 per thousand sixty years ago to 10.03 per thousand today. Also, in the past four decades the Uyghur population has grown from 5, 550, 000 to 12,720, million. This is hardly what one would expect for a population supposedly undergoing extermination.



In a celebrated case used against the Chinese, a Uyghur woman, Zumret Dawul, claimed that Chinese authorities imprisoned her in a re-education camp and forced her to undergo the surgical removal of her uterus. The Chinese said that she was never enrolled in an educational center, and that after giving birth to her third child, she had had her tubes tied at her own request. Dawul’s brother claimed her story was a lie, and the hospital produced a document that Dawul had signed authorizing the surgery.



In another celebrated case, a Uyghur doctor living in the United States told Radio Free Asia on March 15, 2019 that he and rich Saudi Arabians were involved in an illegal scheme to harvest “halal organs” among Moslems in China. Six days later, he recanted and apologized for promoting a “hoax.” Though, this doctor has confessed criminal activity, no entity has brought criminal charges against him.



As for the charge that the Chinese were destroying mosques, Vivas replies that only mosques that have been demolished were unsuitable or dilapidated, and that in consultation with religious leaders and the congregations, these were replaced by new and often larger mosques. In seventy years, the number of mosques in Xinjiang has increased from 2000 to 24,400. In Xinjiang there is one mosque for every 530 Moslems.



In 2019 the World Bank loaned China $50 million to build five colleges to train professionals. Faced with allegations that the Chinese were using the money to build concentration camps, the World Bank conducted an on-site investigation. The Report of the World Bank published in Washington on November 11, 2019 concluded: “The examination did not corroborate these allegations.”



Most importantly, Vivas points out that in spite of the impression widely spread by the mass media and U.S. officials, the accusation of Chinese genocide against the Uyghurs has not been supported by the United Nations. The impression that the United Nations backs these charges arose after August 13, 2018 when Gay Johnson McDougall, an American lawyer specializing in human rights who is also a researcher in residence at the Leitner Center of International Law and Justice of Fordham University, made a sensational charge at the UN headquarters in Geneva that China was holding millions of Uyghurs in detention centers or concentration camps. Though McDougall provided no verification other than saying her information came from credible sources, the charges were retailed widely by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and other news outlets. These papers made no independent effort to substantiate the charges, aside from checking with so-called human rights organizations, such as the World Uighur Congress and Chinese Human Rights Defenders, groups financed by the National Endowment for Democracy.



Moreover, when the United States tried to have the UN pass a resolution asking China to respect the rights of Uyghurs in Xinjiang only, 39 of the 193 member states of the UN supported it. For the most part the charges of genocide are the product of individuals or groups connected to the CIA, or the National Endowment for Democracy. For example, a major source of attacks on China’s treatment of the Uyghurs comes from the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a self-proclaimed human rights organization founded in Munich, Germany in 2004, that advocates for the independence of Xinjiang, which it calls East Turkestan. Several leaders of the WUC had posts with Radio Free Asian and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, both CIA creations. Moreover, the WUC is generously financed by the National Endowment for Democracy, the soft arm of the CIA.



Vivas is a former postal worker and former member of the French Communist Party (but not a member of any pro-Chinese party) who made himself a writer after his postal facility closed. Before this book on the Uyghurs, he wrote a book on Tibet and on the Chinese policies there. Though Vivas has visited Tibet and Sinjiang (twice), his inability to read or speak Mandarin or Uyghur naturally limited his research. Nevertheless, using firsthand observations and sources available to any enterprising journalist, Vivas has produced a valuable book and a convincing argument that the charge of Chinese genocide against the Uyghurs not only is bogus but also has been systematically promoted by groups financed by the U.S. government.

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Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 05, 2022 4:17 pm

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Justin Podur: Why comparing Chinese Africa investment to Western colonialism Is no joke

We are very pleased to reproduce this article from FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) in which Justin Podur dissects a recent broadcast by South African comedian Trevor Noah, which made facile claims that China was colonising Africa. Whilst not hesitating to acknowledge shortcomings and mistakes, Podur presents a detailed refutation of Noah’s claims and, in so doing, draws apt comparisons between China’s contributions to Africa’s development and the truly murderous and rapacious history of imperialism and colonialism on the continent.

“Why China Is in Africa” (12/16/21) is a question Trevor Noah took up last month for Comedy Central‘s Daily Show. As with many of the topics taken up by the Daily Show, the issue is no joke: China has a large and growing economic presence in many African countries. The China/Africa deals cry out for analysis: Are they different from the deals on offer from Western countries like the US, Britain or France?

Post-independence Africa’s economic relationship with the West has been mediated through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Funding for projects comes with a range of conditionalities; when Western loans come due, the IMF demands painful cuts to health and education programs as the price of refinancing. In the past, the IMF has taken outright control of African governments. At other times, the US has sponsored coups, assassinated leaders and fomented civil wars on the continent.

China, meanwhile, does not attach political strings to its loans. China is known as a “patient” investor, making deals that take decades to pay off. When the Chinese loans come due, China reschedules or restructures debt payments. Ex-Minister for Public Works for Liberia, Gyude Moore, cited 87 cases of restructuring or rescheduling of such loans between 2000–19.

Which of these two approaches sounds like neocolonialism, and which like economic development?

China offers Africa terms that the West isn’t interested in matching. Instead of improving its own offers, the West presents scary tales to try to infantilize Africans and frighten them away from doing business with China. Examples of these scare stories abound, from Mike Pence (USA Today, 11/17/18) and John Bolton (Guardian, 12/13/18) to Foreign Policy (4/25/19) and Al Jazeera (5/17/17).

But even in the Wall Street Journal (5/2/19), readers can learn that “the real political purpose” of China’s deals “isn’t a debt trap but building goodwill and high-level relationships.” The New York Times (4/26/19) published an opinion in 2019 that “the idea that the Chinese government is doling out debt strategically, for its benefit, isn’t supported by the facts.”

The format of the Daily Show and comparable shows (e.g., Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) makes it possible to deliver political commentary and news with plausible deniability about political viewpoints (“it’s only comedy”). Noah, a New York-based comedian who grew up in South Africa, did his best to spin Chinese investment in Africa into neo-colonialism—regardless of the underlying reality.

‘With the stroke of a pen’

“Back in the day,” Noah begins,

when one country wanted to take over another country, they had to beat them in a war…. But now it looks like a country might have found a way to take over another country with the stroke of a pen.

Noah presents a clip from BBC World News (11/30/21), in turn quoting the London Times (11/30/21): “China has recently been accused of trying to take over Uganda’s sole international airport if the East African country fails to pay a $200 million loan for the expansion of the site.”

Debunked in Asia Times (12/8/21), the “Uganda airport takeover” story was based on a tendentious reading of a 2015 loan agreement between the government of Uganda and the Exim Bank of China. The grace period for the loan ends in December 2022, at the end of which, if 87 previous examples over the past 20 years are indicative, China and Uganda will presumably renegotiate the terms.

Noah quotes the Chinese embassy’s statement: “Not a single project in Africa has ever been ‘confiscated’ by China because of failing to pay Chinese loans.” But Noah does not find this reassuring, saying: “‘We have never confiscated an airport’ is very different from ‘we are never going to confiscate an airport.’”

In fact, past behavior is a pretty good indicator of future behavior. The Western record in Africa—an indicator of future behavior there—is appalling.

The simplest Western strategy of all is to withhold investment until African countries are ready to accept terrible conditions—including demands to privatize national industries that amount to across-the-board confiscation by Western corporations. The strategy has worked in the past because, as Noah says, Africa needs financing:

Ever since the age of colonialism ended, Africa has been working hard to modernize its economies and catch up with the rest of the world. But to do that it needs lots of new infrastructure: roads, railways, ports, dams…. You name it, Africa needs to build it. The problem is, that stuff all costs money. Money that most African countries don’t have. But in recent years, many African countries have found themselves a new sugar daddy: China.

How China/Africa deals work

But what went wrong with Africa’s old “sugar daddy”? How did China end up financing projects in Africa, once a Western monopoly? In Rhys Owen Jenkins’ 2018 book, How China Is Reshaping the Global Economy: Development Impacts in Africa and Latin America, the author tells an illustrative story. Oil-rich Angola, whose infrastructure was devastated after surviving a (US-sponsored) civil war, approached the IMF in 2001. But the IMF demanded cuts to public spending as a condition of giving Angola any money—and a shaky regime coming fresh off of a brutal civil war can ill-afford to alienate the people with an austerity program.

So Angola approached China in 2002, and the relationship has expanded since. Angola and China trade directly in oil. While most oil deals in the global economy are transacted in US dollars, China often makes “infrastructure for resources” deals, circumventing the US dollar altogether.

Fantu Cheru and Cyril Obi present other examples in their 2010 book The Rise of China and India in Africa. In the DR Congo, Zhongxing Telecommunication Equipment Corporation (ZTE) built a mobile phone network and sold phones in hopes of “capturing a market niche primarily focused on the millions of African poor who now constitute the largest potential consumers.” In Kenya, Tianpu Xianxing partnered with Electrogen Technologies to establish a solar panel factory, seeing an opportunity in Kenya’s policy of using solar power to extend electrification.

But it isn’t all happy win/win deals. Elsewhere in the book, the authors present Zambia as a case where Chinese investors entered an economy already devastated by IMF-imposed structural adjustment, such that workers in all sectors—including those with heavy Chinese investment—are indeed exploited. China didn’t create those conditions, but nonetheless benefits from exploitation. How should that be addressed? A complex analysis is called for, comprehending the overall impact of Chinese and Western investment and the competition between them, the pre-investment condition of a given African economy and its bargaining power. But summarizing it all as a form of Chinese colonialism is misleading.

China as ‘cool mom’

China’s approach of offering financing without political strings makes it the “cool mom of international finance,” Noah says, adding a joke in which (as usual) Africans are the children and others are the grownups. “Oh, you and your friends want to come party…. Come do it in our basement with your child soldiers, we won’t hear a thing!” (The implication is that the US is a “strict mom” that forbids its partners from making use of child soldiers. In fact, after the US State Department in 2020 identified 14 countries as being responsible for recruiting or using child soldiers, President Joe Biden signed a waiver allowing the US to continue providing security aid to eight of those countries, five of which are in Africa.)

Despite China’s assertion that there are no strings, Noah suggests that China’s deals do indeed have a political agenda: Countries that do more business with China also tend to vote with China about Taiwan at the United Nations. This observation may have the causality backwards, however: Countries that vote with China are voting against the US—something that a country can only do if it is in a position to protect itself from US economic retaliation.

Yemen had no such protection in 1990 when it voted against the US invasion of Iraq. US diplomats told their Yemeni counterparts, “That was the most expensive vote you ever cast,” and the US withdrew $70 million in foreign aid to the country. Today, African countries have a second option.

Noah then points to Eswatini as the only African country that does recognize Taiwan, and follows this up with the most demeaning insult in the entire piece—predictably, perhaps, towards Africans. Noah says:

That’s the power of money right there. Enough of it can make you switch allegiances, change your principles, do anything. For enough money, you could get Africans to start saying that Africa is just one country.

He then asks for money in an “African” accent, joking that Eswatini will change its tune upon realizing that China is “giving out money.”

Eswatini, called Swaziland until 2018, was picked up in 1906 by the British as a protectorate after the Boer War. Britain’s South Africa colonies had planned to make Swaziland part of the Union of South Africa, but plans changed; the country gained independence only in 1968. Eswatini, with a population of about a million, is currently ruled as an absolute monarchy. Its huge neighbor, Noah’s native South Africa, exerts immense political influence. At the moment, the monarchy is being challenged by a pro-democracy movement. It is dubious to hold up the decision of Eswatini’s monarchy as an example of an African state freely choosing principle over money.

‘Jobs are going to China’

Noah’s next point is about employment: “You might say subordinating your foreign policy to another country is worth it if it means getting all this investment… and it is true, these projects do create jobs. It’s just that many of those jobs are going to China!”

A news clip continues the argument: “The country’s been accused of unfair labor practices in Africa including bringing its own workers instead of hiring locally.” Noah presents no hard data on this point.

But there are studies on China/Africa workforce development; a 2018 paper presented a number of interesting figures about the topic. There were 10,000 Chinese-funded companies, 90% of which were private companies. Surveys cited in the paper showed that local workers hired by Chinese firms were around 78% of the workforce overall, 85% in Nigeria, 90% in Kenya. Another survey cited in the paper pointed to an issue with the quality of those jobs: Only 44% of managerial positions were held by Africans. But a study in Ethiopia found 75% of Chinese firms invested in worker training, compared to 27% of Ethiopian firms. The study reported:

In firms engaged in construction and manufacturing, where skilled labor is a necessity, half provide apprenticeship training, while experienced Chinese workers teach new African hires to begin work through hands-on teaching and gradually improve the new workers’ skills through daily operation.

Angola, Egypt, South Africa and other countries oblige Chinese companies to hire locals (as they should). This makes sense for other reasons: Chinese workers don’t want to leave their families to work far from home. As a consequence, while Chinese workers are often hired to start up projects, jobs and responsibility are gradually transferred to local talent (again, as they should be).

‘At least they were upfront’

Noah summarizes what he has presented about the non-conditional loans, African countries voting with China on Taiwan, and Chinese workers taking up jobs in China-Africa projects: “When you start to examine this relationship as a whole,” he says, “it actually starts to look a lot less like a loan, and a lot more like a new kind of colonialism.”

A few quick clips follow on this “new colonialism.” One from Al Jazeera calls it “debt colonialism.” The Voice of America (1/15/19) calls it “debt-trap diplomacy.” A PBS clip (9/27/19) says that Kenya “agreed to apply Chinese law inside Kenya” (presumably labor laws), and was in a position to get the port if Kenya couldn’t repay the loan (a repeat of the Uganda airport story). Noah’s segment descends from here into pure tasteless comedy, including Noah doing a Chinese accent.

“Say what you will about European colonizers,” Noah concludes, “but at least they were upfront about it.” Actually, they weren’t “upfront about it” at all. The history of European colonization is replete with covert operations and assassinations, mistranslated treaty clauses, broken promises and outright lies.

Western colonizers enslaved and killed millions of Africans over centuries (Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Davidson, The African Slave Trade). They colonized the entire continent (Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa). They invented apartheid and imposed it on Africans (Magubane, The Making of a Racist State). They corralled Africans into death traps to be machine-gunned in one-sided battles, from Ulundi in 1879 to Omdurman in 1898 (Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa), and posed proudly for photographs with the corpses. They ran counterinsurgencies against independence movements in the 1950s that included torture, mass hanging and concentration camps (Elkins, Imperial Reckoning).

In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, they killed 10 million people between 1885-1906, cutting off people’s hands to coerce their families to work (Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost). They assassinated the most promising post-Independence leaders (notably Patrice Lumumba). They engineered the secession of Katanga, the wealthiest province of the country. They backed first a dictatorship (Mobutu) then an invasion and occupation (by Rwanda and Uganda). Millions of people died in post-independence wars sponsored by the US. (See Podur, America’s Wars on Democracy in Rwanda and the DR Congo; Epstein, Another Fine Mess; or Curtis, Unpeople, for details.)

Drawing a comparison between the horrors visited by Western countries on Africa and China’s infrastructure deals there can only serve to advance ignorance and racism.

The threat of a second offer

The Zimbabwe Herald (9/21/21) published an article, “US Plan to Discredit Chinese Investments Unmasked.” The article described a program, sponsored ultimately by the US embassy, “to fight the influence and growth of China in Zimbabwe through weaponizing anti-Chinese sentiments.” It stated that the US was offering $1,000 per pitch for media stories that fit the bill.

The money could be coming from special funds from the May 2021 Strategic Competition Act, which included $300 million per year for 2022 through 2026 “to counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally.” One funded activity is to “support civil society and independent media to raise awareness of and increase transparency regarding the negative impact of activities related to the Belt and Road Initiative.” Expect much more of this type of news item and derivative comedy.

Why is so much venom directed at a series of infrastructure deals between other countries?

Every negotiator knows the dramatic effect of a second offer on a negotiation. If you have one, it’s no longer a monopoly situation. The second offer becomes the floor for a deal, and it becomes impossible to impose terms on you. Europe colonized the entire continent, and for decades after independence, Western countries have imposed the most humiliating terms on the African continent. Noah’s piece, despite its comedic form, is a vehicle for the rage of the imperialist West—a former monopolist who now has a competitor.

Let them fume. Africa was not colonized in the first place by clever propaganda, nor by last-minute clauses inserted into trade deals, but by brutal violence. Africa resisted and won its independence. Africa will never be colonized by China—but nor will it be recolonized by the West. This is the real source of the rage against China seething behind the Daily Show’s bit of comedy news.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/03/j ... s-no-joke/

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US media attacks China’s Covid-19 policies for saving lives, while Americans die

Republished below is a detailed and valuable article by Joe Scholten comparing the Covid-19 suppression strategies employed in the US and China, and exposing the absurdity of the US media which, instead of trying to learn something from China’s success in saving millions of lives, disparages and condemns it. This article first appeared in Multipolarista.

The People’s Republic of China has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, yet has had fewer than 6,000 Covid-19 deaths in the entirety of its territory. The Western press corps insists this is a bad thing.

The New York Times published an opinion piece on January 25 titled “China’s Zero Covid Policy is a Pandemic Waiting to Happen.” In this article, the authors argue that the pandemic will inevitably become endemic, and that the Chinese policy of eradicating Covid has “set the nation up for disaster.”

This proposal made in the New York Times opinion page is lunacy. In the two weeks leading up to the opinion piece, there were two days in which the United States saw more than a million daily Covid cases (January 18 and 24). From January 4 to 31, the US did not have a seven-day average below half a million cases.

As of February 1, more than 885,000 people in the United States have died of Covid-19, and there have been more than 75 million confirmed cases.

By contrast, China has had a total of 137,000 cases and 5,700 deaths in the entirety of Chinese territory – with just 4,636 deaths in the mainland, 213 deaths in Hong Kong, and 851 deaths in Taiwan.

This is despite the fact that China’s population is four times the size of the United States’.

The total number of cases China has had in the entire pandemic has been exceeded by the US’ seven-day average since December 20, 2021. The last date the seven-day average of deaths in the United States sunk below 1,000 was August 22, 2021.

The average number of deaths in the US in single-week periods has exceeded the deaths occurring in China from the pandemic every week since August 2021, save for a single week from late November to early December.

And why have the differences between these two countries been so stark? It is not magic; it is policy.

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The cause of these massive discrepancies between the People’s Republic of China and the United States ultimately comes down to the widely disparate responses by the state and private sector.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ), a peer-reviewed publication of the British Medical Association, has released a series of articles analyzing the Chinese government’s Covid-19 containment strategy, and lessons that can be learned from it.

In short, the main features of Beijing’s successful pandemic control were extensive testing, contact tracing, and rigid but targeted quarantines – methods that have been bungled or outright rejected by US officials.

Chinese contact tracing for example, involves QR codes installed on popular mobile apps, such as Alipay and WeChat. These apps are used by a strong majority of Chinese people, and process more than 90% of mobile payments in China. They are required for entry into many public spaces, such as movie theaters, malls, or transportation.

These QR codes have specific colors assigned to reflect users’ status: green corresponds to unexposed and uninfected; yellow means Covid-19 exposure in a certain proximity; red signifies confirmed infection or close exposure. Yellow and red codes alert other users of their exposure, requiring quarantine and/or multiple negative tests.

This tool allows public-health officials to track exposure patterns, and retroactively test individuals who were exposed, preventing large, uncontrolled spread of the virus and instigating localized quarantines when China encounters new cases, effectively cutting off the transmission of the virus before it balloons out of control.

Why the United States failed to contain Covid-19

By contrast, the United States has no nationwide contact-tracing system. Local contact tracers work for extremely understaffed and underfunded agencies which lack the resources and infrastructure needed to reach those who are exposed.

US states like Missouri (where the author of this article resides) have seen government officials demand that “local public health agencies and school districts… rescind and cease enforcement and publicizing of public health orders, mask mandates, quarantine orders,” claiming “public health authorities and school districts have gone unchecked.”

In states like Texas, the government has made contact tracing entirely optional, even when students test positive for Covid-19. Supporters of this policy claim that opposition to these measures is to “protect privacy” – but this didn’t stop government authorities from using cell phone location data to track down, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants during the pandemic.

The US government will happily use these mass-surveillance measures to hound people living paycheck to paycheck, but will obstinately refuse to use those tools for public good.

Why China succeeded with lockdowns while the US failed

Pandemic policies extend beyond just contact tracing; they also involve the sporadic use of lockdowns. The rationale for lockdowns is that a temporary cessation of large gatherings of people in spaces, excluding essential workers, limits possible transmission of the virus.

The US had temporary stay-at-home orders in individual states, but these lasted for limited periods of time, were full of loopholes, and were never deployed again as the situation deteriorated.

These loopholes weakened the effectiveness of the lockdown, allowing large gatherings in churches, for example.

During the deadliest wave of the pandemic in the United States, some municipalities permited indoor dining with limited capacity and curfew.

These could hardly have been called “lockdowns”. They were exercises in security theater, with loopholes that needlessly enabled the spread of the virus, prolonging the pandemic.

Ironically, these half-measures also ended up putting restrictions on North Americans for much longer than they were imposed on people in China, who were able to quickly go back to their normal lives when the virus was contained.

The reality is simply that US authorities were much more concerned with re-opening businesses and forcing people to go back to work. And corporate lobbyists made sure that even these milquetoast half-lockdowns would not be considered again.

It is true, it must be acknowledged, that these half-lockdowns did bring social costs. Millions of North Americans fell behind on rent. Millions more lost their jobs. Federal aid was distributed haphazardly and slowly, and there was not nearly enough of it.

Cuts to unemployment benefits that ended in 2021 are projected to increase poverty in the US and lower wages by an estimated $144.3 billion, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

But these very real costs of the half-lockdowns in the United States were largely a product of the government refusing to spend what was necessary to support and protect its population. Instead, the US government left Covid-19 response to the private sector, outsourcing policy-making and implementation to for-profit companies, and effectively telling citizens to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

By contrast, in China, the state invested significant resources to meet the needs of its people during the largest public health crisis in a century.

The Chinese government offered generous rent alleviation policies. Hard-hit cities in Hubei province even received six months of rent-free residential living.

Unlike in the United States, where the average insured overnight hospital stay costs roughly $11,700, hospitalization is free or very inexpensive in China – another major factor in Beijing’s ability to contain Covid-19.

The Chinese government has additionally subsidized consumer spending with vouchers, to bolster the economy against the worst effects of the pandemic, and to ensure that citizens don’t worry about slipping into poverty.

In cities like Qingdao, all 9 million residents were tested in just five days. The government used a temporary targeted quarantine, after a handful of cases emerged in the city from overseas.

The policies worked: Qingdao saw no fatalities, avoided a widescale lockdown, and saw life back to normal in the entire city within a few weeks.

Quarantining those who were exposed and aggressively tackling cases as soon as they were detected saved lives and ensured the economic costs to society as a whole were minimal.

The results of Beijing’s Covid-19 policies, purely in economic terms, are stark. China was the only major economy which saw GDP growth in 2020. In 2021, China’s GDP grew by an impressive 8.1%, with per capita GDP increasing as well.

Beijing also managed to address infrastructure and environmental goals during the same period.

The Chinese high-speed rail network expanded to include 75% of all Chinese cities with a population of half a million or higher by the end of 2020. That number increased further in 2021.

Meanwhile, half of Chinese energy is forecast to come from non-fossil fuel sources by the end of 2022.

China’s Covid-19 containment is a success story

It is clear that the Chinese approach to the Covid-19 pandemic has worked. Cases are low; deaths are even rarer; the economy has been stable, despite a pandemic raging around the world; enormous public projects have been able to continue as planned without substantial interruptions.

By contrast, the United States’ policy has seen tens of millions get infected, a death toll greater than its own Civil War, and the continued immiseration of millions of working people who struggle to make ends meet, while their government has effectively left them to die as a pandemic rages.

It is madness to suggest – as the New York Times opinion section has – that China should emulate the North American model.

But the newspaper’s op-ed “China’s Zero Covid Policy is a Pandemic Waiting to Happen” is also insidious in how it mischaracterizes Beijing’s strategy.

The authors argue that Chinese “vaccines are not providing adequate protective immunity to a citizenry that lacks natural immunity through infection,” warning that if “millions need care the hospitals will be quickly overwhelmed.”

The problem with this argument is that obtaining natural immunity requires catching Covid. This isn’t a policy to end the pandemic; it’s a recipe for dangerous variants.

As prominent scientific experts and medical institutions have warned, the spread of the virus throughout the population increases the risk of new variants, a problem countries in the Global South have highlighted in their demands for vaccines.

In March 2021, India and South Africa proposed a waiver for the World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement (TRIPS). This would allow for certain exceptions to be made to copyright laws, enabling less wealthy Global South nations to develop generic Covid-19 mRNA vaccines.

The Peoples’ Republic of China saw that this measure could be an important step to ending the pandemic. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said, “China fully understands and is supportive of the developing world’s demand for an IPR waiver for COVID-19 vaccines”.

The United States and European Union, on the other hand, blocked this proposal. They were more concerned about maintaining corporate profits than protecting global health.

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Absent universal vaccination, ensuring as few people as possible get Covid-19 is an important goal. Uncontrolled spread of Covid, like in the United States and Brazil, can lead to new variants, as the world saw in India.

If a new variant combines the virulence of the Delta variant with the transmissibility of Omicron, a frightening stage of the pandemic could follow – a scenario that some medical experts fear may become reality with the current Covid strategy in the US, which had a higher number of hospitalizations in January 2022 than it did during the worst stages of the pandemic in 2021.

China has handled the pandemic like a responsible global actor. It has ensured that, when Covid outbreaks happen, rapid large-scale testing occurs. Popup labs in the city of Xi’an, for instance, were able to test 5 million people per day.

On a domestic front, China’s policy of mass testing and containment has prevented a virus from spreading uncontrolled through the world’s most populated country, preventing a new variant from emerging there.

And when it comes to vaccination, Beijing has again proven to be a global leader.

The United States hoarded vaccines in the early stages of the pandemic, allowing hundreds of thousands to go to waste, while right-wing politicians literally applauded at their community’s low vaccination rates.

China, on the other hand, was at work delivering more than 1.38 billion doses around the world. Beijing ensured that other nations were not left behind, helping to prevent the rise of new variants.

The United States had delivered just one-quarter the number of vaccines China had as of January 2022.

The Chinese Covid-19 response is not a disaster waiting to happen, as the New York Times has claimed. Rather, Bejing’s model averted the disastrous consequences seen the United States.

China used sensible public-health measures to prevent the spread of the virus. It employed limited, targeted, and effective lockdowns to stamp out the virus when detected. It met the needs of its population with generous social spending. It sent much-needed vaccines around the world, while ensuring a high rate of domestic vaccination.

And today, China is fighting to help fellow nations in the Global South free themselves from the neocolonial grip of international IP laws, amplifying the call for the right to manufacture generic versions of vaccines.

Maybe if the United States and its media class had studied China’s example, instead of being so quick to condemn it, they could have learned something – and more than 885,000 North Americans may not have tragically lost their lives.

https://socialistchina.org/2022/02/02/u ... icans-die/

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From a pre-eminent liberal site:
FIVE-RING CIRCUS

China’s Opening Ceremony Taunted the World. What Is NBC Going to Do About It?
BY JUSTIN PETERS
FEB 04, 20229:47 PM

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Chinese torchbearer athletes Dinigeer Yilamujian, a Uyghur, and Zhao Jiawen during the opening ceremony of the 2022 Winter Olympics at the Bird’s Nest, in Beijing, on Friday. Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images

As NBC’s telecast of the 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing got underway on Friday, Savannah Guthrie wasted little time calling out the elephant in the room. “Some have said that there’s a cloud over these Olympics, that China has come under fire globally because of policies and practices,” Guthrie said from NBC’s studio in the U.S., speaking to the network’s on-the-ground team of Mike Tirico, Bloomberg’s Andy Browne, and Yale professor Jing Tsu. “In fact, the U.S. has issued a diplomatic boycott of these Games, sending no officials here because of human rights—in particular, China’s treatment of the minority Uyghur population in the Xinjiang region. Andy, the U.S. has come right out and called it genocide.”

Genocide. There’s no mistaking the term, and the fact that Guthrie used it within 15 minutes of the start of the telecast was a sign that NBC does not plan to completely sidestep the significant human rights issues underlying these Beijing Games. Since at least 2017, according to the United States and many other Western observers, the Chinese government has engaged in a systematic campaign of repression against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang. “They allege a host of human rights abuses: forced labor, coercive birth control practices, indoctrination, and that all this adds up to a form of cultural genocide,” said Browne. He, Guthrie, and the rest of the NBC team deserve credit and recognition for getting straight to the point.

Having done so, the network went on to immediately hedge that point. “It has to be said that the Chinese government emphatically denies all of this. They say that accusations of genocide are the lie of the century,” said Browne. While this observation is correct—the Chinese government does say this—it also revealed a lot about the fundamental fragility of NBC’s position at these incredibly problematic Olympics.

<snip>

It’s a no-win situation for NBC, and the question executives have surely been asking themselves is this: What is the least worst way for the network to lose? Its early coverage of the opening ceremony might offer a clue: My gut tells me that NBC will cleave to objectivity and treat China’s human rights issues as a story that has two sides. While the network won’t evade the story, it will also take care to hedge whenever it is mentioned. It will play the story straight down the middle and take care to refrain from taking a stance either way.

<snip>

The repression of the Uyghurs—like the Beijing Olympics and most other political choices made in China—is the handiwork of the nation’s autocratic leader, Xi Jinping, a man who also believes in getting straight to the point. Xi’s point, as far as I understand it, is that the Uyghur genocide isn’t a genocide at all, that China has done nothing to be ashamed of, and that anyone who thinks differently can go suck eggs. China can take this provocative stance with relative impunity because of its global economic status. Most of the rest of the world is financially beholden to China in one way or another, which emboldens Xi and the Party to say and do basically whatever they want without much fear of meaningful diplomatic reprisal.

<snip>

“China wants to send a message about itself in this opening ceremony,” Guthrie said early in Friday’s broadcast, and by the time the ceremony was over, it was clear that that message was largely a taunt. At every Olympics, the opening ceremony concludes with a succession of torchbearers jogging into the stadium to light a flame that will burn for the duration of the Games. “The identity of the final torchbearer is kept secret until the last moment. It is often a personality from the sports world or a young person symbolising hope for the future,” as a publication from the Olympic Museum put it. China chose two final torchbearers: Nordic combined skier Zhao Jiawen, and Dinigeer Yilamujiang, a Uyghur who is competing for China this year in cross-country skiing.

It was a jaw-dropping moment, as if Germany had chosen a Dachau prisoner to light the cauldron at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Tirico and Guthrie were clearly taken aback by China’s choice of final torchbearer.

(more...)

https://slate.com/culture/2022/02/nbc-w ... ijing.html
Unfucking believable. But because it doesn't issue directly from the State Dept such baldfaced propaganda passes as independent commentary. One of the secrets of the success of bourgeois democracy is the phony separation of government and the Fourth Estate. What make it phony is class interests cause even if the person who wrote this garbage is not of the ruling class his owner surely is and the writer would keep his job or even contemplate a higher paying job of lying.

This is the crap that liberals are mainlining. Persons considering this variant of capitalist suckfish 'left' or in any way allies of the 'left' in any but the most temporary instance should reconsider.
“All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie.”

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

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