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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Nov 30, 2024 2:32 pm

Xi Jinping called for modernization of Marxism.
November 30, 14:39

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Xi Jinping Calls for Greater Contributions to Promoting the Sinicization and Modernization of Marxism.

A working conference on the program for research and development of Marxist theory was held in Beijing, where President Xi Jinping made an important instruction.
Xi Jinping called for greater efforts to systematize and academicize theoretical research, and make study and publicity more focused and effective, so as to help the public better understand the Party's achievements in theoretical innovation. Xi Jinping also stressed the importance of combining the basic tenets of Marxism with the specific reality of China and with the excellent traditional Chinese culture.


Modern Marxism with Chinese Characteristics.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9526016.html

Google Translator

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China’s global vision benefits all humanity
November 28, 2024, marked the 10th anniversary of Chinese President Xi Jinping first proposing the idea of major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.

Marking the anniversary, in a front-page article, China Daily noted that, “many scholars and officials have been impressed by how Beijing has showcased distinct Chinese characteristics, style and ethos in its diplomacy, and how it has been working on building the image of a confident, self-reliant, open and inclusive major country with a global vision over the past 10 years.”

It went on to quote our co-editor Keith Bennett, who spoke to the paper during his recent visit to Beijing, as saying that the Chinese characteristics of the country’s major country diplomacy include a number of components, including commitment to peace, dialogue, equality, mutual respect, non-interference and win-win cooperation.

“The Chinese policies are not based solely on the narrow national interest, or interest at the expense of other countries”, but instead have a global vision and “are for the benefit of all of humanity,” Keith noted.

The following article was first published by China Daily.
As President Xi Jinping wrapped up his trip to Latin America last week, observers noted that the year 2024 has been special for marking the 10th anniversaries of a range of landmark events, such as China’s hosting of the 2014 APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Beijing and the founding of the Forum of China and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.

Following these memorable moments, Thursday also marks the 10th anniversary of another landmark event in China’s foreign policy history — Xi’s proposing of the idea of major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.

Many scholars and officials have been impressed by how Beijing has showcased distinct Chinese characteristics, style and ethos in its diplomacy, and how it has been working on building the image of a confident, self-reliant, open and inclusive major country with a global vision over the past 10 years.

In the eyes of Keith Bennett, a London-based senior analyst on international relations and co-editor of the Friends of Socialist China platform, the Chinese characteristics of the country’s major country diplomacy include a number of components, such as the country’s commitment to peace, dialogue, equality, mutual respect, noninterference and win-win cooperation.

“The Chinese policies are not based solely on the narrow national interest, or interest at the expense of other countries”, but instead have a global vision and “are for the benefit of all of humanity,” he said.

On Nov 28, 2014, Xi stated in his speech at the Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs that China “must have a major country diplomacy with its own characteristics”.

In March 2016, the concept of major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics was for the first time clearly stated in the annual Government Work Report.

Analysts said the concept has been developed in the past decade and has seen its theoretical architecture greatly taking shape and its supporting pillars being built.

The Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs held in December last year identified the theme of China’s external work as building a community with a shared future for mankind, which is also the noble goal pursued by China in conducting major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.

The conference decided that the current and future work on foreign affairs should follow the principles of “self-confidence and self-reliance, openness and inclusiveness, fairness and justice, and win-win cooperation” — the guidelines of major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.

“The concept helps to explain the definition and the underlying logic of China’s diplomacy,” said Chen Xulong, a professor of multilateral diplomacy and United Nations’ reform studies at the University of International Business and Economics.

The concept calls for the country to act as a major country should, shoulder its duties, meet the challenges, and make contributions to global governance, he said.

“A range of outstanding, distinct qualities of Chinese culture have been endorsed by this concept, including the consistent pursuit of a peaceful rise, objecting to hegemony and subscribing to innovation,” he added.

In an article published in January in Qiushi Journal, the flagship magazine of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, Foreign Minister Wang Yi wrote that “major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics in the new era builds on and carries forward New China’s diplomacy”.

“China has become a responsible major country with enhanced international influence, stronger capacity to steer new endeavors and greater moral appeal,” he wrote.

“Head-of-state diplomacy has played an important and irreplaceable role in major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics in the new era”, he added.

At a bilateral meeting with Xi on the sidelines of the 31st APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Lima, Peru, on Nov 15, Chilean President Gabriel Boric brought a copy of the fourth volume of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China, one of Xi’s books.

Boric presented the book to Xi and invited him to sign it.

Nadia Helmy, an associate professor of political science at Beni Suef University in Egypt and an expert on Chinese politics and Asian affairs, said, “We find that China has achieved fruitful diplomatic results, as the diplomacy of the Chinese head of state, Comrade Xi Jinping, played a strategic guiding role.”

Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era and major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics “led China to achieve tangible achievements in the field of Beijing’s foreign policy and international relations, (and) brought China closer to assuming the forefront of the global scene”, she wrote in an article published in January.

She listed some main points of China’s major country diplomacy, such as “maintaining justice while seeking to achieve common interests at the political and economic levels”, “sincere and friendly international relations with the developing countries” and “building a new type of relations between major countries”.

Regarding his expectations for China’s major country diplomacy in the next 10 years and beyond, Bennett, the London-based international relations analyst, said that China is expected to win more support and more understanding from more countries, as there is “quite a strong contrast” between “the worldview and practice of China and the worldview and practice of most other major powers”.

https://socialistchina.org/2024/11/29/c ... -humanity/

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Interview: Socialism holds its ground and grows stronger with China’s contribution
In a recent interview with the Global Times, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez discusses China’s development over the past 75 years and the role it plays in the world today.

The interview discusses the forthcoming Chinese translation of Carlos’s book The East is Still Red – Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century, and its significance for Chinese readers:

I hope Chinese readers will feel encouraged to know that there are people in the UK, Europe and the US that oppose the new cold war; that oppose the campaign of containment and encirclement against China; that stand for peace and multipolarity; and that want to see close cooperation in pursuit of peace, prosperity, ecological conservation and a sustainable future for our shared planet. The concepts of “common prosperity” and “building a community with a shared future for mankind” have relevance and resonance among progressive circles in the West.

In response to the question of what the Western left can learn from China, Carlos notes that “China is taking extraordinary, unprecedented steps forward on poverty alleviation, renewable energy, biodiversity protection and more”. These are successes of the global socialist movement, and the Western left can learn and take inspiration from them.

Addressing the “China threat” theory, Carlos points out that China’s record is remarkably peaceful:

China has not been at war for many decades. It does not maintain a global infrastructure of hegemony, unlike the US, which has over 800 overseas military bases, in addition to troop and weapons deployments around the world… On the global stage, China stands consistently and firmly for peace. It has put forward detailed and viable proposals for peace in Ukraine and Gaza. So where is the threat?
Editor’s Note: Recently, an English-language collection of essays, People’s China at 75 – The Flag Stays Red, was launched to examine China’s trajectory since 1949. British author and independent political commentator Carlos Martinez (Martinez) was one of its co-editors. Martinez has been trying to help Western people better understand China’s development in its different phases and aspects. In a recent interview with Global Times (GT) reporters Xia Wenxin and Xu Jiatong, Martinez shared his view on China’s marvellous successes over the past 75 years, as well as its contributions to the world, including to the socialist movement.

GT: When we interviewed you last year, your book The East is Still Red – Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century (hereafter, The East is Still Red) had just come out and gained international attention. Now, the Chinese version of the book is about to come out. How do you feel about this? What do you hope Chinese readers can grasp from this book?

Martinez: I’m very excited and honored that The East is Still Red will be published in Chinese. Although the book was written primarily for the Western audience so that they could come to understand modern China better, I hope it will be useful for some Chinese people to see how Marxists in the West view China and how Chinese socialism becomes an inspiration to the global socialist movement.

I think the analysis of the West’s vicious anti-China propaganda will be interesting for Chinese readers, who may struggle to understand the reasons for the West’s hostility and its slander campaign in relation to Xinjiang, Tibet (Xizang), Hong Kong and other affairs.

And I hope Chinese readers will feel encouraged to know that there are people in the UK, Europe and the US that oppose the new cold war; that oppose the campaign of containment and encirclement against China; that stand for peace and multipolarity; and that want to see close cooperation in pursuit of peace, prosperity, ecological conservation and a sustainable future for our shared planet. The concepts of “common prosperity” and “building a community with a shared future for mankind” have relevance and resonance among progressive circles in the West.

GT: This year marks the 75th founding anniversary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Which aspect of China’s development during this period has impressed you the most? How do you view China’s contribution to the world in the past 75 years?

Martinez: The founding of the PRC constituted a profound turning point for the Chinese people after thousands of years of feudalism and then a century of invasion, domination, unequal treaties, chaos, warlord rule and intense poverty. Living standards have risen continuously since 1949. Life expectancy has risen from around 35 to 78 – several years above the global average.

China has advanced from being a very poor and technologically backward country to being a global leader in science and technology. It has eliminated extreme poverty. It is making by far the greatest contribution to the struggle against climate breakdown. It has leaped from a “low” Human Development Index (HDI) 30 years ago to a “high” HDI today and is on the cusp of moving into the “very high” group. It is building its own path to modernization.

Looking at the global scale, China has provided crucial support to national liberation movements and countries in the Global South. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence continue to provide a framework for relations between countries, particularly developing countries. Via the Belt and Road Initiative and other initiatives, China is sharing its infrastructure development expertise and providing a means for the countries of Africa, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean and the Pacific to break out of underdevelopment.

And, of course, China is a force for peace. Its foreign policy is based on negotiated solutions to problems, the pursuit of peace, mutual benefit and global friendship. This is a very important contribution to the world.

GT: In a recent article, you urged the Western left to “learn a great deal from China” and “take a great deal of inspiration from it.” Could you please elaborate on this?

Martinez: China, along with the other socialist countries, is building socialism. So, people around the world who support the process of building socialism should seek to learn from China. The people of China are “taking part in the practice of changing reality,” and they are the trailblazers of the left globally, so we should learn from them.

Furthermore, China is taking extraordinary, unprecedented steps forward on poverty alleviation, renewable energy, biodiversity protection and more. In my view, the successes in those areas are successes of the global socialist movement, and the Western left could take inspiration from them.

In 1989, Deng Xiaoping said that “so long as socialism does not collapse in China, it will always hold its ground in the world.” Thirty-five years later, socialism is still holding its ground in the world, and growing in strength, thanks in no small part to China.

GT: What are the common misunderstandings about China and its development in the West? Why could China’s development lead some in the West to the sense of being “threatened”?

Martinez: The notion of China as a threat to some people in the West is patently absurd. Unlike the NATO countries, China’s record is remarkably peaceful. China has not been at war for many decades. It does not maintain a global infrastructure of hegemony, unlike the US, which has over 800 overseas military bases, in addition to troop and weapons deployments around the world. Of the nuclear powers, China is the only one to maintain a consistent policy of no first use and to pledge never to use – or threaten to use – nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state.

China is accused of aggression in the South China Sea, and yet there is not a single instance of China preventing normal, non-military navigation. Regarding the Taiwan question, China’s position of working toward peaceful reunification has not meaningfully changed in many decades, and the one-China principle is recognized by the majority of the world’s countries.

On the global stage, China stands consistently and firmly for peace. It has put forward detailed and viable proposals for peace in Ukraine and Gaza. So where is the threat? This “threat” seems to be unacceptable to those working toward a Project for a New American Century, and therefore, they slander China and wage a propaganda war against it.

GT: You have been introducing the real China to your audience in the West. What do you think is an effective narrative for China to tell its story to the world?

Martinez: On the basis that “actions speak louder than words,” I think China should continue what it’s doing.

Its progress on environmental issues – becoming the world’s first renewable energy superpower and blazing a trail on biodiversity protection and water management – is very inspiring to people around the world who are concerned with preventing climate breakdown.

China’s successes in poverty alleviation and improving the living standards of its people are also drawing admiration. And China’s orientation toward peace and its principled positions in international relations are opening people’s eyes.

Increasingly, people are coming to reject the relentless anti-China propaganda they’re fed.

https://socialistchina.org/2024/11/27/i ... tribution/

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China takes forward the legacy of the October Revolution
On Saturday October 26, the Newport and Gwent Valleys [South Wales] branch of the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) organized a very successful fund-raising social to celebrate the anniversary of the 1917 October Socialist Revolution. It was attended by members and supporters of the CPB, the Young Communist League and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), along with other friends from the labour, trade union and progressive movements. The more formal part of the afternoon was chaired and introduced by CPB General Secretary Robert Griffiths. Short videos were shown of the 1945 victory parade in Moscow marking the triumph over Nazi fascism and of the famed African-American artist and revolutionary Paul Robeson singing the Soviet national anthem. Following this, Robert introduced the guest speaker, Keith Bennett from Friends of Socialist China.

We publish below the main body of Keith’s talk.
The October Revolution was a truly great event in world history – one that remains worthy of celebration. The account given by the US communist journalist John Reed has a highly apposite title – ‘Ten Days that Shook the World’.

Indeed, this was a revolution that not only shook but changed the world forever. Even though the Soviet Union itself tragically no longer exists, after the October Revolution nothing was ever the same again or could ever be the same again.

The Soviet Union represented the first sustained attempt by working people to hold and maintain power. Throughout its lifetime there were both great achievements as well as some significant mistakes.

But whatever the mistakes or shortcomings, the Soviet Union was the first country to legislate for the equality of women and men. The first to guarantee universal and free education and health care. The first to ensure full employment and the right to paid annual holidays for all workers and farmers.

Entire nationalities were provided with a written script for the first time. Visiting Soviet Uzbekistan in the 1980s, I learned how that vast republic went from some two percent literacy to universal literacy in barely a couple of decades.

Above all, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the World Anti-Fascist War in Europe, sacrificing the lives of 27 million of its citizens to defeat Nazism.

Support from the Soviet Union played a vital role in the dismantling of the old colonial empires and the victory of the national liberation movements.

And the threat of the Soviet example played a significant role in forcing the ruling class in this and other major capitalist countries to make concessions to the working class in the form of the ‘welfare state’.

Some years ago, when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, the Tories, who, of course had bitterly opposed the creation of the NHS, took to deriding it as “Stalinist”. On first consideration, this might seem to be a risible and ridiculous claim. Nevertheless, it expresses a certain truth that such gains for working people did indeed flow in no small measure from the fear of the ruling class that their populations might follow the Soviet road.

That mistakes were made, and even crimes committed, in the course of building socialism in the USSR is undeniable. But, whilst detailed assessment of these is not possible today, what we really must do is place them in a context where the imperialist ruling class was never reconciled to the existence of the Soviet Union and the threat it posed. Not the military threat claimed by the cold warriors, but the threat of a good example. In that sense, it is reasonable to conclude that, throughout its entire history, the Soviet Union never enjoyed even a single day of true peace.

We were, however, told that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union there would at last be a ‘peace dividend’. No more wars.

Instead, we got the exact opposite. No peace dividend but rather austerity and the rolling back of the welfare state. And above all, we entered a period of constant and endless wars. In former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. Through to today’s appalling genocide in Palestine, and the spiraling conflict throughout the region, as well as NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine.

And this brings me to the question of China.

The October Revolution was by no means a simple national phenomenon. Rather it inaugurated an entirely new period of world history – that of the long transition (with all its victories and setbacks) from capitalism to socialism on a worldwide scale.

In his last published article, ‘Better Fewer But Better’, Lenin turned to consideration as to whether the Soviet state could survive – a matter about which he was never sanguine. But he concluded on a note of revolutionary optimism that:

“In the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc., account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the past few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense, the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.”

In a very real sense, therefore, the liberation of China, and the founding of the People’s Republic, whose 75th anniversary we have just celebrated, arose from the October Revolution. In his 1949 article, ‘On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship’, Mao Zedong explained:

“The Russians made the October Revolution and created the world’s first socialist state. Under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, the revolutionary energy of the great proletariat and labouring people of Russia, hitherto latent and unseen by foreigners, suddenly erupted like a volcano, and the Chinese and all humanity began to see the Russians in a new light. Then, and only then, did the Chinese enter an entirely new era in their thinking and their life. They found Marxism-Leninism, the universally applicable truth, and the face of China began to change.

“It was through the Russians that the Chinese found Marxism. Before the October Revolution, the Chinese were not only ignorant of Lenin and Stalin, they did not even know of Marx and Engels. The salvoes of the October Revolution brought us Marxism-Leninism. The October Revolution helped progressives in China, as throughout the world, to adopt the proletarian world outlook as the instrument for studying a nation’s destiny and considering anew their own problems. Follow the path of the Russians – that was their conclusion.”


In fact, every socialist revolution is, and must be seen as, a continuation and an extension of the October Revolution. As the Korean communist leader Kim Il Sung, writing in memory of Che Guevara, put it:

“The triumph of the Cuban Revolution is the first victory of the socialist revolution in Latin America and a continuation of the Great October Revolution in Latin America.”

When the Soviet Union and the socialist countries of Eastern Europe collapsed, the international bourgeoisie expected that China and the other remaining socialist countries would also follow suit. Standing against this, Deng Xiaoping confidently asserted that so long as socialism did not collapse in China it would always be able to hold its head up in the world.

Today’s Chinese leader Xi Jinping makes a similar point that, without China, socialism might have ceased to be a force in world politics. Borrowing from Marx and Engels, Xi likens its possible fate to that of a haunting spectre, wandering the globe like a ghost.

This is a very correct analysis. Of course, there are some other socialist countries, like Cuba and Vietnam, but, for objective reasons, none of them have the ability to materially impact the global balance of forces in the way that the Soviet Union was able to do in the past and that China is able to do today.

I have been interested in China for more than half a century. Throughout that time, the ruling class has rarely ceased to predict the country’s impending collapse. The ‘Economist’ magazine seems to have quite a specialised line in predicting it every few months.

More seriously, the Cold War has ceased to be history. We are now experiencing a New Cold War, in which much of the same trite and poisonous propaganda that was once directed against the Soviet Union is now directed against China.

Of course, the reality of China is very different. And that itself is precisely a key reason for the New Cold War.

In the last several decades – I have been privileged to witness this since my own first visit in 1981 – we’ve seen the phenomenal, peaceful rise of China. It has become the world’s second largest economy. It has gone from a poor country to a middle-income country. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. China is on course to become the world’s largest economy and a high-income country in the fairly near future. And it is leading in building an ecological civilisation so as to reverse the threat of climate catastrophe.

With its strong domestic foundations, China is progressively reorienting the global economy, through such means as the consolidation and expansion of the BRICS cooperation mechanism and the vast infrastructure developments associated with the Belt and Road Initiative. And in such ways, China is steadily winning more and more friends, among the developing countries in particular.

Like the Soviet Union in the past, China is naturally not without its problems. It is far from a perfect society and doesn’t claim to be. But the most important point is that China is not our enemy.

It is the only major country putting forward serious, realistic and fair proposals for peace in the Middle East and in Ukraine. It is leading the fight against climate change. And many thousands of jobs in this country depend on trade with China and investment from China. It’s worth recalling how, in late 2022, when the government ordered that a Chinese company divest its ownership of Britain’s largest microchip factory, Newport Wafer Fab, just a few miles from here, on dubious ‘national security’ grounds, the workers and their trade union strongly protested, insisting that they liked working for a Chinese company.

We formed Friends of Socialist China a few years ago to refute hostile propaganda and to tell the truth about China. We do so through our website, through meetings and webinars, and through our just published book, ‘People’s China at 75: The Flag Stays Red’, along with the recent special supplement in the ‘Morning Star’.

But by far the best thing, if you possibly can, is to go to China and see for yourself. It’s a long way, but it’s not impossible. In Friends of Socialist China, we’re hoping to facilitate more such visits in the future.

https://socialistchina.org/2024/11/27/c ... evolution/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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blindpig
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 03, 2024 3:03 pm

Mirror Action - China To Block 'Dual Use' Exports To U.S. War Mongers

During its Ukrainian proxy war on Russia the Biden administration and its minions have pushed China for allegedly providing support to Russia. This year it even started to sanction Chinese companies for allegedly providing 'dual-use items' to Russian businesses.

*Ukraine war: Biden tells China's Xi of 'consequences' if Beijing gives Russia material support for invasion - Sky News, March 18 2022
*Blinken says China helping fuel Russian threat to Ukraine - BBC, Apr 26 2024
*U.S. Imposes Sanctions on Chinese Companies for Aiding Russia’s War Effort - New York Times, May 1 2024
*China should pay for propping up Putin's war - Nato chief - BBC, June 17 2024
*Germany’s Baerbock urges China not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine - Anadolu, Dec 2 2024


The sanctions game though can be reversed. China has several quasi monopoly positions which it can use to hit back.

In (probably) a reply to Baerbock's latest intervention, it just started to use these (machine translation):

Announcement of the Ministry of Commerce No. 46 of 2024 on strengthening export controls on Related Dual-use items to the United States - mofcom.cn, Dec 3 2024

In accordance with the relevant provisions of laws and regulations such as the "Export Control Law of the People's Republic of China", in order to safeguard national security and interests and fulfill international obligations such as non-proliferation, it has been decided to strengthen export controls on related dual-use items to the United States. The relevant matters are now announced as follows:
The export of dual-use items to U.S. military users or military purposes is prohibited.
In principle, the export of gallium, germanium, antimony, and superhard materials related dual-use items to the United States shall not be permitted; the export of graphite dual-use items to the United States shall be subject to stricter end-user and end-use reviews.
Organizations and individuals in any country or region that violate the above regulations and transfer or provide related dual-use items originating in the People's Republic of China to organizations and individuals in the United States will be investigated for legal responsibility in accordance with the law.


Gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials are important for chip making in electronics industries and for weapon manufacturers. Graphite is necessary to make rechargeable batteries.

These commodity items are not necessarily rare but China has plenty of them and, more importantly, is nearly the only country which processes them in large quantities. The reason is that the processes to do refine the raw materials are somewhat dirty and only profitable when done on scale.

The U.S. can, and probably will, (re-)build the industries to do the processing for such items. But it will cost it lots of money and, more importantly, years to achieve that.

It will also be difficult to criticize China for fulfilling its 'international obligations such as non-proliferation' while that is a main attack point the U.S. has used against China.

But be assured that the hypocrites, like Mrs. Baerbock, will anyway try to do so.

h/t: Arnaud Bertrand

Posted by b on December 3, 2024 at 10:27 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/12/m ... .html#more

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China and the affirmation of an alternative modernity
Gustavo Ng

Nov 29, 2024 , 3:40 pm .

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Tiananmen Square, Beijing, at the political heart of the People's Republic of China (Photo: Archive)

Modernity itself is conceived as key and in contrast to the West
In July this year, the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was held, at which 199 committee members and 165 alternate members approved General Secretary Xi Jinping's work report titled "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Further Deepening Reforms in an All-round Way and Promoting Chinese-Style Modernization."

China is not merely seeking to be a modern country, but is ensuring its progress toward a modernity with its own unique characteristics. President Xi Jinping said that Chinese-style modernization "breaks the myth that modernization equals Westernization."

Modernity shone in Shanghai between the 1920s and 1940s and erupted since the Reform and Opening-up, but as an import. It was imported Western modernity. The idea of ​​Chinese modernization began to be formulated by Deng Xiaoping, who in a speech in March 1979 said: "What are our main tasks now and for a long period in the future? In a word, it is to undertake modernization."

To make it clear that this was a local process, the prerequisites for modernization at that time, Deng said, were "adhering to the socialist road, adhering to the dictatorship of the proletariat, adhering to the leadership of the Communist Party, and adhering to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought." At this year's Third Plenary Session, the foundations were updated to include Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Three Represents Thought and the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.

The concept of Chinese modernization has been updated. In 2021, the People's Daily published several articles on "Chinese-style modernization." The term appeared prominently in the "Resolution of the CPC Central Committee on Major Achievements and Historical Experience of the Party Over the Past Century" of the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee at its sixth plenary session in the same year, and was one of the main concepts of Xi Jinping's political report to the 20th CPC National Congress in 2022. It appeared prominently at the first session of the 14th National People's Congress in 2023 and at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee this year.

The overhaul is attributed to Wang Huning, current president of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, former dean of the School of Law at Fudan University, former director of the CCP's Central Policy Research Office, who is also said to have worked on other key concepts of Xi's thinking, such as the Chinese Dream and the Belt and Road Initiative.

A socialist modernity with Chinese characteristics
The launch of modernization as a project in China is surprising when one considers that in the West, postmodernity has been talked about since before the concept was popularized by Jean-François Lyotard's book "The Postmodern Condition" in 1979.

The key to this untimeliness is the idea that the West failed to achieve modernity and is now struggling with a post-post-modernity, while China is successfully materializing it for the benefit of its people. Deng had explained that "Chinese-style modernization must start from China's characteristics" and Xi expands on the idea: "The path that a country chooses for modernization is determined by its historical traditions, social systems, development conditions and external environment, among other factors." He has also stated that "Chinese modernization is socialist modernization."

The National Development and Reform Commission said : "The CPC has ushered in a new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics, comprehensively won the battle against poverty and completed the historic task of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects as planned. We have achieved the first centenary goal and embarked on a new journey of building a modern socialist country in an all-round way. In several decades, we have completed an industrialization process that took hundreds of years for developed countries, secured China's position as the world's second-largest economy and created two miracles rarely seen in the world: rapid economic development and long-term social stability. China has become the country with the largest middle-income population in the world and one of the countries that provides a greater sense of security recognized by the international community."

Another modernity
In a speech given in February 2023, Xi Jinping defined Chinese modernity as five distinctive features: the modernization of a huge population, common prosperity, material and ethical-cultural progress, harmony between humanity and nature, and finally, especially on the external level, peaceful development.

He began by explaining that his country is working to achieve the modernization of more than 1.4 billion people - "more than the combined population of the world's developed countries" - which means ensuring that everyone is well fed, has employment, education, housing, health care, and that the elderly and children are cared for.

"This will greatly change the landscape of global modernization," the President stressed.

He said modernization for common prosperity sets Chinese modernization apart from Western modernization. "The biggest problems with Western modernization are that it focuses on capital rather than people, and that it seeks to maximize capital gains rather than serving the interests of the vast majority of the people. This has created a huge gap between the rich and the poor, and led to serious polarization," Xi said. In contrast, Chinese modernization "aims to ensure that development is for the people and by the people, and that its fruits are shared by the people."

Modernization in this area requires "adopting more effective measures to regulate income distribution and wealth accumulation, and implementing law-based regulation and guidance to promote the healthy development of capital."

On the modernization of material and ethical-cultural progress, the president stated that "material poverty is not socialism, nor is cultural impoverishment."

Here, too, he distinguished China from the West: "The early pursuit of modernization by Western countries led only to the accumulation of wealth, crises of faith and insatiable material desires. A major cause of the predicament of Western countries today is their inability to control greed, which is the nature of capital, and to resolve their deep-rooted problems of rampant materialism and spiritual impoverishment."

Instead, he argued that China's modernization "seeks cultural and ethical enrichment to enhance our people's confidence in Chinese values ​​and culture." That includes "socialist values ​​that have the power to unite and inspire the people" and "enhancing public understanding of the history of the CCP, the People's Republic of China, reform and opening up, and the development of socialism; cultivating and promoting core socialist values."

Another area of ​​modernization is that of "harmony between humanity and nature," for which it considers, among other strategies, "accelerating the transition to a green development model, improving the diversity, stability and sustainability of our ecosystems, and working both actively and prudently towards the goals of achieving maximum carbon emissions and carbon neutrality."

This, too, sets China apart: "Since the advent of modern times, Western modernization has typically involved a stage of unrestrained plundering of natural resources and destruction of the environment. While it has created enormous material wealth, it has often caused serious problems such as environmental pollution and resource depletion. Due to its severe shortage of per capita energy and resource shares, China will face increasing energy, resource, and environmental constraints as it accelerates its development. This means that China cannot follow the well-trodden path of Western modernization."

Finally, the President emphasized the "modernization of peaceful development" that characterizes the path his country is taking in safeguarding world peace and development and promoting the construction of a global community with a shared future.

Xi Jinping says China is moving in the opposite direction to a Western modernization that "was plagued by bloody crimes such as war, slave trade, colonization and plunder, which inflicted unspeakable misery on developing countries. Having suffered aggression, bullying and humiliation from Western powers, we Chinese are deeply aware of the value of peace and will never follow the beaten path of the West."

Addressing both overseas audiences and Chinese society, Xi warned that “we must never oppress other nations or plunder other countries’ wealth and resources in any form.” Instead, “we will continue to create new opportunities for the world through China’s development” by practicing “true multilateralism” and upholding “the common values ​​of mankind.”

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 13, 2024 3:46 pm

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View of the Namcha Barwa massif, which reaches an altitude of 7,782 meters.

News from Qinghai and Xizang (Tibet)
Originally published: Schweizer Standpunkt on November 22, 2024 by Guy Mettan (more by Schweizer Standpunkt) (Posted Dec 10, 2024)

Next time you travel to Lhasa, be sure to visit the Museum of Modern Art. Climb the often narrow and steep stairs of the White and Red Potala Palace, light a candle made from yak butter in front of one of the thousands of painted Buddhas of the Jokhang. They are to Lhasa what Versailles and Notre Dame are to Paris.

But don’t miss the milestone of the brand-new art museum, which opened in December 2023 in Lhasa’s former cement factory. It is masterfully converted and restored by designers and architects from Tongji University in Shanghai. Here you will get to know a radically new facet of the autonomous province of Tibet, or rather Xizang, as it is officially called.

Industrial history and cultural modernity
I dare to make this recommendation because I know you will not be disappointed by either the outside or the inside. Visually both are so rich and surprisingly innovative. Here, the combination of industrial history and cultural modernity has been very successful. In doing so, I consciously take the risk of being ridiculed and called a “useful idiot of the Beijing regime”, since the cliché of the Tibetans “invaded and oppressed” by the Chinese perseveres so persistently in our country. I take this risk because I limit myself to telling what I have seen and what will sooner or later find its way into the consciousness of all of us.

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Lhasa. White and Red Potala Palace, 130 meters above the city. (All pictures gm)

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Monks studying.

A journey through two provinces
For two weeks, I travelled around Qinghai province and the area around its capital Xining, as well as Xizang province from the Lhasa valley to the prefecture of Nyingchi, accompanied by a senior employee of a Catalan cultural foundation, a Canadian photographer and designer, a doctor from Xian and a local communications officer.

The two provinces are very similar. They are mountainous, semi-desert, have a very harsh climate and are inhabited by about ten million people in an area four times the size of France [2,5 mio. km2 totally, edit.]. Together they form the heart of the Tibetan plateau and Tibetan Buddhism.Contrary to the stereotype that it is an area under the sole control of the Dalai Lama, it is home to Buddhist sects of various denominations and numerous religious and ethnic minorities such as Muslims, Christians, Taoists, Han, Hui, Tu, Salar and Mongols. With altitudes ranging from 2,600 to 8,000 metres, the region is the water tower of Asia and it is the source of the major rivers that irrigate the Chinese plains, in particular the Yellow River and the Yangtze.

For the sake of simplicity, it should be noted that Tibetan Buddhism is derived from Tantrism and is divided into four main schools:

Gelug, the youngest school, also called the Yellow Hat school, to which both the XIV Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959, and the XI Panchen Lama, who lives between Beijing and Shigatse, refer;
Nyingma, the oldest school, the red-capped school, which is closest to the original Tibetan religion and includes the six major monasteries;
Kagyü, the White Sect, because of the white stripes that adorn the robes of the monks, and
Sakya, the smallest school, which is referred to as colourful (grey, white).
Each of these schools have their own traditions, doctrines and practices, which are more or less strict, and they don’t always get along well. The various obedience groups include about 46,000 monks.

So much for the general context.
Spectacular visits
In Xining, our programme included a visit to the Ta’er monastery complex, one of the oldest and largest in the country, with dozens of buildings and nearly 10,000 monks; the Qinghai Salt Lake Biological Reserve, one of the largest and highest (3,000 m above sea level) in continental Asia; the village of Deji, where some 250 families from the most remote areas of the province live; the city of Tongren, a historic commercial and cultural centre; the famous Regong Art School in Longshu (traditional thangka painting, frescoes and patchwork), and the ethnic secondary school in Golog, a free boarding school with 800 students from the region’s various ethnic minorities.

But the most spectacular visit was undoubtedly the Hainan Prefecture Energy Complex. There, 20 billion dollars have been invested to create the largest solar farm in the world (600 km2 of photovoltaic panels—more than twice the area of the canton of Geneva), coupled with towers for concentrated solar energy and huge wind farms in an area larger than the canton of Vaud (4000 km2). The whole thing was linked with hydroelectric dams on the Yellow River. With 1,200 gigawatts of installed solar and wind power (see Le Temps, 14 December), China has become by far the world’s largest producer of these renewable energies.

In Xizang (Autonomous Province of Tibet), the programme was similarly concentrated: the Potala Palace with its walls bleached with yak’s milk, the Jokhang Temple, an important place of pilgrimage, the Museum of Modern Art and the Jieguan Gallery of Contemporary Art with works worth several million dollars, the Centre for Tibetan Medicine, the university, the Tibetan Buddhist Academy (a huge theological campus with 700 monks and 100 nuns from different schools) and even a factory for high-tech non-stick titanium pots and pans!

The last part of the journey was dedicated to the natural beauty of Nyingchi Prefecture (known as the “Throne of the Sun” to Tibetans and “Little Switzerland” to tourists), which can be reached via a brand-new motorway up to an altitude of 5,000 metres. The city, with a population of 500,000, is situated in the middle of forested valleys with lakes and towering peaks, such as the spectacular Namcha Barwa massif, which at 7,782 metres is considered to be the holiest mountain in Tibet after Mount Kailash.

What can you learn from this trip? First, a surprising impression of modernity and economic development. As sleepy, dusty and slightly depressing as the city and the area around Lhasa appeared to me on my first visit in 2003, today it seemed so active, lively and full of energy. Motorways, high-speed rail lines (Beijing-Xian-Lhasa and Chengdu-Nyingchi lines), impeccable airports, but also fully restored residential buildings, heritage buildings and old towns, asphalted streets and electric car parks, high-voltage power lines, tourist infrastructure, schools, high schools, hospitals, small and large companies.

Growth through an imaginative measure
Since the decision was taken in 2012 to develop the eastern provinces, hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested in infrastructure development. This is clearly visible. Tibet is becoming a popular destination for Chinese and Asian tourists.

For several years, growth there has been more than 10% per year. To achieve this result, Beijing has mobilised the country on a large scale with a rather imaginative measure, which consists of mobilising not only the financial resources of the rich coastal provinces, but also their entrepreneurial and social resources.

In this way, energy production is being developed by consortia from central or western China, and the rich provinces of Shanghai or Canton are building roads, schools, hospitals or opening factories, providing not only the material means but also the human and technical resources, sending executives, teachers, managers and officials on internships to train the local workforce.

A form of mentoring that has the advantage of both sides taking responsibility for the country’s development. Western propaganda has seen this as a form of paternalism towards the Tibetans. This remains to be proven, because the results are spectacular: in less than ten years, widespread poverty and illiteracy have been eliminated. It should not be forgotten that until the 1950s, 90% of the Tibetan population lived in serfdom and could neither read nor write.

Culture and Buddhism in Tibet do not appear to be under threat
Another observation is that Tibetan culture and Buddhism do not appear to be under threat, quite the opposite. Only 20 years ago, the devastation wreaked by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution could still be seen on the walls of some temples, while greedy monks held bundles of banknotes between their fingers that had been entrusted to them by pilgrims entering the temple lying on their stomachs in the mud.

Today, this is no longer the case. The offerings are placed in unobtrusive donation boxes. The halls filled with paintings and Buddha statues, Boddhisattvas and other Maitreyas have been restored and illuminated. Monks in red robes are a common sight on the streets, in the temples and in the monastic schools. Many monasteries have been renovated and equipped with heating, access roads and internet connections.

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Lhasa. Museum of Modern Art, integrated into the city’s converted and renovated former cement factory.

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View of the Namcha Barwa massif, which reaches an altitude of 7,782 meters.

The sites of Potala and Tibetan culture are UNESCO World Heritage, as is Tibetan medicine. The Tibetan language is taught in schools and appears on public monuments and in official documents alongside ordinary Chinese.

Numerous museums and libraries preserve, collect, transcribe, annotate and digitise the sacred texts of Tibetan Buddhism and make them available to monks and the public on the internet—an unprecedented effort to archive and preserve documents that have sometimes been forgotten in the archives of the monasteries. More than 200 scholars are dedicated to this work, whether at the Xizang University or at the Research Centre for Tibetology in Beijing.

On the government website, you can even find an official document praising freedom of religion and worship in Tibet. However, in the temples you are more likely to find the portrait of the Panchen Lama than that of the Dalai Lama, who has been hated since he fled to Dharamshala and is strongly suspected of having supported resistance movements and the 2008 riots in Lhasa. For a European, it is perhaps a paradox, but in Lhasa and Xining, Tibetan tradition and religion seemed to me much more alive than Christian tradition and religious practice in Europe.

The campaign to modernise and integrate historic Tibet into modern China was carried out under the motto “Tibet is our home, China is our homeland”. It is not unreasonable to believe that the bet will be won. With the agreement on joint border controls concluded with India shortly before the BRICS summit in Kazan in October, the West’s last hope of separating Tibet from China was lost.

https://mronline.org/2024/12/10/news-fr ... ang-tibet/

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“Nothing like before” — China is out-competing the West on EVs
Originally published: Progressive International on December 4, 2024 by Paweł Wargan (more by Progressive International) | (Posted Dec 11, 2024)

The past year has seen a concerted effort by Western politicians, regime intellectuals, and media stenographers to accuse China of “overcapacity”. The coordinated narrative has accompanied a choreographed escalation in the West’s economic war on China. What is motivating these accusations?

In May 2024, the White House announced a series of new tariffs on Chinese products, including a 100% tax on imports of Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), set to take effect later this year. The European Union followed closely behind. In July, the Commission announced duties ranging from 17.4% to 37.6% on Chinese EV manufacturers. And in August, Canada announced 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs along with 25% tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminium.

The White House insisted that the measures would “protect American manufacturers from China’s unfair trade practices” and ensure that “the future of the auto industry will be made in America by American workers.” The European Commission cited China’s “unfair subsidisation” and Canada warned of the threat of China’s “intentional, state-directed policy of overcapacity”. In this narrative, now choreographed and ritualized across the West, China’s “overcapacity” is to blame for the West’s rising trade deficits and persistent inability to reindustrialize.

China has responded firmly to these accusations. In a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and the European Commission’s Ursula von der Leyen in May, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that there is no such thing as “China’s overcapacity problem”, and emphasised China’s contribution to the green transition. China’s Foreign Ministry said that the “overcapacity” thesis was a “pretext” to create new restrictions on China’s energy products.

China’s “overcapacity” and the West’s industrial decline
Overcapacity can be measured in three ways. First, we can look at the “capacity utilization rate”, or the degree to which available industrial capacity is being used. Second, we can look at inventory levels; a high number of unsold goods gathering dust in warehouses might suggest that production exceeds demand. Third, we can look at profit margins, which would have to fall to help empty the brimming warehouses and make way for new goods.

As French economics commentator Arnaud Bertrand found, China does not show signs of “overcapacity” across any of these measures. On the contrary, its industrial utilization rates and inventory levels are similar to those of the United States, and Chinese profit margins are soaring.

But even if the “overcapacity” thesis were true, the West’s industrial decline long precedes China’s rise. In the U.S., the trade balance has seen a sustained deficit since the late 1970s. As the productive structure of its economy shifted, industrial capital made way for financial capital. The number of manufacturing jobs decreased from around 20 million at their peak in 1979 to under 13 million today–a period in which the U.S. saw its population rise by 100 million. This year, factory employment in the U.S. fell to record lows.

For its part, Europe faces historic economic pressures due to rising fuel prices caused by price-gouging and Europe’s attempts to delink from Russia. Germany is now deindustrializing. Volkswagen and its subsidiaries are set to cut tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs across Europe, and its workers are mobilizing from Wolfsburg to Brussels. “The real issue here is, in fact, not overcapacity, but competitiveness,” Bertrand says.

China’s EV miracle
In 2023, Ford chief Jim Farley visited China with his Chief Financial Officer John Lawler for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic. They test-drove an EV made by Changan Automobile, one of Ford’s long-standing partners in China. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the pair were stunned. “Jim, this is nothing like before,” Lawler told Farley. “These guys are ahead of us.” Ford has reportedly shipped several Chinese EVs to the U.S. for further study as it seeks to build a low-cost offering of its own, but it is difficult to see how it could compete with brands like BYD, whose cars start at just $11,000.

Across China, a technological revolution is brewing. In 2024, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology joined four other ministries to develop the blueprints for ‘road-cloud-vehicle’ integration. The aim is to build intelligence into every aspect of road traffic–from traffic lights and charging stations to roads and logistical channels, from vehicle and pedestrian movements to information services–in ways that can harness the capacities of China’s booming EV market.

“In 2023, new EV penetration was 31.6% across China. In major cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Guanzhou, the number is closer to 50%–and it took them just 10 years to get there,” Haidong Chen, Director of Marketing at the National Innovation Center of Intelligent and Connected Vehicles, told me in Beijing.

In the first quarter of 2024, the share of new EVs sold was 31.3%, but jumped to 50.39% in April.

Nearly every EV released in China is capable of at least “L2” automation, Haidong told me, meaning that it can steer and accelerate autonomously under driver supervision. But with ‘road-cloud-vehicle’ integration, every car released in the past few years could gain the capacity for full self-driving without additional hardware upgrades.

That degree of integration can produce significant improvements in road safety. “Imagine that an elderly driver misses a red light at an intersection,” Haidong said. “The system can avoid a crash by stopping or redirecting the other cars on the road, even if the car in question is not itself plugged into the network.” This is something that a Tesla could not do. On their own, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) systems, which electric vehicles use to map their surroundings, can only see up to a distance of 250 meters, and cannot see around corners. “Full integration is needed,” Haidong said.

‘Road-cloud-vehicle’ integration can also reduce energy use. An integrated logistics system can plan for the most efficient and least congested route through which to deliver goods from a given port to one or more cities. A road can instruct a car to slow down on a slope or turn, letting gravity or momentum do the work while preserving battery power.

More than 40 cities have applied to be part of the pilot program. Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guanzhou, and other major cities have already started to test the technology on public roads. The immediate goal is to implement the program across all major cities in just a few years. But the long-term ambition is greater. “This is the infrastructure,” Haidong said,

that will allow China to replace private cars with fleets of publicly-owned, self-driving vehicles in the future.

Value-chain integration
This degree of integration is only possible through control over the entire EV value chain. This begins with raw minerals, the most significant of these being lithium, a key component in battery manufacturing. While China has limited domestic lithium reserves, it has developed cutting-edge technologies that allow it to recycle nearly 100% of the lithium from used batteries. By 2021, China had more existing or planned lithium-ion battery recycling capacity than all of Europe and North America combined. The CEO of CATL, one the world’s largest battery companies, now predicts that China will need no new minerals for battery production by 2042.

Second to the battery is the software. Where car manufacturing was once primarily a question of mechanical engineering, Chinese planners soon began to see them as “cell phones on wheels”, Haidong told me. The impetus to develop sovereign information technology to power them increased as the West’s economic war against China accelerated. “In 2008, Microsoft accused China of digital piracy, and ‘blackscreened’ all government computers,” Haidong said.

This was a major humiliation. The government realized that it would need to develop its own software and its own hardware.

In 2013 and 2014, when attacks against Chinese technology companies like Huawei accelerated, China began to move quickly towards technological sovereignty in all areas, from chips and artificial intelligence to cars and batteries. “Today,” Haidong said, “China’s industry is guided by a single principle: self-sufficiency.” This has allowed for the kind of integration–of batteries and software, or roads and cars and cloud technology–that is currently beyond the realm of imagination in the West. This, Haidong said, is why the Chinese EV industry is seen as a threat. It competes not only with the automobile industry–historically the domain of the West. It also now competes with the tech giants of Silicon Valley.

“Overcapacity” is a political accusation
The accusation of “overcapacity” serves a dual purpose. First, it gives the Western ruling class a license to turn to the very policies it accuses China of–subsidies and protectionism–to protect their own monopolists in a contest they otherwise could not win. Second, it allows the Western leadership to blame China for the structural long-term decline of the global capitalist economy, which can no longer accommodate the standard of living it once did and can therefore only sustain its legitimacy by reference to external threats.

But if the accusations of “overcapacity” are overwrought, they are part of a dangerous and escalating hybrid war with ramifications far beyond China’s borders. China has leveraged its socialist market economy to develop new technologies urgently needed to address the climate crisis. Over the past decade, this strategy has seen the costs of solar and wind power fall by 90%–and batteries by more than 90%. With China now building two-thirds of the world’s wind and solar projects, these sources of energy are set to make up 39% of China’s total energy mix by the end of 2024. China is now on track to meet its climate goals six years ahead of schedule.

If the tariffs imposed by the U.S., the EU, and Canada are an admission of their monopolists’ inability to compete with China–and a guarantee that state power is available to protect capitalist interests against an emergent socialist superpower–they are also a warning. The West is prepared to sabotage China’s economy, and the global green transition, rather than cooperate.

I wondered how China’s EV industry views the tariffs. “We don’t particularly care about the tariffs,” Haidong said.

If I’m the only producer globally, the tariffs mean that U.S. consumers will pay more. It’s a bit like leaving your wife for your mistress. At one point, you’ll want to win her back, but now the cost has gone up.

https://mronline.org/2024/12/11/nothing ... st-on-evs/

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China’s bridges to a socialist future
The article below, written by Paweł Wargan for the Morning Star, reflects on China’s extraordinary advances in infrastructure construction, and how these contribute to – and are a product of – China’s unique socialist development model.

Paweł notes of the vast city of Chongqing: “Until the 1980s, boats ferried people across the rivers that snaked through the city; no bridges had yet been built across them. Today, Chongqing has some 14,000 bridges.” The city’s skyline is “so dazzling that it sometimes felt imagined”.

Such comparisons with a few decades ago can be made throughout the country, albeit Chongqing is a particularly striking example. China’s program of modernisation has included the construction of hundreds of thousands of bridges, tunnels, roads, railways, airports and ports, as well as the world’s largest high-speed rail network, transforming the physical contours of the country.

In China, bridges have accelerated the pace at which the burdens of the past could be overcome: underdevelopment, poverty, hunger, dependency, and disparities between the rural and the urban, the coastal and the inland. They reflect the stability, confidence and strength with which the project of socialist construction advances.

Paweł concludes:

At each stage, China has worked to bridge its past with its future, carrying forward the traditions inherited by one of the world’s oldest civilisations, while building a socialism fit for the present day. This is the essence of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Paweł Wargan is an activist, researcher and organiser. He serves as Political Coordinator at the Progressive International, an international coalition of over 100 popular movements, political parties, and unions. He contributed to our conference marking the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.
In 1993, Deng Xiaoping walked across the newly opened 8,354-metre bridge connecting the Yangpu District to the Pudong New Area over Shanghai’s Huangpu River. On each pylon, a handwritten inscription from the elder statesman bore the bridge’s name: Yangpu Daqiao, or Yangpu Bridge.

Deng had navigated the People’s Republic of China through a remarkable process of transformation. He declared that socialism could not be built from poverty and set out to build the foundations for what he called the “moderate prosperity” of the Chinese people — then among the world’s poorest.

Now, at the age of 89, he surveyed the results of his efforts. “How wonderful that the road we have walked outperformed all the books we have read,” he said.

I recalled this story on a trip to the sprawling city of Chongqing. From its Qiansimen Bridge — one of the Twin River Bridges across the Yuzhong peninsula — I looked out at the meeting point of the Jialing and Yangtze rivers.

The water reflected a skyline so dazzling that it sometimes felt imagined. To the right, the opera house — a mute olive by day — glowed bright red. To the left, a strip of light dashed across the next bridge over the river, its reflection carried through the water like a bolt of lightning in slow motion. The skyline danced with light.

It was here that, decades earlier, peddlers working in the riverbanks invented the Chongqing hot pot, a hearty dish of spiced stock in which they dipped vegetables and meats — tripe, liver, stomach, lotus, needle mushrooms and leafy greens — to stay warm in the frigid winters.

Until the 1980s, boats ferried people across the rivers that snaked through the city; no bridges had yet been built across them. Today, Chongqing has some 14,000 bridges, and the hot pot is served by restaurants high above the wharves to people who have long forgotten that biting cold. What would Deng make of this sight?

There is a metaphor often used to describe the non-linear road towards socialism in China: “Crossing the river by feeling the stones.” It speaks to the uncertainties inherent in navigating a path with no precedent.

Six years ago, the People’s Republic of China became older than the USSR would ever be. Now, it faces thresholds and barriers that older socialist projects did not get the chance to overcome. There is no template to follow, and no established model to apply.

Five years ago, 70 years after the People’s Republic was founded, Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke of the spirit of “opening roads where we find mountains and building bridges where we meet rivers.”

No longer wading blindly through the river, China would now bridge it — in realms both metaphorical and material. Today, among many other infrastructural feats, more than half of the world’s ten longest bridges across every category are in China.

The first bridge to be designed and built entirely by Chinese engineers crossed the Qiantang River in the city of Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

It would come to form a junction for two critical routes: the Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo railway, which connected Hangzhou with major cities to its north-east and north-west, and the Zhejiang-Jiangxi railway, which ran east-west from Zhejiang to the border of Hunan.

But, to halt the advancing Japanese army, the 1,453-meter bridge was blown up just three months after it opened in September 1937. It took three years to build, hours to destroy, and a decade to reconstruct.

By 2018, the People’s Republic inaugurated one of the most ambitious infrastructural projects in human history: a 55-kilometre network of bridges and undersea tunnels spanning the Lingding and Jiuzhou channels.

This “Great Wall of the sea” connects three major cities on the Pearl River Estuary: Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macau. It cuts a four-hour drive to 30 minutes. Thirty-two kilometres north along the same estuary, a new bridge inaugurated this year cuts the travel time between Shenzen and Zhongshan from two hours to 30 minutes.

I have an unwritten rule of travel. Whenever I visit a city on a river, I do not leave before crossing one of its bridges. Bridges extend a society’s reach. They are carriers of culture and commerce; vehicles for scientific and technological advancement. They narrow geographies and shorten timespans. They unite what was once separate.

From the middle of a river, you can see clearly the developmental and cultural fault lines that are markers of a city’s history.

In China, bridges have accelerated the pace at which the burdens of the past could be overcome: underdevelopment, poverty, hunger, dependency, and disparities between the rural and the urban, the coastal and the inland. They reflect the stability, confidence and strength with which the project of socialist construction advances.

In 1949, China declared victory over the “three mountains” of imperial domination, feudal exploitation, and bureaucratic capitalism. In 1979, Deng launched the “four modernisations,” a project first outlined by Zhou Enlai in 1963, which sought to overcome definitively the long-intractable problem of economic dependency and paved the way for an explosion in productive forces.

In 2022, having lifted 850 million people out of poverty, China embarked on the path of building “a modern socialist country in all respects” by the year 2049 — the centenary of the revolution.

At each stage, China has worked to bridge its past with its future, carrying forward the traditions inherited by one of the world’s oldest civilisations, while building a socialism fit for the present day. This is the essence of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

https://socialistchina.org/2024/12/13/c ... st-future/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 20, 2024 3:59 pm

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Wang Yi: Riding the trend of the times with a strong sense of responsibility

On December 17, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, delivered a major speech at an important year end symposium in Beijing on the international situation and China’s foreign relations.

Wang makes a detailed and profound exposition of the thinking behind China’s foreign policy and its stance on key questions, summarises the work of China’s diplomacy in 2024, and outlines priorities for the coming year.

Among some of the highlights of his speech are:

*Building a community with a shared future for humanity is an important vision put forth by President Xi Jinping. It provides an incisive answer to the important question of “what kind of world to build and how to build it.” It envisions a historic progress in state-to-state relations from the pursuit of peaceful coexistence to that of a future shared by all.

*The building of a community with a shared future for humanity has become a great enterprise joined by various parties. In the course of 2024, China and Brazil have announced joint efforts to build a China-Brazil community with a shared future for a more just world and a more sustainable planet, demonstrating their sense of responsibility as two emerging countries; China and Serbia have launched efforts to build a China-Serbia community with a shared future in the new era, the first of its kind in China’s relations with European countries.

*What’s worth mentioning in particular is that Chinese and African leaders have agreed to build an all-weather China-Africa community with a shared future for the new era, giving expression to the shared desire of the 2.8 billion Chinese and Africans to pursue common development in greater solidarity.

*We have actively worked for the restoration of world peace and endeavoured to save human lives. On the Ukraine crisis, we have always maintained an objective and impartial position, and actively pushed for peace talks. China and Brazil jointly issued the six-point consensus on political settlement of the Ukraine crisis. We also brought other Global South countries together to launch the Group of “Friends for Peace” to gather consensus for finding a path to peace.

*The Gaza conflict has taken too many civilian lives. The immediate priority is a comprehensive ceasefire, the key is to ensure humanitarian assistance, and the fundamental way out is to realize the two-state solution. Over the past year, we have pushed for the adoption of the first resolution by the Security Council on a ceasefire in Gaza, facilitated the reconciliation dialogue and the signing of the Beijing Declaration by various Palestinian factions, and delivered multiple batches of humanitarian assistance to Gaza. We will continue to make unremitting efforts toward a comprehensive, just, and lasting solution to the Palestinian question.

*We have mediated peace in northern Myanmar and facilitated multiple rounds of peace talks among conflicting parties.

*We have supported Afghanistan in building an inclusive political framework and realising peace and reconstruction.

*Facing the dramatic change in Syria, China will continue to stand with the Syrian people and uphold the “Syrian-led and Syrian-owned” principle. China opposes the attempt of terrorist forces to exploit the situation to create chaos, and will help Syria maintain its sovereignty and restore stability.

*Over the past year, China’s cooperation with other developing countries has set a fine example, which has reinforced the trend of uniting for strength within the Global South. The collective rise of the Global South in the current chapter of history is a distinctive feature of the great transformation across the world. China will always be an important member of the Global South and always be committed to unity and invigoration of the Global South.

*Building on its historic expansion last year and setting off this [coming] year from the new starting point of greater BRICS cooperation, BRICS is bringing more partners into its big family to make the platform a primary channel for strengthening solidarity and cooperation among Global South nations.

*The China-Russia relationship, under the visionary guidance of the heads of state, has grown more mature and stable, demonstrated in a clearer way its independence and resilience, and set an example of friendly exchanges between major countries and neighbours. The three meetings between President Xi Jinping and President Putin this year further deepened the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination.

*China and Europe are two great civilisations of the world and two major forces of the times. China stands ready to work with the European side to handle differences and disputes properly, seek win-win solutions, and jointly safeguard free trade and multilateralism.

*As long as China and the United States cooperate with each other, they can accomplish many great things together. In the meantime, China firmly safeguards its sovereignty, security and development interests, and firmly opposes the illegal and unreasonable suppression by the US side. In particular, with regard to the US’ gross interference in China’s internal affairs such as Taiwan, China has to make a firm and robust response to resolutely defend its legitimate rights and interests and safeguard the basic norms governing international relations.

*China will be a firm force for justice in the face of the countercurrents of unilateralism and bullying. We will hold solemn commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese people’s war of resistance against Japanese aggression and the world anti-fascist war, promote a correct view of history, uphold true multilateralism, and firmly safeguard the international system with the UN at its core, the international order underpinned by international law, and the basic norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

The following is the full text of Wang Yi’s speech. It was originally published on the website of the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

(Quite long, see link.)

https://socialistchina.org/2024/12/19/w ... nsibility/

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Why Chinese Agriculture Must Undergo an Ecological Transformation
By Ding Ling and Xu Zhun

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Art created by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Ding Ling and Xu Zhun


Ding Ling (丁玲) is a lecturer in the Department of Economics at Anhui Normal University. Her research interests include China’s agrarian change, rural differentiation, cooperative economy, and food sovereignty movement. In addition, as a volunteer with the People’s Food Sovereignty Forum, she actively participates in the journey for food sovereignty practices in contemporary China.

Xu Zhun (许准) is an associate professor of economics at John Jay College and Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). He teaches economics at Lingnan College, Sun Yat-sen University, and previously taught at Howard University and Renmin University of China. His main research interests include the political economy of development, the Chinese economy, and economic history. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Science and Society and the Journal of Labor and Society.


When talking about contemporary ecological and agricultural issues in the world, the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ is a topic that inevitably arises and a topic with which China has a deep connection.1
In the US government’s 1949 White Paper on China, Washington attributed the Chinese Revolution to the country having too many people and too little land. Chairman Mao Zedong amply refuted such Malthusian historiography in his eloquent essay ‘The Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History’. However, Malthusianism would still dominate global approaches to development and social policy for a long time, and its immediate policy conclusion – that technological improvements in food production could solve the social/revolutionary problem – was the essence of the Green Revolution.

After the victory of the Chinese Revolution, the imperialist efforts to control China and the entire Third World suffered a significant blow. To counter the revolutionary wave in Asia, the imperialists turned their focus to another major Asian country, India. Paul Hoffman, administrator of the US Marshall Plan and president of the Ford Foundation in the early days of the Cold War, once observed, ‘if in 1945 we had embarked [in India] on such a program [as the rural development program in Taiwan] and carried it on at a cost of not over two hundred million dollars a year, the end result would have been a China completely immunised against the appeal of the Communists. India, in my opinion, is today what China was in 1945’.2
Hoffman’s comments reflected the underlying motivation behind the Green Revolution, which, as is now widely recognised, was not truly ‘green’ or ecological but primarily aimed at distinguishing itself from the ‘Red Revolution’.

Discussing ecological issues and the Green Revolution in the Chinese context can sometimes deliver a paradoxical experience. On the one hand, ecological civilisation has become central to the mainstream discourse in China thanks to the push by Chinese policymakers, and related terms such as emissions reduction, low carbon, and new energy have become very familiar to the general public. The general public prefers to buy green, pollution-free produce and even prefers to make their main food purchases at vegetable markets directly supplied by farmers. This deep-rooted awareness of ecological issues is perhaps remarkable on a global scale. Scepticism about the ecological transition and denial of the global climate crisis are invisible, at least at the official level in China. This is one of the direct benefits of China’s long-term emphasis on and belief in science.

On the other hand, however, China’s government and non-government sectors often have an ambiguous understanding of the meaning of ecological civilisation and ecological transformation. One of the most prominent points here, for example, is the perception of the Green Revolution. In China, the Green Revolution – or at least a part of it, the so-called hybrid high-yield crops – still has unshakeable support, which is quite different from global attitudes toward the Green Revolution.

In a broad sense, China’s attitude towards the Green Revolution is directly related to its historical background. In the course of China’s socialist construction, a large number of scientific research activities for the benefit of the people arose, organised either by the government or by the masses on their own initiative, in particular efforts to help the countryside improve their agricultural production methods and breed good seeds. The technologies produced as a result of this scientific research, such as new varieties of seeds, were often promoted in suitable areas at low prices and did not merely remain in the hands of a few. Other essential parts of the Green Revolution, such as water resources and fertilisers, were also the common property of the people, as in the case of the people’s communes, which built many collective water facilities that are still functioning decades later.

But no matter how special the historical context of the Green Revolution in China is, it does not change the basic fact that the Green Revolution itself was not ‘green’, but part of industrial civilisation. Chinese President Xi Jinping has argued that China needs to transition from an industrial civilisation to an ecological civilisation. What is the distinction between the two? In essence, in terms of production relations, the main and defining feature of industrial civilisation is not industry but rather the highly unbalanced and disharmonious relationship between human beings and nature. Since the emergence of class society, there has always been a contradiction between urban and rural areas, and over the past two to three centuries, this disharmony has reached unprecedented heights and is unsustainable. Therefore, President Xi Jinping stressed that, in the context of such profound contradictions, it is necessary to build an ecological civilisation. This concept is characterised by the need to repair the contradictory relationship between human beings and nature; whether there is industry or not is not the key, but to what extent the highly tense relationship between human beings and nature, and between human beings and the environment, which has developed over the past few centuries, has been resolved.

Over the past two decades, a number of Marxist scholars concerned with ecological issues, such as US scholar John Bellamy Foster, have uncovered important theoretical tools such as the ‘metabolic rift’ to help us understand the important ecological issues that have arisen in the age of capitalism. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, some Chinese universities have been using US economics textbooks to educate their students. Some of these textbooks have impressed the authors of this article, such as those that praise the greatness of capitalism and the market economy, roughly speaking, in the following manner: ‘Imagine you live in a city in the United States, and when you get up in the morning, you can drink coffee made in Africa, eat fruit made in Latin America, and wear clothes made in East Asia’. These kinds of imagery and narratives of prosperity have undoubtedly fuelled blind faith in capitalism and the globalised economy. From an ecological point of view, this prosperity of the market economy, in fact, contains the seeds of disorder and destruction. A highly developed market economy involves a high volume of long-distance trade, where African coffee and Latin American fruit, containing the labour of local people and the fertility of the land, are shipped to New York and Europe to become consumer goods. After the nutrients are absorbed in the cities of developed market economies, the leftovers end up as rubbish. However, in traditional agricultural societies, such human and food waste are not rubbish but rather a valuable source of soil nutrients. In the absence of long-distance trade and the frequent interregional movement of materials, these nutrients would flow back to where they came from and be recycled. But in contemporary times, especially in the last two centuries of highly developed globalisation and marketisation, a great contradiction has arisen, namely, that the fertility of the land is being transported from its place of origin to other regions in the form of products, and that the nutrients produced never have the means to return, which in turn leads to a diminishing of fertility at the place of production and, in the long run, is unsustainable and destructive.

The phenomenon of the fertility of the countryside becoming concentrated in the city and then becoming waste is the material basis of the contemporary urban-rural conflict. Over the past two centuries, during which capitalism gradually became dominant, there have been two waves of the Green Revolution in the world. The first took place in the nineteenth century, before the concept of ‘green revolution’ had emerged and before the development of the modern chemical industry. At this time, the way to increase soil fertility was to mine bird droppings, or guano, from the small islands scattered in the Americas. To mine guano, many Chinese labourers were transported to the region to work as ‘coolies’. The foundation of the agricultural revolution in Europe and the Americas at that time included these poorly paid Chinese labourers and the non-renewable guano fertiliser. The second wave came about with the rise of the chemical industry in the twentieth century, when compound fertilisers were widely used in agriculture through different ratios of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, and fertiliser-sensitive crop varieties were bred to sustain agricultural production.

It can be observed that regardless of which Green Revolution we consider, the underlying logic has always been to maintain or even expand the metabolic rift. This has been achieved by continually injecting fertility from external sources, fundamentally based on the super-exploitation of labour and the unsustainable depletion and pollution of the environment. Logic dictates that this will not solve or even alleviate ecological problems whatsoever, and indeed, it has not in practice. The Green Revolution came with huge ecological costs. For example, since Green Revolution agriculture relied on only a few high-yielding varieties of each crop, the original, diverse varietal system of Indian crops gradually disappeared. Land degradation was also one of the major negative consequences of the Green Revolution. Excessive use of chemical fertilisers has altered the soil microbial community and increased soil salinity, leading to physical and chemical degradation of the soil.3

China’s Green Revolution, despite its early widespread benefits and relatively low overall chemical usage, still saw rural collectives exploring some ecological conservation efforts, which limited environmental damage during the commune period. However, after China dissolved the communes and entered a market economy, countless small-scale farmers, driven by market forces, rapidly increased their use of chemicals, and the negative impacts of China’s Green Revolution gradually became apparent. Around 1970, every kilogram of grain output in China corresponded to only 20 grams of fertiliser input on average; by 2010, every kilogram of grain output corresponded to 110 grams of fertiliser input.4
In just a few decades, China has become the world’s largest consumer of fertiliser. Today, China uses more than 30% of global fertiliser and pesticides annually on less than 9% of the world’s arable land.5
The overuse of fertilisers and pesticides has caused agriculture to surpass industry as China’s number one source of surface pollution. Can we continue on this path of heavy reliance on chemical fertilisers and pesticides? Such a situation is clearly unsustainable.

One might counter with the following question: does rejecting the Green Revolution mean that we should all go hungry? Taking India as an example, it is true that India’s food production has increased if we look only at the production in a certain number of years after the Green Revolution; but before the Green Revolution, India’s total food production was already increasing relatively steadily, and the Green Revolution has not accelerated this trend.6
From 1950 to 1965, India’s wheat production increased by 4% per annum, and for about 20 years after the introduction of the Green Revolution (1968–1984), wheat production increased by about 5.6% per annum, which is the major evidence that is usually cited to affirm the Green Revolution in India. However, wheat is not a staple food in India, and its status is far less than that of rice. Whereas rice production increased by 3.5% per year prior to the Green Revolution, this fell to less than 2% in the two decades after the Green Revolution. Thus, if one looks at India’s entire food supply, production increased by 2.8% per annum for a dozen years before the Green Revolution but fell to 1.9% per annum during its implementation, only to return to 2.5% per annum a number of years after the Green Revolution. Looking at longer-term food data, the Green Revolution did not have a significant impact in terms of solving India’s food problems.7

Looking at the global food issue, we can observe that over the past 40 years or so, per capita grain production worldwide has basically remained stagnant. This indicator surpassed 370 kilograms in the early 1980s, but it has hovered at a low level for decades since, often not even reaching the levels of the 1980s. Although there has been a slight increase over the past decade, it still hasn’t exceeded 390 kilograms.8
These past few decades have been an era in which the Green Revolution and industrial agriculture have dominated worldwide, yet humanity’s ability to feed itself has not seen any substantial improvement.

In other words, even if we forget about ecological issues for a while, the potential of the Green Revolution to increase food production overall has been exhausted, and the mere maintenance of the situation requires continued reliance on high-intensity fossil fuel inputs. But for a large country like China, this possibility does not exist. On the one hand, China has decided to achieve significant carbon reductions, and the industrialised food system is involved in a large amount of carbon emissions, with the latest research suggesting, for example, that the food system accounted for up to a third of total carbon emissions in 2018.9
If emissions reductions are to be made in food production and processing, fossil fuel consumption in the agricultural sector will have to be reduced. On the other hand, China’s decision to reduce emissions comes against the backdrop of global climate change, which is bringing about an increase in average temperatures, a decrease in glacial snow water, and an increase in extreme weather, which will undoubtedly have a considerable impact on agricultural production. Under unfavourable conditions, China’s yields of crops such as wheat, rice, and maize could even decline by 20-30% by 2050.10
Against this backdrop, the ‘de-risking’ of food security should be given top priority. Green Revolution-style agriculture lacks the resilience to withstand risks due to the prevalence of monoculture crops and high dependence on external conditions, making it difficult to rely on for food security.

The history of socialist construction in North Korea provides us with another important lesson. The socialist construction of North Korea has made great achievements, but the country’s agriculture is essentially based on fossil fuels and the Green Revolution. As early as the Kim Il Sung era, North Korea proposed the electrification of agriculture, and its agricultural development once achieved very good results, far exceeding that of South Korea, but this relied on oil imports and intensive use of fertilisers. From 1961 to 1991, its fertiliser inputs and cereal outputs were on an overall upward trend, however, in the early 1990s, due to the impact of geopolitical changes, North Korea’s inputs of fertilisers dropped by 90%, which led to a significant drop in grain output, and then triggered what is known as the Green Revolution in North Korea. This led to a period of food hardship, which North Korea called the ‘March of Misery’.11
At that time, North Korea’s heavy industry was already one of the best in Northeast Asia, but the country paid a high price for its complete dependence on industrial agriculture based on oil imports.

Indeed, the examples of China and North Korea have provided important lessons for Third World countries. From an environmental and ecological point of view, the Third World cannot rely on industrialisation and fossil fuels to solve its agricultural problems, nor is fossil fuel a reliable option from a geopolitical and risk-reduction point of view. If the Third World wants to truly solve its food security problems without developing a dependence on the so-called ‘rules-based international order’ of the United States, it must undergo an ecological transformation as soon as possible.

Of course, for a country like China, which is already dependent on industrialised agriculture, would an ecological transition not lead to a loss of production and thus threaten food security? The ecological transition is certainly not costless. But if China can face up to the limitations of the Green Revolution and truly begin to explore the transition to an ecological civilisation, it can make full use of its own strengths to minimise the impact of the ecological transition on food security.

An important condition that China possesses is the existence of extensive grassroots party organisations. These organisations are held in high esteem by the people, and are guided by the line of pursuing socialism and building an ecological civilisation. In the past few years, there have been several important and successful explorations of primary-level party organisations leading cooperatives, which have ensured food security and maintained ecological balance. In the cases we have studied, whether rice and shrimp farming in the lake areas of the Jianghuai Plain or animal husbandry in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau region, the economic power of the collectives and the political leadership of the party have made it possible to ensure ecological sustainability by making agriculture people-centred rather than profit-centred, and by taking both ecology and production into account from a political standpoint.

Taking the Wuhu region as an example, in March 2022, Wuhu Prefecture’s Wanzhi District set up a party organisation-led specialised cooperative to promote the development of the regenerative rice industry, which provides a whole industrial chain of services for 33,000 mu (2200 hectares) of regenerative rice growers in the district, and ensures that the total output of the first season and the second crop stabilises at more than 900 kilograms.12
Regenerative rice uses rice stubble to re-grow seedlings and spikes with no pesticides and only a small amount of fertiliser, to ensure food production and achieve ecological benefits.

The leading industry established by the party organisation-led cooperative in Dongba Village, Liulang Town, Wanzhi District, is ‘rice-shrimp co-culture’, a composite farming model that integrates rice cultivation with crayfish farming. As of August 2023, the Dongba Village Cooperative had attracted 171 members. In August 2022, through land transfers, the cooperative consolidated land from two villager groups for contiguous farming. After the land was consolidated and improved together, the cooperative divided 260 mu (17.3 hectares) of land into 11 plots of varying sizes, the largest over 60 mu (4 hectares) and the smallest over 10 mu (0.67 hectares). While cultivating high-quality rice, they dug ring-shaped ditches around the plots for crayfish farming, implementing standardised transplanting, management, and farming practices. By directly returning rice straw to the fields as rich feed for the next season’s crayfish, this low nitrogen fertiliser input still yielded high productivity. This method not only addressed the issue of straw utilisation but also achieved increased yields, reduced costs, promoted green farming practices, and improved land use efficiency.

During the field survey, flocks of egrets were seen foraging in the rice fields. Village officials noted that these birds had rarely been seen in the area before. However, since the introduction of the rice-shrimp co-culture, the use of pesticides and fertilisers in the rice fields has been reduced by at least three-quarters due to the high water quality requirements for crayfish farming. Technicians regularly cultivate beneficial algae and bacteria, further improving the water quality in the rice-shrimp base. In just one year, the farmland’s ecosystem has significantly recovered, which is why the egrets, known for their high standards in habitat selection, have been attracted to the area.

Why develop the rice-shrimp industry through party organisation-led cooperatives? The party secretary of Liulang Town offered the following explanation:

The role of party organisation-led cooperatives goes beyond just developing and expanding the collective economy and helping the people prosper. The more important aspect is the social benefits. If large-scale farmers were to manage it, they would focus on crayfish because it’s more profitable, neglecting the rice since it isn’t as valuable, which would jeopardise food security. By having party organisations lead cooperatives, we ensure food security, not just in terms of yield per acre but also in terms of ecological sustainability. While we do pursue profits, we don’t prioritise them excessively. The rice yield is guaranteed to be at least 500 kilograms per mu.

As a result, the collective not only strengthens farmland protection and safeguards the bottom line of food security, it also creates a green, eco-friendly agricultural model, continuously improving the rural environment and restoring biodiversity.

In the pastoral regions of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, we also found examples of collective organisations pursuing ecologically protective production, aiming for social optimisation and ecological sustainability. Gacuo Township, located in the northern part of Shuanghu County, Nagqu City, Tibet, covers an area of 27,400 square kilometres, with an average altitude of 4,900 metres. Once known as an uninhabitable zone, Gacuo Township currently has 125 households and 570 people, spread across two administrative villages. By the end of 2017, the township had a total of 34,456 livestock, including yaks, sheep, and goats. The herders collectively own pastures, livestock, tents, and other production materials as a village unit, with the village collective coordinating the division of labour and planning. At the end of each year, members receive cash incomes as well as distributions of beef, mutton, and dairy products based on the work points they have earned from the collective.

Shuanghu County faces natural disasters almost every year. Eight or nine months of the year are a dry season with withered grass, making its ecosystem extremely fragile. During our field research, we found that, besides achieving significant results in production, distribution, public supervision, and collective cultural development, Gacuo has also made notable contributions to ecological protection, particularly in preserving the snowfields and glaciers (which are also regarded as valuable natural resources).13
Gacuo Township not only integrates ecological practices into collective production but also diligently protects the surrounding environment.14
In their herding practices, the herders maintain traditional methods of handling livestock, avoiding the use of vaccines or veterinary drugs unless absolutely necessary. Moreover, they do not leave any waste on the grazing land, but instead regularly transport it back to the township for centralised disposal. Gacuo Township is located in the heart of the Qiangtang National Nature Reserve and extends north into the Hoh Xil National Nature Reserve. According to tests conducted by national authorities, Gacuo’s pasture resources could support the grazing of 210,000 sheep units, yet the total number of livestock in Gacuo is kept below 50,000 sheep units, with a strict rotational grazing schedule enforced to protect the grasslands. Even during seasonal migrations, locals use yaks instead of tractors, saying, ‘tractors are good, but they create tracks that, over time, damage the grasslands’.

With the implementation of the dual responsibility system for livestock and grassland contracting in the late 1980s, China’s pastoral areas have faced severe challenges of overgrazing. Issues such as grassland degradation and soil desertification have, in turn, become significant obstacles to the continuous income growth of herders.15
To address these issues, the government implemented the Grassland Ecological Protection Subsidy and Incentive Mechanism in 2011, encouraging herders to reduce livestock numbers and restore degraded grasslands. However, the actual impact has been limited, with some areas seeing an increase in livestock rather than a reduction, leading to continued grassland degradation.16
So, how does Gacuo Township strictly maintain the sustainability of its grasslands and surrounding ecosystems? First, the collective manages grazing and resting periods according to the characteristics of winter and summer pastures, with grassland planning being the most critical task. A major planning session is conducted every three years, and at the end of each year, there is a patrol and assessment of the grasslands. If any degradation is found, the area is designated for resting or prohibited from being grazed the following year while also reserving grasslands for disaster prevention during the winter and spring. Second, there are clear limits on how many livestock each pasture can support and for how long, with no overloading allowed under any circumstances.

Additionally, if a production team needs to migrate, for example, from Pasture A to Pasture B, there are strict regulations on how long the migration should take. If they need to stop at Pasture C due to special circumstances like weather, and the stay exceeds two days, they must report and apply to the village to use the pasture to prevent overloading Pasture C. In special cases, such as when a snow disaster hits one village’s pasture, production teams can apply to use a nearby pasture from another village for emergency relief. This kind of adjustment is only possible through a collective economic organisation, which effectively maintains the sustainability of pastoral production.

Over the years, Gacuo Township has led Shuanghu County in economic development. Due to the collective division of labour and supervision mechanisms, the quality of livestock products like beef and mutton produced here is superior to that of surrounding townships, commanding the highest prices – a concrete manifestation of the strength of the collective economy. Notably, Gacuo’s development has not been driven by external trade but has focused on meeting internal demand. In the face of harsh climate and fragile ecological conditions, they chose to use collective strength to protect and manage public resources and safeguard the surrounding environment. This proves that only a collective economy can maintain a balance between community life, economic development, and environmental sustainability.

The discussion above highlights the importance of grassroots party organisations in China. We understand that many Third World countries lack such formal organisational structures, but they do possess a variety of widespread mass political organisations, both formal and informal local community organisations, and a significant number of socialist forces, all of which can play a substantial role. Fundamentally, Third World governments and the masses can generally benefit from an ecological path, so the political foundation for an ecological shift objectively exists, and the specific forms of practice can certainly flourish in diverse ways.

In recent years, China’s ecological civilisation has made significant progress in theory, policy, and local practice. However, looking to the future, the task remains daunting, and determining how to advance towards an ecological civilisation is an issue that we must address both now and in the future. Of course, this is not just China’s task but a challenge for all humanity. There is much that China and the world can learn from each other. China’s practitioners and researchers need to better understand practices and theories from around the world that go beyond industrialised agriculture, while people in many other countries can find inspiration and encouragement in the achievements and prospects of China’s collective economy and ecological agriculture.

Notes
1An earlier version of this article was published in the Chinese edition of Wenhua Zongheng. Ding Ling and Xu Zhun, ‘中国农业为什么必须生态转型’ [Why Chinese Agriculture Must Undergo an Ecological Transformation], 文化纵横 [Wenhua Zongheng], no. 3 (2024): 96–106.

2E. B. Ross, ‘Malthusianism, Capitalist Agriculture, and the Fate of Peasants in the Making of the Modern World Food System’, Review of Radical Political Economics 35, no. 4 (2003): 437–461.

3R. B. Singh, ‘Environmental Consequences of Agricultural Development: A Case Study from the Green Revolution State of Haryana, India’, Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 82, no. 1–3 (2000): 97–103.

4Xu Zhun, ‘Farm Size, Capitalism, and Overuse of Agricultural Chemicals in China’, Capitalism Nature Socialism 31, no. 3 (2020): 59–74.

5Yiyun Wu, Xican Xi, Xin Tang, Deming Luo, Baojing Gu, Shu Kee Lam, Peter M. Vitousek, and Deli Chen, ‘Policy Distortions, Farm Size, and the Overuse of Agricultural Chemicals in China’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 27 (2018): 7010–7015.

6Glenn Davis Stone, ‘Commentary: New Histories of the Indian Green Revolution’, The Geographical Journal 185, no. 2 (2019): 243–250.

7See above for data here.

8Data based on the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations.

9Francesco N. Tubiello, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Giulia Conchedda, Kevin Karl, Johannes Gütschow, Pan Xueyao, Griffiths Obli-Laryea, et al., ‘Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Food Systems: Building the Evidence Base’, Environmental Research Letters 16, no. 6 (2021): 065007.

10Shilong Piao, Philippe Ciais, Yao Huang, Zehao Shen, Shushi Peng, Junsheng Li, Liping Zhou, et al., ‘The Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources and the Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources and Agriculture in China’, Nature 467, no. 7311 (2010): 43–51.

11Xu Zhun, ‘Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea’, Monthly Review 75, no. 10 (2024): 30–47.

12Hu Xiaodong, ‘湾沚区农业农村局积极种植再生稻 增产又高效’ [Wanzhi District Agriculture and Rural Affairs Bureau Actively Plants Regenerated Rice to Increase Production and Efficiency], Wanzhi District People’s Government, Wuhu Prefecture, 1 April 2022, https://www.wanzhi.gov.cn/xwzx/gzdt/12065463.html.

13Researchers: Ding Ling, Qi Lixia, Yan Hairong (July 2018).

14Ding Ling, Qi Lixia, and Yan Hairong, ‘藏北高原上的牧业集体社区——那曲嘎措乡的乡村振兴之路’ [Pastoral Collective Community on the Northern Tibetan Plateau: The Road to Rural Revitalisation in Gacuo Township of Nagchu], 经济导刊 [Economic Herald] 10, 2018.

15Yang Siyuan and Song Zhijiao, ‘玛曲高寒草原畜牧业的可持续性考察’ [An Examination of the Sustainability of Livestock Husbandry in the Maqu Alpine Grassland], 政治经济学报 [Journal of Political Economy] 5, (2015).

16Fan Mingming and Zhang Qian, ‘生态补偿给谁?——基于尺度问题反思草原生态保护补助奖励政策’ [Ecological Compensation to Whom?: Rethinking the Grassland Ecological Protection Subsidy Incentive Policy Based on the Scale Problem], 学海 [Xuehai] 4, (2018).

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Socialism or barbarism.

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China executes top party official
December 17, 13:01

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Death penalty news.

In China, a major regional CPC party official has been sentenced to death and executed.
He stole and took bribes totaling about 2 billion yuan (about 28 billion rubles). A so-so Chinese-style Timur Ivanov.
The sentence was carried out. As usual, by firing squad.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9556953.html

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 25, 2024 3:14 pm

Chinese war correspondent on the war for Taiwan and the war in Ukraine
December 25, 11:08

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Interview with Chinese war correspondent Zhu Haozheng on China Army TG channel

Zhu has been in Russia for three years now and has spent a lot of time in Donbass. Now he shares some answers to questions about China and Taiwan.

China is trying to resolve the Taiwan issue peacefully. However, the Taiwanese authorities do not listen to Beijing and continue to follow the lead of the United States, buy weapons from them and establish military ties, including with foreign countries. How long can China tolerate this?

In fact, since the 1950s, Taiwan has maintained good relations with some countries and bought a lot of weapons from them. Let's look at some events from the history of the last thirty years. Taiwan received fighter jets and warships from France, and missile systems, tanks, fighter jets and artillery from the United States. Beijing is very unhappy with this situation. China has tried to use diplomatic means to stop all this, but the effect is not ideal. I believe that this situation will not change in the future.

Taiwan is actively building up the defense of the island. Anti-China drills are being held, a coastal combat command and its subordinate military units equipped with anti-ship missiles are being formed, drones are being purchased and Taiwanese drone operators are being trained, etc. What does China think about this? Is it too late for China to resolve the issue of reunification with Taiwan by force? After all, this may result in large losses among Chinese troops.

As a person who has lived through the events of a special military operation, I am shocked by the development of military technology. For example, in Donbass, Russia is currently using drones in large numbers, including reconnaissance and aerial photography. There is no doubt that drones pose the greatest threat to soldiers in war.

Let's talk about Taiwan's military technology. In fact, Taiwan is capable of producing drones and missiles. They have good electronic products and can produce chips. Some people in Beijing are worried about this situation. They believe that even if a military operation in Taiwan begins, it will not end quickly, and Beijing will pay a price. After all, these drones and missiles pose a huge threat to warships, tanks and soldiers. Of course, it should also be noted that China's military technology is advancing faster than Taiwan's, so victory is in Beijing's hands.

How likely is it that China will launch a military operation to retake Taiwan? When will that happen?

Personally, I think that a military operation in Taiwan should be launched as soon as possible because the United States is currently in a difficult situation because of Ukraine. If Beijing opens a second front, it will be easier to win. In fact, relying on political means to regain Taiwan is unrealistic. Even during the Kuomintang period, which was friendly to Beijing, this situation did not work out. The only way to resolve the Taiwan issue is a military one, because Taiwanese leaders understand very well that their own military power is the only capital for confrontation.

The United States says that they want peace in the Taiwan Strait. What does Beijing think about this? Don't you think that America is deceiving China, trying to dull its attention and buy time to arm Taiwan?

As I mentioned, the United States is worried about Ukraine and perhaps Israel. So, Taiwan is not a priority for the United States at the moment, so Washington does not want a war in Taiwan. However, Washington does not stop arming Taiwan and plans to make it stronger. Perhaps America will give the Beijing authorities a peace commitment similar to the Minsk Agreements. But history has shown that the so-called peace promises or peace agreements are just pieces of paper. They can be torn up at any time. These promises and agreements are lies. Their purpose is to arm Washington's allies.

How will China react if the President of Taiwan officially declares the island's independence?

If Taiwan's leaders declare it a sovereign state, Beijing will probably take military action, but we cannot determine its scale. Military action will be carried out either throughout Taiwan or only on some of Taiwan's outer islands: Kinmen, Matsu, Penghu. We can recall history. In the late 1950s, Washington offered Taiwan independence. In order to warn/send a signal to Taiwan, the PRC authorities began an artillery battle for Kinmen. PLA artillery regularly shelled military targets in Kinmen. These military actions lasted for 20 years.

Will China turn to Russia for help if a crisis breaks out in the Taiwan Strait?

I think that if China decides to launch a military operation in Taiwan, the leadership in Moscow can find out about it in advance. After all, the US, Russia and China have common enemies. When you fight enemies, you need to inform your friends about it, and your friends will provide assistance, even if it is political, which is also very important.

How important is the experience of the Russian Armed Forces' special operation in the so-called Ukraine for China?

The Special Operation War can be called the largest war, which uses more military technology than World War II. There is no doubt that this war has given people many tips. For example, regarding drones, five years ago, the Chinese army rarely conducted drone training, but now drones are widely used in the combat training of the Chinese army. Infantry units often practice using UAVs to detect and destroy targets. Armored units also practice intercepting and countering drones. All this happened thanks to the experience gained during the SVO.

Do you see any progress in the training of Chinese volunteers in the special operation zone?

In fact, as far as I know, there are more than a hundred Chinese volunteers who have come to the SVO zone, some of whom are my friends. I keep in touch with them and interviewed them. They said that they learned many valuable military skills in Russia. Chinese volunteers sometimes took part in brutal assault operations and also suffered losses.

Do you agree with the statement that the US wants to turn Taiwan into a second Ukraine?

Yes. I agree. But the Taiwan that China is dealing with is a stronger Ukraine, with a developed economy and sophisticated industry. In 2018, the Taiwanese government announced for the first time the implementation of a project to develop the Yunfeng supersonic cruise missile. The firing range of this missile reaches 1,000 km, which completely covers such important Chinese cities as Nanjing, Shanghai, Fuzhou and Ningbo.

How or with what will China destroy the US Hymars multiple launch rocket systems supplied to Taiwan in the event of an escalation of tensions in the Taiwan Strait? After all, these systems pose a direct threat to Chinese territory.

In fact, the Taiwanese government not only has US missiles/MLRS. They also produce their own missiles and MLRS in Taiwan. For example, the Thunderbolt-2000 RT/LT-2000 MLRS with a firing range of 100 km. To destroy these long-range systems, I think Beijing will use cruise or even ballistic missiles with the help of satellite reconnaissance.

In mid-December, the United States intends to deliver M1A2T tanks to Taiwan. What do you think about this and what is Beijing's reaction?

💬 I once observed a captured M1A2 tank in Moscow. It turned out that this tank has obvious shortcomings. First, it is too heavy. The weight of 70 tons cannot be adapted to the terrain of Taiwan. Taiwan has a lot of forests and rivers. It is very difficult for an American tank to move around these places. Second, this tank does not have an automatic loader, and the rate of fire is very low. As usual, Beijing protested over the sale of weapons to the United States. But it is still important to note that the M1A2 tank is much better than the M60 tank currently used by Taiwan. Undoubtedly, the PLA is facing a stronger enemy. I think the PLA has already begun to study how to deal with the M1A2 tank.

@china3army - zinc

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 28, 2024 4:34 pm

China’s Economy is Developing Tremendous Strategic Strength Instead of Collapsing as the Western Media Falsely Claim
By Felix Abt - December 27, 2024 3

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

[The article can be watched as a video here] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ypN3jUvbM&t=3s

In their reporting on China, the Western mainstream media conjure up a massive real estate crisis, enormous youth unemployment and a severe economic crisis. But the collective West is harming itself with illusions about China’s economy, as you will see below.

“China is in the midst of a profound economic crisis,” Time magazine starts its most recent report on China.

Bad China news from Western media is nothing new. Last year and in prior years, there was a lot of bad news in the American media about the supposedly critical state of the Chinese economy.


It is not surprising that Washington’s European media partners are imitating the American doomsday scenarios about China.

The British neo-conservative, anti-China mouthpiece The Economist has been announcing one Chinese failure after another on its front cover for more than a decade.

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The Economist’s scathing coverage of China: Everything is always going haywire in the Middle Kingdom. [Source: economist.com]

Now the clamor about China’s alleged economic crisis has reached new heights in the Western media.

Against their better judgment, even Western correspondents based in China are spreading reports about China’s alleged major crisis. German journalist Matthias Kamp, Beijing correspondent for the leading Swiss newspaper NZZ, for example, reported that “restaurants and stores in Beijing are closing by the dozen,” using this example, which he did not substantiate, to illustrate the allegedly catastrophic state of the Chinese economy.

The title of his alarmist article was “China’s rulers are on high alert due to the economic crisis.” But when I looked around Shanghai recently, I found full restaurants and busy shops.

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Restaurant in Shanghai: Every seat is taken. [Source: Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

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Busy shoppers in Shanghai. [Source: Photo courtesy of Felix Abt]

Contrary to the media, however, we should not take this as a sign of the health of the Chinese economy.

The situation in China is much more nuanced than the Western media portray it. Many Chinese are certainly disillusioned and disappointed that the partially saturated economy will have to make do with lower growth rates from now on. Chinese business people I have spoken to believe that citizens have become accustomed to very high annual growth rates over many years. However, it is completely absurd to talk about a general crisis because the economy is growing overall, with some sectors growing strongly and others, such as the real estate sector, stagnating or shrinking.

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Is this what an economic crisis looks like? The Chinese economy has slowed down compared to the double-digit growth rates of previous decades, but its growth is still close to 5% despite the severe impact of the real estate crash. [Source: National Bureau of Statistics, Beijing-Courtesy of Felix Abt]

The facts speak a different language than the claims of the anti-China Western mainstream media. [Source: fxempire.com]
There is no doubt that the property sector, which was a driver of the economic boom for years, is in crisis. Since 2021, it no longer contributes anything to growth. This is shown in the following chart:

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Property sector in China: negative growth since 2021. [Source: infosperber.ch]

However, what the Western media deliberately overlook is that the real estate sector no longer plays a decisive role in the Chinese economy and no longer has the potential to drag the economy into the abyss. Nevertheless, it still influences consumer sentiment.

The industrial sector is booming all the more.

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Various industrial sectors are showing high growth rates, both domestically and in exports. Source: ibisworld.com]

The five strongest sectors that are currently satisfying both rising domestic demand and foreign demand are: 1. solar module manufacturing; 2. car manufacturing; 3. aircraft manufacturing; 4. boat building; and 5. the construction of alternative fuel vehicles. These five sectors have also increased their exports by 20% to 28% this year.

What you could not learn from the Western mainstream media is that Chinese bank lending for real estate peaked in 2018 and has been systematically reduced since then. In contrast, loans for productive sectors and industries of the future have been significantly expanded since 2019. This means that the economy has been steered away from the property zombie industry and toward growth industries via lending for the past five years.

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Growth rates in industry, the property sector and services. [Source: People’s Bank of China-Courtesy of Felix Abt]
Artificial intelligence is currently the fastest growing industry of the future: More than 237,000 AI companies were founded in China in the first six months of this year.

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Artificial intelligence has become one of the most important drivers of the Chinese economy. Headline in South China Morning Post. [Source: finance.yahoo.com]

The government’s new stimulus packages are not an act of desperation, as the Western mainstream media would have us believe. In view of the intensified trade war that the U.S. and its allies want to wage with all their might against China, this is a necessary stimulus for domestic consumption.

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“Desperate China” or rather desperate Western media making up doomsday stories? [Source: news.com.au]

My interlocutors among Chinese business people are convinced that this “transition phase,” in which dependence on Western markets will inevitably be reduced, will initially cost China a few painful percent of growth, especially if domestic demand is not strong enough to compensate for the losses on the export side.

China is focusing on its strategic strengths
In contrast to the West, where there is a lot of talk about an alleged economic crisis in China, China’s government does not think in terms of short-term economic cycles. Nor do companies think in terms of quarters and quarterly financial statements. An economy “with Chinese characteristics” means focusing on strategic strengths that will pay off in the long term. These will determine what China’s economic future will look like.

It is assumed that 64 critical technologies will determine the future of the world. China dominates 89% of them. Twenty years ago, the United States still dominated 60 of these 64 technologies. This is according to a report by the China-critical Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank financially supported by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

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The results of the ASPI study: China dominates 57 out of 64 critical future technologies. [Source: aspi.org.au].

In recent decades, China has flooded almost the entire world with cheap industrial products. To achieve this success, Chinese companies initially copied Western technologies and applied them to mass production.

But many overlook that China has now mutated into the world’s leading research center. This is the only reason why China has been able to dominate the global economy in the fields of artificial intelligence, renewable energy, biotechnology, space technology and quantum computing.

Even The Economist now recognizes that China is a “scientific superpower.”

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The Economist sounds the alarm: “From plant biology to superconductor physics the country [China] is at the cutting edge.” [Source: economist.com]

Supposedly “incapable of innovation”
Just ten years ago, the Harvard Business Review published a study claiming that China was incapable of innovation. Harvard researchers, looking at China through a clouded ideological lens, emphasized that “China is largely a land of rule-bound rote learners—a place where R&D is diligently pursued but breakthroughs are rare.”

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In March 2014, the Harvard Business Review set out to prove that China cannot be innovative. [Source: hbr.org]

They failed to recognize the Confucian character of the ruling party, which is more communist in name than in reality.

Only a decade after this damning finding, China had five times as many top research results as the United States.

While the U.S. was financing and waging overt and covert wars and overthrowing governments around the world, China was working behind the scenes and outperforming the U.S. in many areas.

To our great astonishment, however, the same Harvard Business Review recently concluded that China has created a sophisticated innovation ecosystem that “uniquely combines top-down government—industry coordination with the bottom-up drive of Chinese entrepreneurs.”

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In August 2024, the Harvard Business Review explains the strengths of the Chinese economy, including its unrivaled capacity for innovation. [Source: hbr.org]

The authors point to the high economies of scale thanks to the huge consumer market as well as Chinas investments in the countries of the Global South, or more precisely Global Majority, which represent the growth markets of the future. However, it is also crucial that the toughest competition in the world prevails within China. Companies that survive this competition will be so strong that they will become global players and champions. The authors explain literally:

“Companies that survive the life-and-death struggles of China’s markets—often described as a ‘Gladiators Arena’—often emerge as global champions. Think of CATL (batteries), BYD (batteries and electric vehicles), Tongwei (solar), Goldwind (wind), or Huawei (information and communications technology).”

And how is the United States responding? The U.S. elite’s response to a highly innovative and superior competitor is to abolish the free market, which they championed as long as they dominated it, and resort to protectionism and coercive measures against China.

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The supposedly strongest economy in the world relies on protectionism to shield itself from smarter competitors. As a result, American consumers have to pay higher prices. While wages have stagnated for many years, prices in the U.S. have risen noticeably. They will rise even further if President Trump imposes high import tariffs on Chinese goods. [Source: quora.com]

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Projection: Western opponents accuse China of unfair practices that they themselves are practicing. Gina Raimondo, U.S. Secretary of Commerce, calls on Europe to join Washington’s coercive measures to prevent China from innovating and prospering. [Source: cnbc.com]
At the same time, Washington is intensifying its military encirclement of the country.

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While China does not have a single military base near the U.S., the U.S. has dozens of bases around China and is in the process of building even more. [Source: napajac.org]

In addition, billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being spent on fear campaigns against the so-called “Chinese threat” when, in reality, it is China that is being threatened by the United States.

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Washington spends millions of dollars advancing anti-China propaganda in the U.S. media. [Source: responsiblestatecraft.org]

Fifteen years ago, Chinese consumers were still queuing up to pay cash for a Buick, Toyota, BMW, Audi or Mercedes. Today, most Chinese have switched to electric cars, especially Chinese cars, because they are now the market leader.

In addition to more advanced technology at lower prices, the U.S. economic war against China is also influencing Chinese buying behavior. (Watch my video: “Economic War Against China: Chinese Turn Nationalistic and Reject Foreign Brands” that explains why.)

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What does it say when Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and his company lose out to much smaller Chinese competitors? [Source: ft.org]

Tesla, once the undisputed market leader in electric cars, which was able to charge premium prices, also felt the effects of the relentless Chinese competition. Despite four price cuts in China in 2023, the company was outperformed by its Chinese competition.

Will Chinese car manufacturers save their German competitors?

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Declining German car companies are seeking rescue from Chinese car manufacturers. [Source: infosperber.ch]

German car manufacturers were the first to teach the Chinese how to build cars with combustion engines. Now German engineers are learning from Chinese manufacturers how to build electric vehicles.

For example, Audi and the Chinese company FAW are working together on a $4.87 billion production plant for electric vehicles in China.

Innovation is expensive: China and the United States finance it very differently

Last year, China had a trade surplus of $823 billion, exporting far more than it imported. The country is using its surplus income for research and development and to build critical industries, especially the key growth industries of the future. China promotes these through various incentives, regulations and centralized investment in scientific research.

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The development of China’s trade surplus in billions of dollars. [Source: infosperber.ch]

While companies in the U.S. recognize that certain industries are the future, they are much slower to invest in them as they focus on maximizing immediate profits and are much less willing to invest for the long term.

In addition, the U.S. government plays a much smaller role in new industries than the Chinese government. And the priorities of the U.S. government can often change due to changing parties and budget priorities.

While China has a considerable trade surplus, the United States has a large trade deficit:

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The development of the U.S. trade deficit in billions of dollars. [Source: infosperber.ch]

Due to the large U.S. trade deficit, any government funding must be raised by the Federal Reserve printing money, further driving up the debt of more than $31 trillion, increasing interest rates, fueling inflation and pushing the world further toward de-dollarization.

Bildschirmfoto 2024-10-06 um 17.48.30
Development of the U.S. national debt in trillions of dollars (1 trillion = 1,000 billion). [Source: infosperber.ch]
The large trade surplus and China’s “whole of nation” approach to innovation allows the country to mobilize almost unlimited government funds in addition to the enormous resources invested by private companies. From 1995 to 2021, China’s total spending on research and development rose from $18.2 billion to $620.1 billion, an increase of more than 3,300%! In the same period, spending on research and development in the U.S. rose by 277%.

In recent years, corporate profits and subsidies received in the United States—and in Europe too—have often been used to buy back shares and pay the salaries of top managers rather than for investment.

In the meantime, China has become a leading center for cutting-edge scientific research. The Economist admits that Chinese scientists are world leaders in high-profile publications and contributions to prestigious scientific journals, “selected through rigorous peer-review” processes.

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A striking example of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor: Money from generally poorer taxpayers to much richer top executives and shareholders who pay relatively low or no taxes. New York Times headline. [Source: infosperber.ch]

No area illustrates China’s technological lead better than “Clean Tech.” Today, China accounts for more than 80% of global production capacity in eleven key clean-energy technologies. China dominates the rare-earth supply chain. It produces 70% of the world’s rare earths and processes 90% of all rare earths.

Western companies are finding it difficult to compete in the solar industry despite high customs barriers. Thanks to China’s enormous investments and the large domestic market, large solar panels cost barely 15% as much as they did in 2010.

It all began with bartering markets for know-how

After China opened up its economy in the 1970s, many Western companies moved to the country to take advantage of the huge market and cheap labor. In return for market access, Chinese companies benefited from decades of Western investment in traditional industries such as cars and chemicals.

This bartering, that is know-how in exchange for huge sales opportunities and profits, led to China’s reputation for “stealing technology.”

Ironically, it is now the West that is asking Chinese companies to come to their countries and share their expertise in critical technologies such as clean energy. One example is Invenergy, one of the largest U.S. renewable energy companies. As part of a 51/49 partnership with leading Chinese solar company LONGi, Invenergy opened the largest solar panel factory in the U.S. this year.

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China’s leading manufacturer of batteries for electric vehicles is supporting an American car company and helping it to build a battery factory in the U.S. [Source: infosperber.ch]

The West neglected developing countries; China sees them as an opportunity

In the past, Western countries mainly exported their products to other high-income countries, often overlooking developing countries with smaller economies in the rest of the world. The Global South is home to 6.8 billion people, more than 85% of the world’s population.

And as their economies grow, so does their demand for goods and new technologies. China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), for which China has invested more than a trillion dollars in over 150 countries, has led to the construction of major infrastructure such as ports, railroads and airports.

Unlike the U.S. and its Western allies, China does not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. It is therefore not surprising that the supportive, non-patronizing China is much more popular there than the West. This helped, for example, that the majority of the smart-phone market in Africa is dominated by Chinese companies or that Huawei supplies 70% of the 4G network infrastructure in Africa.

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In America’s backyard: Chinese companies are taking market share from American competitors. [Source: thediplomat.com]

In Latin America, the Chinese have a market share of 86% for electric vehicles and 40% of total car sales.

Standing up to the competition in the Chinese meritocracy or laying down your arms

Under the subtitle “The dangers of not being in China,” the Harvard Business Review now warns global companies not to make the mistake of not competing in China. Those which are not active in China risk “losing global revenues and strategic opportunities to their Chinese competitors.”

Little known in the West is the significant fact that the Tang Dynasty (618-907) introduced meritocracy, China’s revolutionary model of success that has endured to this day, as I explained in this article.

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Title of Substack article on Chinese meritocracy, which cannot be separated from China’s economic success. [Source: felixabtsubstack.com]

So, should we still believe the Western media and politicians when they say that the Chinese economy is doomed? Well, only if we want to be distracted from the fact that the economies of the United States and its allies are, booming, which is of course an illusion.

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“Forget China—it’s America’s own economic system that’s broken,” says Robert Reich, professor of public policy at the University of California’s Goldman School of Public Policy and former U.S. Secretary of Labor [Source: realclearpolitics.com

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... ely-claim/
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 03, 2025 3:58 pm

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Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning. (Photo: MFA China)

China demands withdrawal of U.S. missile system from the Philippines, calls it a threat to regional peace and security
Originally published: Peoples Dispatch on December 28, 2024 by Abdul Rahman (more by Peoples Dispatch) | (Posted Dec 31, 2024)

China reiterated its concerns about the Philippines’ plan to acquire the U.S. Typhon missile defense system. In the foreign ministry press briefing on Thursday, December 26, the spokesperson of the ministry, Mao Ning, claimed it is a “strategic and offensive” weapon which may fuel arms race in the region. China also restated its long-standing demand for the withdrawal of the system already deployed near its borders.

Ning reminded the leadership in the Philippines of their promise of never taking sides among the major powers. She accused the Philippines of working “with the U.S. to bring in the Typhon system” and “placing its national security and defense in the hands of others, introducing geopolitical confrontation and risk of arms race into the region and posing a threat to regional peace and security.”

Mao Ning questioned the move, asking “whose interest does this move serve? How could anybody believe this in independent foreign policy?” She asserted that “what the Philippines is doing benefits no one.”

Dismissing concerns raised by China earlier, Philippines Defense Minister Gilberto Teodoro had said on Tuesday, that “any deployment and procurement of assets related to the Philippines security and defense falls within its own sovereign prerogative and are not subject to any foreign veto,” Reuters had reported.

Philippines Military Chief Lieutenant General Roy Galido even said on Monday that his country would acquire the Typhon mid range missile system from the U.S. “for the interest of protecting our sovereignty,” in the coming year.

The U.S. deployed the Typhon missile system in the Philippines in April this year despite objections raised by China. Both the U.S. and Philippines had claimed that the deployment of the missile system was temporary for the purposes of a joint Balikatan military exercises and once the exercise is over it would be pulled out by June. However, the missile system has not been removed yet and both U.S. and Filipino officials have since claimed no third country has any say in the matter.

U.S. weapons mean risk of war and conflict
Typhon is a missile system developed by Lockheed Martin and was adopted by the U.S. army last year. It can carry both conventional and nuclear warheads up to 480 KM.

China has repeatedly asked for the removal of the U.S. missile systems in the region with its defense ministry claiming earlier this month that “history and reality have proven that wherever U.S. weapons are deployed, the risk of war and conflict will rise, and the local people will suffer undeserved suffering from war.”

Galido has confirmed that negotiations are underway with the U.S. to acquire Typhon. When acquired it would be deployed to defend Philippines’ maritime borders and its “floating assets” of up to 200 nautical miles (370.4 KM), South China Morning Post reported.

At present, China and the Philippines have a dispute over some islands in the South China Sea. The military cooperation between the U.S. and the Philippines has grown significantly since 2022 under the leadership of Filipino President Marcos Junior. The U.S. has been trying to increase its presence in the region in the name of “freedom of navigation” targeting Chinese interests. There have been increased numbers of military exercises and tensions among the countries of the region since the growing U.S. involvement.

Reiterating its stand on external interference in the region, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Ning had said in a press briefing on Monday that “by bringing in this strategic offensive weapon, [Philippines] is enabling a country outside the region to fuel tensions and antagonism in this region and incite geopolitical confrontation and arms race.”

China had earlier appealed to the government of the Philippines to “heed the call from regional countries and their peoples, correct its wrongdoing as soon as possible, quickly pull out the Typhon Missile system as publicly pledged, and stop going further down the wrong path.”

https://mronline.org/2024/12/31/china-d ... -security/

******

Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Antony Blinken, China, and the Idiocy of Tom Friedman
Posted on January 2, 2025 by Yves Smith

Yves here. The far-too-widely-read Tom Friedman has become a parody of a know-nothing American showing off his case of Dunning-Kruger effect. I must confess to lacking the motivation to read his pieces for the purpose of shellacking them, so hats off to Megan Russell for taking up the task.


Russell mentions a key point in passing, and it bears repeating. Friedman can dole out nonsense-posturing-as-insight because his readers are at least as ignorant and lack curiosity. And I don’t even mean going to China, although it would be good (absent carbon costs) for more Americans to see for themselves that the US is not the center of the world and generally has a poor quality of life. As with our military, a lot of our spending goes to overpriced and not terribly fit for purpose items such as bloated higher education, an extortive health care system, slow and costly bandwidth, and supersized houses.

Americans generally and the New York Times in generally should be embarrassed about what Friedman’s status as a member in good standing of punditocracy says about them.

By Megan Russell, CODEPINK’s China is Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator. Originally published at Common Dreams

Thomas Friedman probably thought he was being clever when he titled his most recent article How Elon Musk and Taylor Swift Can Resolve U.S.-China Relations. It’s a headline meant to catch your attention– appealing to the Swifties, who think Taylor can save the world, the Musketeers, who are certain Elon can save the world, and, of course, their anti-fans who follow their every move with just as much zeal, and perhaps even more. It was the New York Times version of clickbait, because why bother with solid journalism when you can piggyback off the success of billionaires?

It was clickable, but it was hardly readable.

Friedman starts his piece off with a kernel of truth, just enough to shock the regular NYT’s readers who are very rarely fed a positive bit of news about China:

“I just spent a week in Beijing and Shanghai, meeting with Chinese officials, economists and entrepreneurs, and let me get right to the point: While we were sleeping China took a great leap forward in high-tech manufacturing of everything.”

Nobody that knows anything about China can argue with that, though a majority of Americans certainly still view the far-away country through the lens of Soviet communism and rural backwardness. The correlation is that the majority of Americans know nothing about China, have never been, and will never go.

He then goes on to express how Donald Trump’s tariffs and anti-China rhetoric jump-started China’s manufacturing prowess, mentioning how Trump’s name on Chinese social media is “Chuan Jiaguo” meaning “Nation Builder.”

No. It was not Donald Trump that ushered in China’s “Sputnik moment,” as quoted by business consultant Jim McGregor. Trump is merely an amusement to China’s general public—a strange American enigma whose hard lines are overshadowed by unexpected candor and comical behavior. For China, the last 40 years has been a continuous Sputnik moment—from the elimination of extreme poverty to unprecedented shift to renewable energy, China has been on the rise, and Donald Trump has never been the yeast making that happen.

And then comes the meat of Friedman’s theory, what he calls the “Elon Musk-Taylor Swift paradigm.” Instead of suddenly raising US tariffs against China, which will lead us into a kind of supply-chain warfare that benefits nobody, Friedman suggest a gradual rise in tariffs, that would allow the US to “buy time to lift up more Elon Musks” which he describes as “more homegrown manufacturers who can make big stuff so we can export more to the world and import less,” as well as give China more time to “let in more Taylor Swifts” which are “more opportunities for its youth to spend money on entertainment and consumer goods made abroad.”

Friedman isn’t wrong about the idiocy of a US-China trade war, but his prognosis is tone-deaf, and very clearly the result of a Western capitalist tormented by the concept of zero-sum competition:

“It’s important to the world that China continues to be able to give its 1.4 billion people a better life — but it cannot be at the expense of everyone else.”

He does, unsurprisingly, make the Soviet comparison:

But if we don’t use this time to respond to China the way we did to the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, with our own comprehensive scientific, innovative and industrial push, we will be toast.”

Toast! Don’t we all collectively like toast?

He talks of the dangers of China’s rising economic dominance. How China “owns the future” because it is the main producer of Electric Vehicles. How China is domestically self-sufficient. How China will soon account for nearly half of all global manufacturing. How all of China’s gains will be everyone else’s loss. How China is going to export robot-run factories to other countries, and thereby steal labor opportunities— as if the West hasn’t exported their own factories and exploited impoverished communities for cheap labor over decades.

“But here’s what’s scary: We no longer make that many things China wants to buy. It can do almost everything at least cheaper and often better.”

That must be incredibly scary to the average American who would rather pay a few bucks for a Temu version of an item rather than shell out tens of dollars for anything made by local businesses. It’s not their fault. The U.S. is incredibly unaffordable and the government does not seem to care.

At the same time, Friedman criticizes the lack of consumption within China:

“If I were drawing a picture of China’s economy today as a person, it would have an awesome manufacturing upper body — like Popeye, still eating spinach — with consuming legs resembling thin little sticks.”

It is the fate of a capitalist to view nonconsumption as a societal malady rather than a sign of good health. The truth is those that consume less have other more nourishing and sustainable ways to fill their souls. At a time when consumerism and overspending are contributing to the destruction of the planet, this is a rather thoughtless point to make. Imagine if society applauded community-building rather than the pointless expenditure of money to temporarily fill a gaping emptiness left by a lack of community and an overemphasis on hyperindividualism? It is very American to look for quick solutions rather than address the root cause.

To his credit, Friedman does state the importance of China providing for its 1.4 billion population, but it is a mere drop of humility that does little to balance the western self-righteousness. He does not comment on the fact that China’s population is greater than the US and Europe combined. Neither does he comment on the West’s own role in exporting labor for cheaper prices— because a capitalist system is run on greed, and wherever a buck can be saved, you bet it will be. Even at the expense of the people.

Friedman suggests that China should “let their people have more of the supply.” Apparently, they want to buy more stuff from us. Stuff that Friedman claims they are being starved of under the rule of the Communist Party of China. Things like art and entertainment. Majors in gender studies and sociology.

“Its youth need more outlets for creative expression — without having to worry that a song lyric they write could land them in prison.”

I have doubts that Friedman ever ventured out to a concert in Shanghai, let alone listened to some of China’s latest indie music. Culture is something that China definitely does not lack, and to make that claim is so wildly misguided that I question whether he has any understanding of China at all. One merely has to take a walk along the riverside in literally any city, and they will be bombarded by musicians, performers, and an impressive amount of outdoor public karaoke. There are as many artists as there are consumers of art, and indeed, a fair share of students pursuing the humanities.

He concludes:

“In sum, America needs to tighten up, but China needs to loosen up. Which is why my hat is off to Secretary of State Antony Blinken for showing China the way forward.”

What did Antony Blinken do that was so impressive? He stopped at a record store in China and bought a Taylor Swift album.

Maybe, just maybe, Friedman is just one giant Swiftie. But more likely, he threw the article together with a preschool level understanding of the WTO, and an opinion that almost sounds like an opinion, but doesn’t really say much of anything when you give it a thought.

The only difference between sudden tariffs and gradual tariffs is time—and what will time do? In our 4-year system, time is as fickle as our word. Either way, China will still be pioneering the green energy revolution, selling affordable EVs and renewable energy equipment around the globe while the United States, as the NYT Beijing bureau chief Keith Bradsher says, will “become the new Cuba—the place where you visit to see old gas-guzzling cars that you drive yourself.”

And if the US continues its threatened posture around anything coming from China—including green energy tech—the world will continue to heat up, and we will all face the consequences.

Friedman’s general lack of understanding about China was a let down. But mostly I was disappointed because the title had me anticipating a much different read—something with a bit of creativity, and maybe even an original thought.

I would have been more impressed if Friedman suggested sticking Elon Musk and his federal spending chopping block DOGE on the over-bloated Department of Defense, and booking Taylor Swift a highly-publicized multi-city tour around China. Send Blinken along with her, if he’s such a big fan, and have him venture outside of his strict China perimeter to meet, talk with locals, and experience a version of China that he never would in his fancy hotel rooms and secure government buildings. Maybe then he would form an opinion based on his own experiences rather than the lines he memorized over the course of his typical Ivy League education, and the subsequent falling-in-place that one must do to become the Secretary of State of the United States. A selling out of the soul, if you will.

And maybe the well being of the people—of all people—would be considered for once, rather than the flimsy monetary aspirations of the already-wealthy.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/01 ... edman.html

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China’s Great Green Wall is a vision of hope for the planet
The article below, written by Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez for the Morning Star, describes the recent milestone success scored in China’s Great Green Wall with the announcement that Xinjiang’s Taklimakan Desert – China’s largest desert and the world’s second-largest shifting sand desert – has been completely surrounded with a green belt composed of drought-resistant tree species. Carlos notes that this forest belt “constitutes the world’s longest green ecological barrier”.

The article goes on to discuss the dangers of desertification, which is a major environmental problem in China, and the world more broadly, as well as describing how “China has been proactively engaging with countries around the world to combat desertification, sharing its experience and helping other developing nations implement desertification control strategies”.

Comparing China’s cooperative approach with the US’s orientation towards war and hegemony, Carlos concludes:

China’s commitment to international co-operation stands in stark contrast to the hegemonism of the US and its allies, reminding humanity of the urgent choice it faces between a Global Community of Shared Future and a Project for a New American Century.
IN 1978, China launched its Three North Shelter Forest (Green Great Wall) Programme, aimed at creating a forest chain extending from Xinjiang in the far north-west to Heilongjiang in the far north-east, to prevent further expansion of the Gobi and Taklimakan deserts. This multi-generational project is scheduled for completion in 2050.

According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the programme “has greatly increased the forest coverage and effectively combated desertification in the programme area, improved the overall situation of serious wind-sand hazards and soil erosion, enhanced the resilience and adaptability to natural disasters and climate change.”

Further, “thanks to the development of forest and fruit-related industries, tens of millions of local people have been pulled out of poverty.”

The Great Green Wall scored a milestone success in November 2024 with the announcement that the Taklimakan Desert (in Xinjiang) has been completely surrounded with a green belt stretching 3,046 kilometres, composed of drought-resistant tree species like red willows, saxaul and desert poplar.

Taklimakan is China’s largest desert and the world’s second-largest shifting sand desert, meaning that its sand dunes constantly shift, causing erosion of grasslands and expansion of the desert. The forest belt now surrounding it constitutes the world’s longest green ecological barrier.

China has, for the last few decades, been the world leader in forestation. Its forest coverage in 1980 was just 12 per cent; as a result of a systematic greening campaign, coverage has now reached 24 per cent.

President Xi Jinping has often emphasised the importance of forest development: “Forests are the mainstay and an important resource for the land ecosystem. They are also an important ecological safeguard for the survival and development of mankind. It is hard to imagine what would happen to the earth and human beings without forests.”

One particularly interesting innovation developed in Xinjiang has been the use of photovoltaic sand control, whereby large solar farms are installed in arid and semi-arid regions. The solar panels act as physical barriers, reducing wind speed at ground level and thereby hindering erosion.

Further, the shade provided by the panels helps reduce surface temperature and aids moisture retention. This dew can even be used for growing grasses and herbs under the panels.

Desertification — the creeping transformation of fertile soil into arid land — poses a major threat to China, affecting over 27 per cent of the country’s land and around 400 million of its people.

A Forbes article from 2017 notes that “the Gobi is the fastest-growing desert on Earth, transforming nearly 2,250 miles of grassland per year into an inhospitable wasteland. This expansion eats away at space that was once fit for agriculture and creates unbridled sandstorms that batter cities near the edge of the desert.”

Indeed, desertification has accelerated worldwide in recent decades. A recent UN report labelled it as a “global, existential peril,” pointing out that three-quarters of Earth’s land was drier in 2020 than it was in 1990. This is, to a significant degree, a function of climate change, with rising temperatures leading to higher rates of evaporation and reduced soil moisture.

War, instability and poverty all have a mutually reinforcing effect on desertification. One of the most successful water projects of the 20th century was Libya’s Great Man-Made River (GMMR), which transported fresh water from ancient underground aquifers in the Sahara Desert to coastal cities and agricultural lands.

The largest irrigation project in the world, it helped to prevent soil degradation, reduce desert encroachment, and enable agriculture in desert regions. The GMMR was dubbed by Muammar Gadaffi as the “eighth wonder of the world,” and even Newsweek grudgingly admits that “this title is not without justification.”

Tragically, the GMMR was deliberately targeted during Nato’s regime-change war in 2011, and given the ongoing political instability in the country, it has yet to be properly restored.

Mustafa Fetouri writes: “The entire project’s infrastructure is under threat. Political instability, negligence, illegal connections to its pipelines and badly maintained water networks are among the biggest problems. In July 2011, Nato bombed the biggest pipe-making plant at Brega in eastern Libya, killing six of the facility’s security guards. In a press release, the alliance claimed it was responding to ground fire coming from the facility.”

Nichole Barger, chair of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification’s science-policy interface, insists that “by embracing innovative solutions and fostering global solidarity” humanity can meet the challenge of desertification and thereby avoid “a future marked by hunger, displacement, and economic decline.”

Thankfully, while Nato countries spread war and instability, China has been proactively engaging with countries around the world to combat desertification, sharing its experience and helping other developing nations implement desertification control strategies.

China has contributed to vast tree-planting programmes throughout Africa and Asia. It provides financial aid, equipment and technical assistance to countries struggling with desertification, as well as sharing technologies for sand fixation, water-saving agriculture, and afforestation. China is working closely with the African Union to support Africa’s own Great Green Wall initiative.

The scale of China’s Great Green Wall shows once again the importance of its people-centred, socialist governance and the country’s commitment to the long-term wellbeing of its people.

China’s commitment to international co-operation stands in stark contrast to the hegemonism of the US and its allies, reminding humanity of the urgent choice it faces between a Global Community of Shared Future and a Project for a New American Century.

https://socialistchina.org/2024/12/29/c ... he-planet/

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China donates 70 tons of equipment to help Cuba restore its electric system
The following article from Brasil de Fato reports on China’s donation of almost 70 tons of power generator parts and accessories to Cuba. Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade and Investment Déborah Rivas said that the donation “reflects the high sensitivity of the Chinese government authorities to Cuba’s needs, and their firm support for Cuba under all circumstances, joining, in a true expression of fraternity, the Cuban government’s efforts to achieve energy sustainability”.

Cuba faces a major energy crisis, largely as a result of the US’s cruel and illegal economic blockade. The article notes: “The import of fuel, like any other good, is hampered by the sanctions that Washington unilaterally imposes on countries that trade with Cuba because any ship that arrives at a Cuban port is sanctioned, which generates staggering prices the island has to pay to import the products it needs.”

China is cooperating with Cuba, under the framework of the Belt and Road Energy Partnership, to construct several new photovoltaic parts, which will allow the island to modernise its energy infrastructure and meet its goal of generating all its energy from renewable sources by 2050.
The People’s Republic of China has donated almost 70 tons of power generator parts and accessories to Cuba, aiming to contribute to the recovery of the Caribbean island’s electricity system.

The materials arrived in the country on Sunday (29) and were received by China’s ambassador to Cuba, Hua Xin, and Cuba’s deputy ministers of Foreign Trade and Investment, Déborah Rivas, and Energy and Mining, Tatiana Amarán.

According to Ambassador Xin, the shipment is part of China’s second assistance package in 2024 to help restore Cuba’s electricity generation capacity to around 400 megawatts (MW). As part of an “emergency project list,” the donations were included to provide Cuba with effective and rapid aid according to what the Chinese government calls “convenience for the most urgent.”

“The next batches are expected to arrive soon by freight, commercial flights or container transportation,” he said.

During the brief ceremony to receive the donations, Deputy Minister Déborah Rivas said that it “reflects the high sensitivity of the Chinese government authorities [to Cuban’s needs] and their firm support for Cuba under all circumstances, joining, in a true expression of fraternity, the Cuban government’s efforts to achieve energy sustainability.”

The deputy minister also stated that the island government estimates that this donation will benefit about 53,200 homes in the country.

The donations come as the Caribbean country is facing a serious energy crisis that has worsened in recent months. This year, Cuba has suffered three total blackouts in the national electricity system, leaving the country completely in the dark. Currently, power cuts are becoming more and more constant, affecting over 40% of the population daily. The situation has seriously damaged economic activity and the population’s quality of life.

### Bloc and energy

The donations are part of agreements signed between Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, seeking to expand cooperation in strategic initiatives such as energy, transportation, food security and trade.

Cuba’s electricity generation comes from old thermoelectric plants – most of which are more than 30 years old – which require constant maintenance to operate. However, due to the US blockade on the country – considered illegal by most UN countries – Cuba has for decades faced serious financial difficulties in making the necessary investments and maintenance to keep its electricity system running.

The import of fuel, like any other good, is hampered by the sanctions that Washington unilaterally imposes on countries that trade with Cuba because any ship that arrives at a Cuban port is sanctioned, which generates staggering prices the island has to pay to import the products it needs.

In recent months, the Chinese government has donated various components for the installation of photovoltaic parks (renewable energies based on sunlight) on the Caribbean island. The region’s climatic conditions make sunlight the most favorable source of renewable energy for the country.

Currently, more than 95% of the country’s power generation comes from fossil fuels, while only 5% comes from renewable sources. Cuba aims to generate up to 25% of its electric energy from renewable sources over the next five years. By 2050, the aim is to cover the entire energy matrix with electricity generation based on renewable energy sources.

In mid-December, the Chinese government and Cuba officially announced the construction of several photovoltaic parks on the Caribbean island, with funds donated by the Asian country. It is estimated that these photovoltaic parks could save up to seven million US dollars.

https://socialistchina.org/2025/01/01/c ... ic-system/

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Indictment Debunks China Hacking Claim

On October 25 2024 a number of main-stream media outlets were spreading an anti-Chinese propaganda campaign launched by U.S. national security sources.

The immediate occasion was an incident in which some hacker had gained access to a number of call records.

NBCnews headlined:

China targeted phones of Trump, Vance and Harris campaign affiliates, sources say
The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the federal government is investigating.

A broad Chinese hacking campaign against U.S. telecommunication networks targeted the phones of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, two sources familiar with the matter say. Another source told NBC News that people affiliated with the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris were also targeted.
The staff of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was also targeted, a Democratic source said.
...
In a joint statement, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said the federal government “is investigating the unauthorized access to commercial telecommunications infrastructure by actors affiliated with the People’s Republic of China.”
...
The U.S. government recently concluded that China has hacked three American telecommunications companies: AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies. Lumen declined to comment. AT&T didn’t respond to a request for comment.


Telecommunication companies keep metadata records of all calls made through their networks. The records include which number called what number at what time and from where. If one gets access to those records one can search for all calls a number associated with a person has made or received. But one (unless one is the NSA) does not get access to the content of those calls.

It is totally conceivable that someone got illegitimate access to call record databases. That person could publish selected real records or fake some to make it look as if some person communicated with some other without that having been the case.

To conclude though that some specific actor, for example China, has done such requires some evidence. None of the October reports contained any. The claims of Chinese involvement were solely based on U.S. government sources.

Media repeated those claims without any qualifications.

They were wrong.

Only ten week later the old reports are falling apart. Now a U.S. soldier is accused of hacking into the call data record databases and of publishing parts of them, presumably on his own behest.

The New York Post provides:

US Army soldier allegedly linked to hacked Trump, Harris phone records charged by feds

A Texas-based US Army soldier has been arrested and charged with selling confidential phone records, including material allegedly stolen from President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Cameron John Wagenius, 20, was indicted by a Seattle grand jury earlier this month on two felony counts of unlawfully transferring confidential phone records information on an online forum and on an online communications platform.
...
An online handle associated with Wagenius has allegedly been linked to several high-profile cyber crimes, which are not detailed in the indictment.

Wagenius reportedly went by the alias “Kiberphant0m” online, which boasted about hacking more than a dozen telecommunications firms and obtaining call records belonging to Harris and Trump.

In November, Kiberphant0m posted unverified AT&T call logs supposedly belonging to the two 2024 presidential candidates and offered to sell the stolen information, according to The Verge.


There is no fact that would associate Wagenius with China or vice versa. The October claims of a Chinese hack just vanished. No one (but this little blog), certainly not NBCnews, will ever point out that the old claims, made by U.S. national security sources, of a Chinese hack were totally bollocks.

Be assured that any other claims made by national security sources of similar hacks by Chinese, Russian or Iranian actors are likely to be of similar quality.

Posted by b on January 3, 2025 at 13:45 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/01/i ... .html#more
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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 18, 2025 2:46 pm

Red Note Revolution & the Red Scare
How Class Consciousness Was Gained Overnight
Ekaterina Cabylis
Jan 15, 2025

The Red Note revolution might be healing us in ways we didn’t think were possible. In just 48 hours, waves of North Americans and people across the globe have been migrating to Chinese platforms like Red Note (Xiaohongshu), sparking a cultural shift. Americans are beginning to see what life in China is really like, shattering decades of Cold War stereotypes. It’s heartwarming, informative, hilarious, and moving to witness some of these cross-cultural interactions. But most importantly, it’s decentering the global North.

For the first time in history, Chinese and American citizens are able to exchange information rapidly and directly, breaking down years of political and cultural isolation. Historically, interactions between these two nations have been heavily obstructed by propaganda, fueling misunderstanding and fear.

For decades, U.S. propaganda portrayed China as an authoritarian, impoverished state, a narrative that persisted even as China modernized and became a global powerhouse. This image kept many Americans unaware of the reality: a society where people enjoy well-rounded lives with access to housing, food, healthcare, luxury lifestyles, complete with brand names and stylish fashion. The reality of what China actually looks like—where sleek maglev trains connect cities at lightning speeds, and entire urban areas are powered by cutting-edge solar energy will be almost incomprehensible to many in Western countries.

Now, as these misconceptions begin to crumble, more people are discovering that a better, more equitable way of living is not only possible but already being realized elsewhere. Platforms like Xiaohongshu, named after Mao’s "Little Red Book," are helping to bridge this gap by offering verified information and shedding light on misconceptions about China. Many are learning that China doesn’t privatize essentials like healthcare or electricity, that its youth enjoy a 70% homeownership rate, and that there are sprawling cities with four times the population of New York where houselessness has been eradicated.

Does this sound too good to be true? It isn’t. This shift represents the final step toward decolonization. American imperialism thrives on divide-and-conquer, spreading hopelessness by convincing people that no alternatives exist. When people can’t imagine, see, or believe that another way of living is possible, they’re less likely to challenge the status quo. American hegemony projects Western values, political structures, and cultural norms onto other countries, reinforcing a narrow vision of what’s possible.

China’s rise does not involve global dominance or cultural imposition. Historically, China has focused on building economic partnerships without the use of force or colonization, and it has largely refrained from interfering in the internal affairs of other nations. Instead, China uses mutual respect, non-interference in sovereignty, and collaboration, making its global influence distinct from Western colonial practices.

In the late 1940s, during the McCarthy era, fear of communism was weaponized to crush labor unions, civil rights efforts, and progressive movements that challenged the grip of big business. The CIA furthered this by shaping education and media to align with capitalist ideas. Since World War II, the CIA has been involved in overthrowing or attempting to overthrow numerous governments, with 75-80% of these efforts targeting socialist or left-leaning governments. These efforts, especially during the Cold War, aimed to protect capitalist interests and counter communism.

During the Cold War, the U.S. covertly supported Tibetan exiles through the CIA, funding resistance groups, establishing military training camps in Nepal, and promoting anti-China propaganda. The CIA also cultivated influence via "Tibet Houses" in New York and Geneva and offered asylum to the Dalai Lama and his followers. These efforts were part of a broader strategy to counter Communist influence, at the expense of Tibetan sovereignty.

The myth of "Tank Man" from the Tiananmen Square protests is one of the most persistent pieces of American propaganda regarding China. The iconic image of a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks has been heralded in the West as a symbol of defiance against an oppressive government.

Tiananmen: The Massacre that Wasn’t
First, the image itself was captured the day after the protests were quelled, not during the height of the events. Contrary to popular belief, there is no evidence that the tanks ran over the man or that he was killed. Eyewitness accounts suggest he was eventually escorted away unharmed.

Despite Western portrayals of China and Russia as military threats, their defense spending remains lower than the US’s colossal military budget, which surpasses China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran combined. The United States holds around 45% of the global prison population. Having just 4% of the world’s population, the U.S. accounts for nearly half of the world’s incarcerated people. Per capita, the U.S. has six times more incarcerated individuals than China. The United States has the highest incarceration rate for women globally. As of recent data, there are approximately 190,600 women incarcerated in the U.S., making up about 10% of the total global incarcerated population.

What Communism Actually Means
Anti-communism in the U.S. serves to protect capitalist interests at home and abroad, leading to violent interventions in countries striving for independence or socialist reforms. Communism seeks to build a classless, stateless society where wealth and power are shared equally. Decisions are made collectively, and the state is meant to “wither away” as society becomes self-governing. However, Cold War propaganda blurred these ideas with authoritarianism, framing communism as inherently repressive.

Communism is rooted in Indigenous systems, egalitarianism and communal living. Karl Marx drew inspiration from the Haudenosaunee peoples of North America. Examples like the Soviet Union and China show how these principles can be applied, though no system has yet achieved the ideal fully.

While many think of the Chinese government as being led solely by the Communist Party (CPC), it’s actually structured into several branches. The key components include the legislative (National People’s Congress, NPC), the executive (State Council, President, and Premier), the judicial (Supreme Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate), and the military (Central Military Commission).

In China, socialism is practiced through decentralized decision-making, with local governments having autonomy over planning and welfare, allowing communities to tailor policies to their needs. China’s governance, often misrepresented in the West, includes mass participation through local committees and urban councils. Decisions made by People’s Congresses at township and county levels are grassroots-driven, with no lobbying allowed. The system consults with organizations like the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference to ensure policies benefit the collective good.

The National People’s Congress holds the most power, with the authority to amend laws, approve budgets, elect key officials like the President and Premier, and oversee major state issues. Decisions are made at different levels—from townships to the national level—where deputies are directly elected by local populations. The CPPCC (Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference) works alongside the NPC, engaging in consultations with various political parties, civic groups, and other organizations. This body gathers suggestions that it passes along to the NPC for consideration. Together, these structures help maintain a blend of centralized control with mechanisms for broader participation in governance.

China’s Achievements in Socialism
The rapid economic growth was driven by a mix of policy changes and investments in infrastructure, education, and industrialization. China focused on poverty alleviation and rural development, enabling millions to migrate to cities and join the workforce using direct policies to tax billionaires and reinvest wealth into public infrastructure, education, and healthcare. This approach lifted over 800 million people out of poverty.

Poverty Alleviation: From 1978 to 2020, China lifted 850 million people out of poverty, marking one of the greatest achievements in human history.

Infrastructure Development: Under Mao and subsequent reforms, China built extensive manufacturing capacities and modernized cities, creating high-speed rail networks, bridges, and roadways.

Healthcare Expansion: Life expectancy in China has risen from 35 years in 1949 to 78 years in 2022, thanks to accessible healthcare initiatives like the New Cooperative Medical Scheme.

Education: China now provides nine years of compulsory education, significantly boosting literacy, especially in rural areas.

Technological Advancements: China leads in green energy, investing in renewable sources like solar and wind power, and promoting clean transportation options. Technology has empowered rural communities to engage in broader markets, narrowing the economic divide between urban and rural areas.

Rural Development: Agricultural reforms have improved rural incomes and reduced urban-rural wealth gaps. The introduction of the Household Responsibility System allowed farmers to lease and manage their own land, boosting productivity and enabling them to sell surplus crops in the market. Specialized teaching brigades made up of agricultural experts provided crucial training in modern farming techniques.

Communism draws from Indigenous societal structures, it focuses on collective living and sustainability. Decolonization involves reclaiming these social models, including treaty-based living in North America. It also means moving toward green energy, supporting internationalism, and rejecting resource extraction from Africa and Latin America.

Chinese socialism and traditional Indigenous systems in North America both share a deep-rooted worldview that values harmony with the land, collective responsibility, and reciprocal relationships between humans and nature. These systems prioritize sustainable living, respect for the environment, and interconnectedness—principles that transcend cultural boundaries and offer valuable lessons for creating more balanced and resilient communities.

Connecting these ideas also challenges the dominant global narrative, where Western-centric views on progress often overshadow other, equally valid traditions and ways of life. The transition to renewable energy is a direct threat to the colonialist economic model, which relies on fossil fuels and the exploitation of resources from the Global South.

The spread of socialist ideas is exactly what the tech oligarchy seeks to prevent, because once Americans realize it’s possible, they might strive to achieve it themselves. China leverages technology to improve living standards, making life more accessible and allowing people to work less. In contrast to the U.S., where many never fully retire, China’s approach offers a vision of shared prosperity, where the focus shifts toward quality of life and sustainable living.

LEARN MORE:
How China Eradicated Absolute Poverty
CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in ‘60s, Files Show
ANTI-COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES, TIBET 2. CHINESE COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES, TIBET
US or China, which is truly democratic? American oligarchy vs Chinese ‘consultative democracy’
Green infrastructure and urbanisation in suburban Beijing: An improved neighbourhood assessment framework
Canada and the new Cold War
The ‘Chinese interference’ story is rooted in xenophobia, economic decline
Cinema Modeoff Africa-China relations has no colonization motives - Namibia president
Subcommittee report declaring “Uighur Genocide” dominated by researchers and groups funded by CIA cut-out, National Endowment for Democracy
'We must develop a multipolar world': Interview with Nicaraguan President Ortega and VP Murillo
Yes, the World Is Multipolar And that isn’t bad news for the United States.
Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage
Stop demonising China, Varoufakis tells Europe
What is China’s political system? | Explained
Growing Multipolar World Is a Threat to the West | BRICS
Anti-China narrative psychological projection of US

https://agonas.substack.com/p/red-note- ... -red-scare

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The exceptional economy
In the following article, British Marxist economist Michael Roberts responds to the neverending predictions of China’s imminent collapse, which have been a staple of Western commentary for decades.

Comparing the two countries on a range of economic indicators, Roberts finds that China is far ahead of the US in terms of GDP growth, wage levels, controlling inflation, managing debt and building infrastructure.

The Western consensus is that China is mired in huge debt, particularly in local governments and real estate developers. This will eventually lead to bankruptcies and a debt meltdown or, at best, force the central government to squeeze the savings of Chinese households to pay for these losses and thus destroy growth. A debt meltdown seems to be forecast every year by these economists, but there has been no systemic collapse yet in banking or in the non-financial sector. Instead, the state-owned sector has increased investment and the government has expanded infrastructure to compensate for any downturn in the over-indebted property market. If anything, it is America that is more likely to burst a bubble than China.

On accusations of Chinese manufacturing overcapacity, “this is another myth broadcast by Western experts”, since China’s manufacturing growth is primarily targetted at the domestic economy.

Roberts poses the all-important question: why is China exceptional?

It is because it is an economy that is planned and led by state-owned companies, so it can ride most obstacles way better than a privately owned system of capitalist production as in the US… China’s most important industries are run by SOEs: finance, energy, infrastructure, mining, telecommunications, transportation, even some strategic manufacturing. The total capital of companies with some level of state ownership in China is 68% of total capital of all firms (40 million). The vast majority of Chinese companies in the Fortune Global 500 list are SOEs. SOEs generate at least 25% of China’s GDP in the most conservative estimates, and other studies have found them to contribute to 30-40+% of GDP.

Which is to say, the most important reason for China’s continued success is the socialist foundation of its economy.
Next week US president Joe Biden finishes his term of office, to be replaced by the Donald. Biden would have been extremely popular with the American public and probably would have run and got a second term as president, if US real GDP had increased by 4.5-5.0% in 2024, and if during the whole of his period of office since end 2020, real GDP had risen 23%; and if per American, real GDP had risen 26% over those four years. And he would have been congratulated if the Covid death rate during the 2020-21 pandemic had been one of the lowest in the world, and the economy avoided the pandemic slump in production.

Above all, he would have been feted if the inflation of prices in goods and services after he came into office was just 3.6% in total over four years. That would have meant that, with wages rising at 4-5% a year, real incomes for average American households would have risen significantly. At the same time, strong growth would have allowed the financing of important new infrastructure spending in the US that could have led to an extensive rail network across the country using super fast trains; and with bridges and roads that did not collapse or crumble along with environmental projects to protect people and homes from fires and floods, and the introduction of cheap electric vehicles and renewables. How Biden would have been popular.

And with extra revenue from strong growth, the Biden administration would have been able to balance the government budget and curb or reduce government debt. And with zero to low inflation, interest rates on borrowing would have been near historic lows, enabling households and companies to afford mortgages and finance investment in new technologies.

And what if US companies had sold a record level of exports of goods and services to the rest of the world, running up a sizeable surplus on trade, despite various tariffs and sanctions against American companies from other trading nations. In running trade surpluses, American banks and companies would have been able to build up foreign exchange reserves and invest in projects abroad, strengthening America’s influence in the world in a beneficial way.

Unfortunately, none of these things happened to the US economy in the four years of Biden’s presidency. Instead these were features of China’s economy. In 2024, China’s real GDP rose about 4.5%, while the US was up 2.7% (faster than anywhere else in the top G7 economies, but still only 60% of China’s growth rate). And throughout Biden’s term, China growth rate outstripped the US.

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Moreover, the gap betweeen China and the US on real GDP growth per person was even greater.

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US annual inflation has been way higher than in China. Indeed, US prices rose a cumulative 21% since 2020 compared to just 3% in China.

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Interest rates set by the US Fed are still at 4.5%, while the People’s Bank of China has a 3% rate. And interest rates on mortgages and corporate debt in the US are well above 5% compared to 1.5% in China. Average real disposable income in the US has been flat since 2019, while it has risen 20% in China. Under Biden, bridges fall down, roads crumble and rail networks hardly exist. Far from running a trade surplus of $1 trillion as China does, the US runs a sizeable trade deficit of $900bn.

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While China runs a surplus on payments and receipts with other countries or around 1-2% of GDP a year, the US runs a current account deficit of 3-4% of GDP a year. At the same time, US industry and banks have huge net liabilities with the rest of world at 76% of GDP. Such a net liability would put all other countries vulnerable to a run on their currencies – but the US escapes this because the US dollar remains the world reserve currency. In contrast, China has a net asset position of 18% of GDP.

And yet, despite all this, we are continually told by Western ‘expert’ economists and the media that China is on the brink of financial meltdown (George Magnus); or alternatively going into permanent stagnation like Japan has done over the last three decades (Michael Pettis); and that China is producing too much that it cannot sell ie. it has overcapacity (Brad Setser). And China has a corporate debt crisis that will eventually bring the whole economy down (said by just about everybody). And China will stagnate because of a ‘lack of demand’, even though wage and consumption growth is way faster than in the US.

The Western consensus is that China is mired in huge debt, particularly in local governments and real estate developers. This will eventually lead to bankruptcies and a debt meltdown or, at best, force the central government to squeeze the savings of Chinese households to pay for these losses and thus destroy growth. A debt meltdown seems to be forecast every year by these economists, but there has been no systemic collapse yet in banking or in the non-financial sector. Instead, the state-owned sector has increased investment and the government has expanded infrastructure to compensate for any downturn in the over-indebted property market. If anything, it is America that is more likely to burst a bubble than China.

And as for ‘Japanication’, this is also nonsense. In 1980s Japan, companies used property and land to lever up and buy more commercial property or expand into other economically unviable projects. When the bubble collapsed, the corporates and the banks carried the weight of the downturn. In contrast, the problems In China are in residential property, not in commercial.

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Hence, China’s real estate prices never went up as much as during the land speculation frenzy in Japan in the 1980s. Average residential sales prices per square meter have risen 7.3% annually since 2007, well below the increase in annual nominal GDP of about 12% over that same period. In Tokyo, home prices grew 13% annually, well above nominal GDP growth of about 8% in the 1980s.

While Japan’s productive base declined from the 1990s, that is not happening in China. China is now the world’s manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined. It took the US the better part of a century to rise to the top; China took about 15 or 20 years. In 1995, China had just 3% of world manufacturing exports, By the beginning of Biden’s term, its share had risen to over 30%.

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Then there is China’s so-called demographic challenge of a declining workforce and population. But this decline is nowhere as severe as in Japan. China’s birth rate has been comfortably higher than those of Japan and the Asian tigers. China’s population under 20, at 23.3%, is still considerably higher than its Asian counterparts (16-18%) and not so far behind the US (25.3%) and above Europe (21.9%). The country’s 65 and older population, at 14.6%, is also lower than that of the developed world (20.5%).

As for so-called overcapacity, this is another myth broadcast by Western experts. China’s export success does not mean that China depends on exports for growth. China is growing mainly because of production for the home economy.

Remember, China’s economy has never suffered a decline in national output since 1949. And as John Ross has pointed out, if the Chinese economy continues to grow 4-5% a year over the next ten years, then it will double its GDP – and with a falling population, raise its GDP per person even more; ie more than two and half times as fast as the US.

Why is China exceptional? It is because it is an economy that is planned and led by state-owned companies, so it can ride most obstacles way better than a privately owned system of capitalist production as in the US. (Compare the US COVID death rate at 3544 deaths per million to China’s 85 (latest figures). China’s most important industries are run by SOEs: finance, energy, infrastructure, mining, telecommunications, transportation, even some strategic manufacturing. The total capital of companies with some level of state ownership in China is 68% of total capital of all firms (40 million). The vast majority of Chinese companies in the Fortune Global 500 list are SOEs. SOEs generate at least 25% of China’s GDP in the most conservative estimates, and other studies have found them to contribute to 30-40+% of GDP.

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Donald Trump takes over next week in the US. He wants to make America great again. He wants to make America ‘exceptional’. But that adjective best describes China, not the US.

https://socialistchina.org/2025/01/16/t ... l-economy/

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Ken Hammond: In China the interests of the working class are at the heart of everything
In the latest episode of The China Report, embedded below, hosts Amanda Yee and KJ Noh interview Professor Ken Hammond about his new book, China and the World. The three have a wide-ranging discussion about the trajectory of China’s foreign policy over the last half-century, as well as interrogating the dominant narratives about China in the West and exploring the nature of China’s economic development.

Ken details how the rapprochement between the US and China in the early 1970s, starting with the visits by Henry Kissinger in 1971 and Richard Nixon in 1972, opened a path for “China being able to open up to a broader range of outside engagements”, and in many ways enabled the Reform and Opening Up process that began in 1978. While improved relations with the US came at a not-insignificant cost to China’s role in promoting socialist and national liberation revolutions – contributing to some confusion in the West and elsewhere as to China’s political trajectory – “China was pursuing what could be described as a deep game, taking a long-term perspective that required making certain compromises or accommodations in the short term to achieve fundamental objectives in the long term”.

The three talk about China’s economic reforms and how, while they introduced serious contradictions and imbalances into Chinese society, they ultimately enabled China to overcome poverty and underdevelopment. Ken points out that the country achieved an average of 10 percent GDP growth for several decades and that “this growth didn’t just benefit the wealthy; it flowed directly to the people”. On this topic, KJ recounts discussions with Chinese officials in the late 1990s and early 2000s, who described market reforms as “like getting onto a wild horse – but we believe we can contain this horse”. The record shows that they have indeed been able to do so.

Talking about China’s whole-process socialist democracy and its extremely high levels of public consciousness and engagement, Ken describes China as “a state in which the interests of the working class are at the heart of everything that goes on”, and contrasts this with the money-driven politics of the US in which the interests of the capitalist class are at the heart of everything.

China and the World is available to pre-order from 1804 Books.


https://socialistchina.org/2025/01/15/k ... verything/

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Prospects for US-China relations in Trump’s second presidency
The London Region of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) held its 2025 Annual Conference online on Sunday 12 January.

Friends of Socialist China co-editor Keith Bennett was among the speakers in a session entitled, NATO, war, nukes: Outlook for 2025, where he was joined by CND General Secretary Sophie Bolt; Jess Barnard, a member of the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee (NEC); Carol Turner, Chair of London CND and a Vice Chair of national CND; and Vijay Prashad, Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research. The session was chaired by Christine Shawcroft, a Vice Chair of London CND and editor of Labour Briefing.

A keynote opening speech on Prospects for Peace and Justice was given by Jeremy Corbyn, former Leader of the Labour Party and now the Independent Member of Parliament (MP) for Islington North, introduced by Murad Qureshi, a Vice President of London CND and a former Chair of the Stop the War Coalition.

Further discussions focused on Ukraine and the Middle East as testing grounds for new tech weapons, with expert input from Peter Burt, a researcher for Drone Wars UK; and Dave Webb, Convenor of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space; chaired by former MP Emma Dent-Coad; and a final session on Peace Movement Priorities, with Baroness Jenny Jones from the Green Party; Tony Staunton, a Vice Chair of CND; and Angie Zelter, a founder of Lakenheath Action for Peace; chaired by Hannah Kemp-Welch, a Vice Chair of London CND.

Keith’s speech focused on the prospects for relations between China and the United States during Donald Trump’s second presidency. We reprint it below.
Thank you to London Region CND for the invitation to take part in this distinguished panel.

With war raging in Ukraine for nearly three years and with the unrelenting genocide in Gaza, now well into its second year, both naturally forming the main day-to-day focus of most peace campaigners, is it self-indulgence or overreach to also turn our attention to the Asia Pacific region?

I would argue that it is not. No analogy is ever exact, but a clear parallel can be drawn with events in the 1930s. Local conflicts, in Spain, Ethiopia and, indeed China, were the proverbial canaries in the mine, which presaged the global conflagration of World War II.

Today, no bilateral relationship is more important, more strategic and more fraught than that between the United States and China. On the potentially positive side, the world needs these two powers to work together constructively if humanity is to meet an existential threat like climate change. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of China, and of a couple of US politicians, there is little sign of this happening. Something that will most likely be exacerbated when Trump quits the Paris Climate Change Accord. Again.

Faced with the peaceful rise of China, a rise unparalleled in human history, it has essentially become a consensus among the otherwise contending wings of the US ruling class that the preservation of US global hegemony necessitates taking China as Washington’s principal adversary. From Greenland to the South Pacific. And from semiconductors to TikTok. And increasingly throughout the Global South. A New Cold War which, like its predecessor, can all too easily turn hot.

As with Cold War One and the Soviet Union, the US seeks to reverse China’s progress and, at best, bring it to heel, through a combination of a debilitating arms race, ideological subversion and economic and technological strangulation. A key difference is that not only has China drawn lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whereas the USA and the USSR were essentially economically insulated from one another, China has spent the best part of half a century integrating itself into the global economy, creating such facts on the ground in the process as ever more complex global supply chains, and with China accounting for some 11% of US foreign trade.

So, what does Trump’s return mean for China/US relations?

First, Trump revels in his role as Disruptor-in-Chief, so the first thing we should expect is the unexpected. Certainly, if he carries through on even a fraction of his recent threats regarding tariffs, not only will China face an economic challenge. The entire global economy, in a parlous enough state as it is, and not least the US economy itself, will be plunged into crisis.

But overall, there seems little reason to anticipate a fundamental change of direction. When Biden assumed the presidency, many had hopes for a return to a more rational and constructive China policy in Washington. This did not materialise. Far from reversing Trump’s anti-China measures, the Biden administration ratcheted them up substantially, especially in terms of trying to restrict China’s access to computer chips and other advanced technology.

To the extent there was change under Biden, it came essentially in two areas:

His administration largely eschewed the openly racist rhetoric of Trump (kung flu, Chinese virus, etc.), which undoubtedly made life more tolerable for many Chinese and other Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.
Whereas Trump was an ‘equal opportunities bully’ when it came to insulting and threatening allies and adversaries alike, Biden’s team worked hard, and with a considerable degree of success, to reinforce cohesion in NATO, get the EU onside, and reinvigorate and reinforce old alliances, such as those with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, all with a view to confronting China, along with Russia, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and other states in Washington’s crosshairs.
So, even if Trump ups the ante with China, it will not break the essential continuum established by Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton with their 2011 ‘pivot to Asia’.

One reason why Trump presents as the Disruptor-in-Chief is that his opinion on any given question so often appears to be that of the last person he happened to have spoken to. The ‘team of rivals’ he has been assembling certainly lacks the intellectual brilliance of that forged by Abraham Lincoln, but it is not monolithic on China.

Trump himself cares little for ‘liberal democracy’ and, on that level, his antipathy to China probably lacks the deep ideological foundation that the US Democratic Party has come to increasingly embody. His motivation is more straightforwardly venal. He will fight ruthlessly but may be prepared to cut a deal if he feels the terms are good. Or, perhaps as importantly, can present it as a win. We need to think only of his current stance on TikTok, doubtless related to its ability to help feed his social media obsession.

The same cannot be said for his proposed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who clearly will not be satisfied with anything less than the overthrow of the Communist Party of China.

A similar orientation can be seen on the part of a number of Trump’s other nominees, including those to be given trade or related portfolios.

But this, in turn, is different from the stand of Trump’s current ‘bestie’ (although for how long is anyone’s guess) Elon Musk, whose Shanghai factory accounts for half of Tesla’s global production.

In a sense, the fissure this creates between Musk on the one hand and a long-established Trump acolyte like Steve Bannon on the other mirrors the recent dispute over H-1B high skilled visas between Trump supporting plutocrats and the MAGA base.

Another area where this pattern can be expected to assert itself is in diplomacy and hence on the international balance of forces. As mentioned, while the Biden administration strove, with considerable success, to unite the imperialist camp, in the case of Trump, from Angela Merkel to Justin Trudeau, if there’s one thing he seems to enjoy more than insulting America’s adversaries it’s insulting America’s allies.

How this will play out remains to be seen. Just yesterday, two of the headlines in the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s well-respected English language daily, read as follows:

Ishiba’s snub by Trump may push Japan toward China, sparking concerns about US influence (Ishiba is the current Japanese Prime Minister); and
US national security adviser fears Trump might push some Indo-Pacific nations toward China
The Asia Pacific region is where key issues still unresolved from the 1940s continue to fester and where the interests of nuclear powers, principally the United States, China, Russia and the DPRK, collide and at times coincide. How will Trump, in his second presidential term, react to tensions in the Taiwan Straits or the South China Sea?

On the Korean peninsula, will he once again resort to threats of unleashing “fire and fury” or will he seek a further meeting with Kim Jong Un, something no other serving US president dared to do?

Answers to such questions will have a major bearing on the future of the world.

https://socialistchina.org/2025/01/15/p ... residency/

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Sowing Doubt About China - But At What Cost?

On December 27 2021 I mocked headlines and pieces which reported on China's achievements but questioned the cost:

When China Does Great Question Its Cost

There seem to be general meme directives for 'western' outlets with regards to official enemies.

Russia is said to weaponize everything. The position of China is not (yet) seen as in military terms. The emphasis is on economic competition. Any undeniable Chinese achievement must be declared to have been a bad investment. The directive thus reads:

"When writing about China's achievements - question their purported cost."

The results:

Global Markets – 1st quarter 2007 : China powers ahead – but at what cost?
- Fin Law, Feb 09, 2007
China pumps up the Cambodian economy, but at what cost?
- Taipei Times Apr 07 2011

...
The list, which included 43 headlines, ended with these:

...
China is now controlling the weather. What’s the environmental cost?
- Euronews, Dec 9 2021
Ultra-leftist voices are making themselves heard in China, but at what cost?
- SCMP, Dec 24 2021


Time has past but the directive to always question China's cost is still in place. Here are a few, new and additional, entries:

At What Cost Stealth?
The biggest obstacle to China developing a fleet of stealth J-20 fighters could be the cost of producing them.
- The Diplomat, Jan 31 2011
Clean Air at What Cost? The Rise of Blunt Force Pollution Regulation in China
- Semantic Scholar, 2017
China freezes highway tolls to boost economy but move comes at a cost
- Nikkei Asia, Feb 21 2020
The Chinese Sports Machine’s Single Goal: The Most Golds, at Any Cost
- New York Times, Aug 8 2021
China is dominant at the Olympics, but at what cost?
- Simply Sport, Dec 9 2021
China Provided Abundant Snow for the Winter Olympics, but at What Cost to the Environment?
- Inside Climate News, Feb 20 2022
Language barriers: some Hong Kong restaurants still cite Covid-19 in turning away Mandarin speakers – but at what cost?
- SCMP, Mar 28 2022
Shein is the new darling of China's fast fashion industry — but at what cost?
- ABC.au, Apr 4 2022
China has avoided the grim US Covid toll. But at what cost?
- Hongkong Post, Jun 5 2022
New deepfake regulations in China are a tool for social stability, but at what cost?
- nature machine intelligence, Jul 20 2022
China: A faster reopening—but at what cost?
- Unravel, Jan 17 2023
Chinese tourism could boost global economy, but at what cost?
- Deccan Herald, Jan 18 2023
China’s wind industrial policy “succeeded” – but at what cost?
- Atlantic Council, May 1 2023
In 2023 The Deprogram / Radio Free Amanda mocked the scheme in a podcast: Episode 64 - China Episode - But At What Cost? - Feb 3 2023

The Chinese influencer Li Jingjing also chipped in: "China Expert" 101: Add "BUT AT WHAT COST" to turn any positive thing China did into a negative - Jul 28 2023


In late 2023 China's official Global Times added this:

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It did not help. The meme continues:

Is China's economy in serious trouble? | Counting the Cost
- Al Jazeerah English, Feb 4 2024
Road salt: Protecting China’s drivers, but at what cost?
- Dialogue Earth, Feb 6 2024
China Keeps Building Stadiums in Africa. But at What Cost?
- New York Times, Feb 10 2024
The world wants China’s 290kmh trains – but at what cost?
- Chatham House, Mar 21 2024
Commerce at What Cost? Investigating Temu’s Problematic Business Model and Controversies in the West
- Berkley Economic Review, Apr 26 2024
Clean air at what cost? The rise of Blunt Force Regulation in China
- Environmental Politics, Jun 23 2024
China in Peru: The Unspoken Costs of an Unequal Relationship
- U.S. Institute of Peace, Jul 2024
China’s plan to save the economy comes at a cost to factories
- Business Times, Jul 11 2024
Thailand’s EV Incentives: Boosting Chinese Investment, but at What Cost to Local Workers?
- China Global South, Oct 10 2024
In China, AI is taking Internet advertising by storm – but at what cost?
- Business Times, Nov 3 2024
Many Ways to Fail: The Costs to China of an Unsuccessful Taiwan Invasion
- U.S. Institute of Peace, Nov 5 2024
UK leader cozies up to China, but at what cost?
- MSN / The Daily Digest, Nov 26 2024
Macao’s casino boom brings wealth but at a cost, 25 years since China’s takeover
- AP, Dec 19 2024
Cheap but costly: As Chinese exports enter Southeast Asia, countries pay an uneven price
- Channel News Asia, Jan 14 2025
An initiative so feared that China has stopped saying its name
“Made in China 2025” has been a success, but at what cost?
- Economist, Jan 16 2025

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If you made it to here you will have noticed that the list has by now a total of 70 headlines which (roughly) follow a similar scheme.

The 'question the cost' with regards to China is not the only directive followed by 'western' media. Just consider How Russia, And Putin, Are Weaponizing, Losing And Running Out Of ... Everything.

All such schemes are signs that The Mighty Wurlitzer is still well and alive.

Posted by b on January 17, 2025 at 11:21 UTC | Permalink

((Links a-go-go below:)

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/01/s ... .html#more

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Chinese Military Might vs Washington’s Asymmetrical Tools of Empire
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 17, 2025
Brian Berletic

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Until China (along with Russia and Iran) can protect its partners from America’s ability to “bully and cajole” them, Washington’s asymmetrical tools of empire will remain an existential threat to China, no matter how significant its conventional military power may be.

China continues to strengthen its military capabilities, combining rapid growth in conventional power with readiness to counter U.S. asymmetrical strategies. Over the past few months China has achieved several breakthroughs in terms of military power in both quantity and quality including the introduction of new aircraft, increased production rates of existing aircraft, and the launching of a new amphibious assault ship proposed as recently as 2020, demonstrating a rapid progression from drawing board to dockside all within China’s already vast shipbuilding capacity.

The implications of these recent developments impact ongoing US encroachment in the Asia-Pacific and the looming prospect of an Ukraine-style war the US appears eager to launch against China. However, just as the US has demonstrated elsewhere, what it lacks in military and industrial power, it makes up for in political influence and its asymmetrical capacity to destabilize and destroy entire regions of the planet.

China’s Expanding Air Force

At the Zhuhai Airshow in November 2024, China unveiled its twin-engine Shenyang J-35 fifth-generation fighter. Defense News would note that the J-35’s introduction together with the mass-produced Chengdu J-20 makes China only the second nation in the world to field two types of fifth-generation warplanes besides the US with its F-22 and F-35 fighters.

While many attempts have been made to dismiss China’s fifth-generation warplanes as cheap copies of American warplanes, both the J-35 and J-20 represent entirely different designs fulfilling entirely different requirements, and mass-produced with flexible and rapidly updated manufacturing techniques quickly closing the fifth-generation fighter gap with the US.

Not only does this mean China will possess at least as many fighter planes as the US, it also means China will be able to rapidly replace lost aircraft in the event of any peer or near-peer conflict, including with the United States.

In 2022, South China Morning Post reported that China was speeding up production of its J-20 warplane, often seen as China’s answer to the US F-22. At the time, it was estimated China had produced up to 200 J-20s, a comparable number to the current number of F-22s the US operates.

By 2024, Air & Space Forces Magazine would report that China may be building up to 100 J-20 airframes per year – all of which are for use by China’s armed forces. While the US produces 135 F-35s a year (with 1,000 produced in total), most of these aircraft are for export to US allies. Because Chinese production of the J-20 has increased since its introduction, it cannot be ruled out that China will continue producing these aircraft at an accelerated rate.

With the introduction of the J-35 last November, a similar production rate may follow.

US airpower has been the central factor in upholding US and Western military supremacy since the end of the Cold War. More recently, the impact of Western military aviation has been blunted by the proliferation of advanced air defense systems, a field the US and Europe neglected throughout the Cold War and has fallen even further far behind since.

China possesses one of the largest and most advanced integrated air defense networks in the world, including proven Russian air defense systems as well as indigenous systems based on proven Russian designs.

Together with China’s expanding fleet of warplanes, China is gradually establishing a two-fold advantage within and along China’s borders and shores. While the US still has a larger air force than China, it should be noted that US warplanes are dispersed across the planet among the hundreds of military bases the US maintains stretching from the US itself, across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and of course, the Asia-Pacific.
It is unrealistic for the US to concentrate all of its warplanes in any potential conflict with China without conceding military domination elsewhere around the globe. Likewise, deeply investing in conflicts against Russia or Iran directly means expending limited warplanes and munitions the US wants to preserve for potential conflict with China.

China’s Expanding Navy

The US government and arms industry-funded Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) published a June 2024 article titled, “Unpacking China’s Naval Buildup.” In it, CSIS admits China’s large and growing advantage in terms of shipbuilding while also acknowledging a growing crisis across what remains of American shipbuilding capacity.

It admits that, “the decline of U.S. naval dominance will be difficult to reverse,” admitting that it constitutes a process that has “spanned decades” and “rests on slow-moving economic and industrial trends.”

It paradoxically concludes that:

…the United States can still maintain superiority by investing in smaller surface combatants like corvettes, frigates, and unmanned naval systems paired with alternative platforms like aircraft or ground-based missile launchers; deepening its partnerships with Pacific nations like Japan and South Korea; and investing more in its domestic shipbuilding industry—particularly the highly specialized submarine industrial base.

However, China is likely just as capable of outproducing the US in terms of smaller vessels, unmanned systems, aircraft, and missiles as it is in terms of larger warships.

Beyond just quality and quantity, China’s ability to rapidly design, build, and launch warships at rates many times faster than the US lends an additional advantage to China.

Its most recent Type 076 amphibious assault ship was proposed sometime in mid-2020 and launched late last year. In less than 4 years China proposed, designed, and launched a modern amphibious assault ship. It takes the US 6 years just to produce an America class amphibious assault ship – the initial development process having taken up to 7 years.

The same CSIS report admits:

The United States probably faces insurmountable obstacles to meaningful increases in shipbuilding in the coming decade, but it might be able to reduce China’s advantage through its relationships with Japan and South Korea. These U.S. partners accounted for 26 and 14 percent of global ship deliveries in 2023, respectively. The U.S. Navy plans to repair ships at international shipyards in 2025 on a trial basis, which could reduce the maintenance backlog, but actually constructing U.S. ships using foreign shipbuilders is unlikely due to U.S. legal restrictions. The only long-term answer is probably an industrial strategy that supports the broader U.S. shipbuilding sector for decades.

Thus, the US is unable to rectify this growing gap. Its strategy depends on “partners” like South Korea and Japan, both hosting US military bases but counting China as their largest and most important trade partner.

Conventional Military Power vs. Asymmetrical Military Power

As the ongoing US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has demonstrated, the US together with its “partners” are unable to match even Russia’s military industrial production, let alone China’s.

The prospect of the collective West significantly expanding production is hindered by private enterprise and its prioritization of profits over any actual purpose on the battlefield. Without nationalizing military industrial production, additional funds made available to the collective West’s arms industry will simply be transformed into additional profits, not shells, airframes, or ship hulls.

Another significant obstacle to expanding military industrial production (including aircraft and ship production) is access to a skilled workforce. China’s vast industrial base and equally vast workforce enables China’s increasingly superior quantities and quality. Efforts to close the gap across the collective West would require significant educational reforms that would span the better part of a generation – if such reforms were even pursued in the first place – which they are not.

Thus, in order for the US to maintain the primacy of its “international rules-based order,” it must apply asymmetrical military power against targets of its aggression, including Russia, Iran, and China. This includes politically capturing and turning nations against US adversaries as the US has done with Ukraine vis-à-vis Russia, the use of Türkiye, Israel, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia against both Syria and Iran, and nations like South Korea, Japan, and more recently the Philippines against China.

The US maintains a vast global network, investing in political sedition toward the political capture and pivoting of additional nations against its adversaries. Through the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED*), the US is attempting to infiltrate the media, education, legal, and political systems of targeted nations around the globe and poison them against nations labeled US adversaries – even at the expense of each nation’s own best interests.

The NED* is heavily active in Southeast Asia in an attempt to poison the population against China – the region’s largest, most important trade partner, investor, source of tourism, and infrastructure partner. While China objectively represents greater peace, stability, and prosperity for Southeast Asia than subordination to the US as a proxy pivoted against China, the nature of US political capture and propagandization makes it possible to exploit and manipulate populations emotionally, short-circuiting reason and logic. .

The US has demonstrated the ability to turn entire populations against their own objective best interests, as it has done in Ukraine. There, the US convinced the Ukrainian population that not only is it an entirely separate entity from Russia despite centuries of shared language, history, culture, and religion, but that Russia posed an existential threat Ukrainians were required to militarize and array themselves against.

The resulting proxy war is now in the process of destroying Ukraine economically, politically, and literally.

A similar process has taken place across Asia including within Chinese territory itself. This includes Hong Kong and the island province of Taiwan.

The population of Taiwan has been convinced – despite being ethnically, linguistically, historically, and recognized under international law as Chinese – they are “not” Chinese and that China represents an existential threat the island province must militarize and array itself against in what will be a predictably Ukraine-style conflict that will result in predictable Ukraine-style self-destruction.

Beyond Washington’s ability to asymmetrically disfigure geopolitical relations along China’s periphery and even within its borders, the US plans on deploying its own military force in an asymmetrical manner.

Rather than fighting China head-on, the US has reconfigured its military forces, including the entire US Marine Corps for interdicting Chinese maritime travel. While this is advertised as targeting Chinese military vessels, long-standing US policy seeks to target and strangle Chinese maritime trade as well.

Washington’s obsession with “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, where the same CSIS mentioned above admits is primarily trade coming from and going to China – isn’t to protect it – but to undermine and utterly strangle it.

While the US may not be able to concentrate its global-spanning military forces to confront China along its own shores in a head-on battle – because China likewise is unable to project military power globally – the US would be able to impose a maritime blockade on China by simply stopping its ships beyond the reach of China’s military forces in Asia-Pacific.

This means interdicting or shutting down the flow of hydrocarbons from the Middle East to China and Chinese trade through the Panama and Suez Canals.

An example of such US policies laid out in detail is the 2013 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace piece titled, “Stranglehold: The Context, Conduct and Consequences of an American Naval Blockade of China.” It lays out a policy of not only blockading Chinese maritime shipping by convincing or coercing its neighbors to isolate it, it discusses using military force to strike at what is now referred to as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) infrastructure.

At one point, it claims:

…the United States would mix political-military coercion with economic incentives to bully and cajole China’s neighbors into imposing embargoes on China. In some cases, the United States might be able to do so with relative ease. Countries like India and Vietnam have a checkered military history with China, and they both fear China’s rise as a regional hegemon. In other cases, the United States might be willing to use military force to interdict lines of supply into China. For instance, if Burma refused to cooperate, the United States might strike the Sino-Burmese oil and natural gas pipeline or even extend the blockade to Burmese ports.

Since then, the US has already begun attacking the Sino-Burmese pipeline through armed proxies it has built up over decades through extensive NED*, USAID*, and other forms of financial, military, and political support. The US NED*-funded “Irrawaddy” reported as recently as August 2024 that US-backed armed groups seized guard posts protecting the pipeline. Armed attacks on the pipeline itself have also been reported.

Likewise, US-backed militants regularly attack Chinese BRI infrastructure across Pakistan, including as recently as October last year, the BBC reported.

In other words – the US blockade and isolation of China is not a proposed policy for some far-off future conflict – it is already a work-in-progress with Washington constantly summoning what resources it has to enhance efforts to strangle China’s economy covertly, as successive US sanctions attempt to do overtly.

Despite China building up sufficient military power to deter or even defeat a head-on conflict with encroaching US forces in the Asia-Pacific and having secured its own information and political space at home, its periphery is still vulnerable and in the process of being transformed into a united front against it. The crisis the US faces militarily and industrially is offset by its expert and proven method of politically capturing and using nations to advance US foreign policy through non-military or “near-military” means.

China’s close relationship with Russia and Russia’s ability to offset the impact of US attempts to strangle it economically – at least in terms of importing resources – helps explain the urgency with which the US is attempting to overextend, collapse, and remove the current political order in Moscow.

The 2013 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace article even stated:

Russia is remarkably well-positioned to alleviate the blockade’s effects on China. Russian trade would be immune to American interdiction, since Russia’s nuclear arsenal and significant conventional assets preclude any serious American attempts at military coercion. If the United States were unwise enough to try, the Kremlin would be incensed and might enter the fray on the Chinese side. But on the other hand, China’s northern neighbor could also sound the death knell for China’s ability to resist a blockade.

So far, attempts by the US to compel Russia to “sound the death knell for China’s ability to resist a blockade,” have failed, but continued efforts by the US toward this end should not be underestimated.

Until China (along with Russia and Iran) can protect its partners from America’s ability to “bully and cajole” them, Washington’s asymmetrical tools of empire will remain an existential threat to China, no matter how significant its conventional military power may be.



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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 25, 2025 3:59 pm

Ella Rule: What I learned in Xinjiang
Innovations abound as the Chinese region pushes ahead with its agricultural and industrial development.
Ella Rule

Wednesday 1 January 2025

Image
In China today, voluntary collectivisation takes a form whereby small farmers group together to pool their land in order to enable the use of modern machinery. Besides rent payments from the farming companies, they are also entitled to receive a percentage of the produce.

The International Symposium on Employment and Social Security in Xinjiang took place in Urumqi on 16 December 2024. It was attended by many distinguished international and diplomatic guests, including representatives of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Central Asia Regional Economic Cooperation Institute, as well as diplomats from Azerbaijan, Gabon, Guinea, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Moldova, Niger, Pakistan (ambassador), Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Togo, Uzbekistan and Yemen (ambassador), and a large number of international guests from many different countries, including many who represented organisations in different countries concerned with the promotion of human rights, several prominent academics (especially foreigners working in China at Chinese universities), and journalists from Radio France, the Irish Times, China-Arab TV, Fulha de São Paulo (Brazil), News 1 Korea, the Associated Press of Pakistan, Antara (Indonesia), Prensa Latina, and a major Spanish tv channel.

Ahead of the seminar, participants arrived a day or two early in order to see something of local economic life. Visits were arranged to the Xinjiang Tianshan Wool Tex Stock company, the Exhibition on the Fight Against Terrorism and Extremism in Xinjiang and the Xinjiang International grand bazaar. I personally was unable to take part in these activities, but on Sunday 15 December I joined visits to the Changji Esquel textile company, the Baowu Group Xinjiang Bayi Iron and Steel company and the China Railway Construction Heavy Industry corporation, all of which were extremely interesting.

Agricultural innovation
Before arriving at Changji, which is some 100km away from the government guest house we were staying at in Urumqi, we were told that the company – which produces pure cotton cloth from the cotton crops – had been subjected to unilateral sanctions by the United States on the pretext that it was supposedly using ‘forced labour’.

Because US sanctions have extraterritorial effect and are imposed on anybody that does business with the sanctioned entity, the company overnight lost almost all its international customers. As a result of this loss of business, the company had to reduce its workforce from 50,000 to 25,000 over its four factory sites in China, causing great hardship to the workers made redundant, who didn’t understand why America should be intervening to deprive them of the comfortable living they had been enjoying.

What the organisers particularly wanted us to see was that the business was not one which employed forced, slave, labour. In fact, it is so highly mechanised that there is no scope for employing slave labour. The room we were shown where the raw cotton was spun into yarn was about half a mile by quarter of a mile long in size, and was filled with hundreds of spinning machines spaced around five feet apart, and with very few workers in this giant room supervising their operation.

We were informed that the business is deeply committed to research and development at every stage of the process, from development of the seeds from which the cotton is grown to innovation in terms of the properties of the cloth produced. We were shown, for example, pure cotton polo shirts that are impermeable from the outside but fully permeable from the inside, so that perspiration can escape but the garment cannot otherwise be made wet.

Great emphasis is put on improving the company’s ecological impact. It is, for example, very proud of the fact that it has developed a method of producing cotton cloth that has reduced water usage to just 10 percent of what is usually considered necessary. For those who are interested to try these shirts for themselves, they can be ordered via Hong Kong, where the company’s trade name is ‘Determinant’.

Heavy industry developing fast
We then went on to the Iron and Steel works back in Urumqi. First we were taken around a factory museum, where all the measures taken to secure the health and safety of workers in what is everywhere a dangerous occupation were on display, some of them invented by workers themselves to prevent accidents at work. Apart from that, at every stage of steel production the company is strongly focused on protecting the environment.

It has its own on-site sewage works that enables it to purify the water it has been using with the result that its net water usage is zero. It also focuses on reducing its carbon footprint as much as possible and it claims a 25 percent success in this endeavour. We were most impressed by the sheer scale of the enterprise, besides its ultra-modern equipment which enables it to produce steel of various types at highly competitive prices.

In the afternoon, we visited the China Railway Construction Heavy Industry corporation, which, as its name suggests, produces some extremely heavy industrial machines. There was no railway construction in sight but a great deal of agricultural machinery – massive mobile machines, with wheels 6ft in diameter, which have been designed to perform the major agricultural tasks of ploughing, seeding and harvesting.

One of the machines was adapted for the harvesting of tomatoes. It was able to do in one hour the work that 122 manual workers had previously been doing. Again, the very availability of these machines, which are a great deal cheaper than any equivalents produced in other countries, makes a nonsense of the accusation that China employs forced labour.

With an unemployment rate of some five percent, China has no difficulty in mobilising all the extremely willing workers that it needs, so that slave labour would make no sense. Obviously, such machines can only sensibly be used on enormous farms, so one delegate raised the question of the forcible ejection of peasants from their land in order to create massive farms.

It was explained to me that no peasants were dispossessed, but on the contrary they were paid rent if their land was used for large-scale production of agricultural goods. Small farmers in various areas, because it was profitable for them to do so, grouped together to pool their land in order to create fields enormous enough to make the use of modern machinery profitable. Their reward was not only the receipt of rent but also their entitlement to a percentage of the produce.

After returning to the guest house, delegates proceeded to a meeting with local party secretary Ma Xingrui and Xinjiang governor Erkin Tuniyaz, followed by a sumptuous banquet in even more sumptuous surroundings at the guest house.

Among the guests I had the opportunity to converse with was Professor David Evans, who was employed to teach inorganic chemistry at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology. He is a good friend of Michael Crook, son of Isabel Crook who was the honorary president of the CPGB-ML until her death three years ago at the age of 105.

Both David and Michael are members of an organisation of foreign academics employed in China named Gung Ho, which at the time of the symposium was holding a meeting in Beijing to celebrate the anniversary of Isabel Crook’s birth. David is currently specialising in outreach to schools aimed at encouraging young people to study chemistry at university – a role which fills him with enthusiasm.

The Yemeni ambassador made a point of contacting me. He introduced me to his wife who is a psychologist specialising in treating people traumatised by war. Of course, I expressed to him our great admiration for the splendid efforts being made by Yemen in support of the beleaguered people of Palestine at the present time.

I also had a long conversation with He Zhongyou, deputy secretary of the Communist party’s (CPC) Xinjian Uyghur Autonomous Regional Committee, secretary of the DPD Committee, political commissar of Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and secretary of the Urumqi Municipal Committee. He was very keen to know about the situation in Britain and was interested in our evaluation of the role of the Labour party. He was also the person who explained to me the system of voluntary collectivisation by farmers, as mentioned above.

Capitalism means the law of the jungle
At the seminar the following day, speakers explained in detail the breaches of international law being committed by the USA in clamping unilateral extraterritorial sanctions on China without any evidential support whatsoever to support their allegations of Chinese impropriety.

Robert Walker, a sociology professor at Beijing Normal University, explained that the trade tariffs imposed by Donald Trump during his term as US president and then continued under the now concluding Joe Biden regime were in all probability imposed in breach of the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), but that the judicial arm of that organisation has been paralysed by the USA preventing the appointment of new members. This has ensured that any judicial unit set up would be inquorate so that the USA could not be brought to task.

He also pointed out that trade sanctions which undermine the wellbeing of whole populations are in breach of human rights law. He contrasted the attempt of US imperialism to suppress trade and development with China’s active promotion of economic development in countries all over the world through such organisations as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Global Development Initiative, the Silk Road Fund and the Infrastructure Development Bank, all of which aim to create a “shared prosperity for all”.

He cited former United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres as saying: “The already rich world is determined to remain rich and to use the global institutions which it has created to ensure that others get rich less quickly, if at all.”

Investing in economic and social development
Among the many excellent speeches, Yemen’s ambassador to China, Dr Mohammed Abdul Wahid Al-Maitami, expressed the feelings of most of the participants when he said:

“Today I am honoured to speak about the extraordinary journey the Xinjiang region has undergone – a journey that has transformed challenges into opportunities and succeeded in building a model for sustainable development and economic growth. This region has demonstrated to the world how, through careful planning and prudent governance, significant challenges can be converted into great achievements in various fields, from improving living standards to achieving social and economic stability.

“During our visit, we have witnessed how the Chinese government has successfully implemented policies that foster economic and social development, and how it has created an environment conducive to investment and employment, significantly reducing unemployment rates, thus providing the youth of the region with various opportunities to engage in diverse fields.

“What the Xinjiang government has accomplished in terms of tackling unemployment and fostering sustainable development stands as a model for many countries facing similar challenges. The Xinjiang government has proven that significant challenges can be turned into real opportunities through effective planning and investment in human capital.

“By providing employment opportunities, enhancing vocational education, and developing infrastructure, the government has succeeded in achieving social and economic stability …

“Statistically, data indicates that the unemployment rate in Xinjiang has decreased from over 10 percent in the 1990s to 2.4 percent in 2023, a remarkable reduction that reflects the significant success in improving the labour market. This improvement has been achieved through a series of policies and measures which have required considerable effort from the government.

“For instance, over 400 vocational training centres were established across Xinjiang from 2014 onwards, aimed at equipping young people with the technical and professional skills needed in the labour market. These centres have trained 1.29 million individuals between 2014 and 2022 …

“It is also worth noting that the Chinese government allocated more than 30 billion yuan [approximately £3bn] to support these centres, offer scholarships, and provide ongoing training for citizens in industrial, agricultural and service sectors.

“In addition, the vital role of infrastructure projects in improving the economic situation in Xinjiang cannot be overlooked. In recent years, several highways, airports and railway lines connecting the region to other parts of China have been constructed, facilitating trade and investment flows, and creating additional employment opportunities.

“These projects not only offer direct employment, but also have an indirect impact by generating jobs in related industries such as logistics, tourism and trade.”

Compulsory laws of the market, and the capitalists’ response
My own contribution was written before I had had the opportunity of seeing the enormous progress Xinjiang had made, and could therefore more fully appreciate the threat that Chinese efficiency in production holds for its rivals in the imperialist camp, whose economic power has been fading as they outsourced production to developing countries and became more and more parasitic.

What I had written was nevertheless relevant to the situation in Xinjiang, and in China generally, but I did make slight amendments on the day to take account of what I had been learning since my arrival in Xinjiang. My contribution was as follows:

“Britain, a major imperialist country, is one of the richest countries in the world. Yet, because it is a capitalist country, because its state is just the mechanism through which the rich capitalists keep the mass of the working class in subjection, the market reigns supreme. Its laws ensure that while the rich get richer and richer, the poor derive little or no benefit from the exponential increases in productivity of labour that are, in the words of Engels, ‘a compulsory law by which every individual industrial capitalist must perfect his machinery more and more under penalty of ruin’.

“As Engels pointed out in Anti-Dühring, in these circumstances what happens is that “the perfecting of machinery is making human labour superfluous”, giving rise to mass unemployment. With the supply of labour-power invariably outstripping the demand for it, there is huge downward pressure on wages of those who are lucky enough to have a job. This is the harsh reality that workers face even in such a wealthy country as Britain.

“In capitalist countries like Britain, the state is in the hands of the capitalist class, and its power is always wielded exclusively for the benefit of that class. In order to lure workers away from the socialism that would dispossess the capitalist class of its riches and power, the bourgeois state in the imperialist countries has made an artform of granting just enough in the way of concessions to reconcile the working class to its subservient existence, despite maintaining widespread unemployment.

“In Europe at least there has been free universal education and medical care, as well as modest welfare payments to those without work and very modest pensions for the elderly (many of whom every winter die of hypothermia because they cannot afford to heat even one room in their homes). The bourgeois state can even intervene to provide useful employment to masses of people who would otherwise be unemployed.

“Only imperialist countries have been able to offer these benefits, which they have traditionally financed from the superprofits they extract from their dealings with oppressed countries. Now that China has stepped in to offer so many oppressed countries a chance to trade on fair terms, it has become much harder for the imperialist countries to extract superprofits, and in consequence the benefits they offer the working masses are gradually being whittled away.

“To the extent that they are still maintained, the bourgeoisie is not prepared to hand over more of its profits for the purpose except by interest-bearing loans that have to be repaid by the taxpayers. Increasingly, governments resort to money-printing (ie, the issue of credit unsupported by underlying assets), which leads to inflation of the currency in which the credit is given and the lowering of the purchasing power of wages and benefit payments.

“Moreover, in the context of a worldwide crisis of overproduction, where there is a great shortage of opportunities for profitable investment by the capitalists, what were previously public services are relentlessly being privatised, taken over by profiteers who continuously reduce the services rendered in the interests of maximising their profits.

“And of course, it is in the context of the worldwide crisis of overproduction that less efficient producers have no hesitation, if they have the power to do so, to shut down their competitors – precisely what the USA is doing when it imposes sanctions on Chinese industries.

“The United States produces cotton but cannot compete with China on price because it has neglected developing and introducing the high levels of mechanisation that China has been able to do. Therefore the United States, having control of numerous financial institutions, uses these to shut out competition from Chinese cotton cloth – illegally, on false pretexts.

“Human beings are, on the one hand, social creatures, and, on the other hand, they are all equipped with a powerful brain that demands constant stimulation that can only be provided by meaningful employment. A person who is not kept busy doing work he or she considers socially useful is a person living in conditions unfit for human beings. The unemployed are those who tend to be most seriously affected.

“In Britain, they suffer disproportionately from mental health problems that they all too frequently try to self-medicate through excessive alcohol intake or substance abuse. In addition, the saying goes that ‘The devil finds work for idle hands’ – work in the form of antisocial behaviour and crime in some cases. Young men, in particular, become prey to those seeking to mobilise them into gangs for terrorism or for misguided attacks on innocent people, such as minority communities or immigrants in general, whom they set up as scapegoats for the ills of the market economy.

“No market economy can be entirely free of these ills, not even one that is maintained in a socialist country where the state is in the hands of representatives of the working people rather than in the hands of the profiteers.

“In socialist countries which partially adopt a market economy in the expectation that this will be beneficial because of the way that it stimulates the rapid development of productive forces, the power of the state can be wielded in order to shield working people from the worst side effects of the market. China has adopted wideranging measures for this purpose in order to counter the ill effects on the population that market forces can produce.

“It is most interesting now to visit Xinjiang, where we are able to see for ourselves how the Chinese socialist state, guided by the Communist Party of China, has been able to counter the evil influence of certain alienated counter-revolutionary elements who had been mobilising muslim youth for terrorism both at home and abroad.

“The Chinese government was able to recognise that the problems being experienced in the region not so long ago were being caused by its relative backwardness – by the insufficiency of good quality employment for the youth, who needed to be provided with skills that would give them opportunities for a good life.

“With the same determination and level of mass mobilisation for which China is known throughout the world when faced with some natural disaster, she mobilised to defuse the alienation of the youth of what had been a relatively backward region by providing education and training on a mass scale to enable young people to obtain good jobs.

“In the space of only a handful of years the problem had been eliminated, for the benefit not only of the people now engaged in meaningful and rewarding employment, but for the benefit of the country as a whole, as these people now work heart and soul for the benefit of everyone.

“This is not something that can be achieved by terrorising or by bullying the population, in the way that the anti-China, anticommunist, propaganda of the west tirelessly and fraudulently maintains. Such behaviour could only make the situation worse, not better.

“No, this result can only be achieved by addressing the fundamental human needs of the masses of the people, something that under the leadership of the Communist Party of China the Chinese government is uniquely capable of organising and achieving.”

Building a decent life for all
David López, head of the International Association for Human Rights and Social Development, based in Geneva, Switzerland, took the opportunity to put the struggle of China and the Chinese people into the context of the struggle of the people of the whole world against imperialism and for social justice, for socialism:

“It is an honour to be once again in these lands that represent the resistance of a people who, in the face of the adversities of history, have decided to build a future based on social justice and collective wellbeing …

“China is at a decisive historical moment, facing the challenges of a multipolar world in gestation. This context is marked by the imperialist violence of the west, which today manifests itself in a particularly bloody manner in Palestine. We are witnessing genocide in broad daylight, financed by the United States and perpetrated by Israel against a people denied even their most basic right: the right to exist.

“This is where one asks oneself where the international community is if only by law the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide obliges the international community to intervene to prevent and punish such crimes.

“At the same time, Ukraine has become a military testing ground, in clear violation of the principles of sovereignty enshrined in the United Nations charter. These actions seek not only to destabilise Russia, but also to consolidate a western bloc that perpetuates its dominance to the detriment of international law and multipolarity.

“In desperation, the west sees in imperialist and neocolonial expansion its only way out to sustain a decadent system. It is the common enemy of those of us who fight for truth and social justice.

“These aggressions also extend to China, with false and manipulative narratives about regions such as Xinjiang. From the perspective of international law, propaganda attacks that seek to delegitimise the Chinese state and its governance in Xinjiang violate fundamental principles of the UN charter, such as respect for sovereignty and noninterference in the internal affairs of states.

“Let us not forget that these narratives are not new; they are part of a strategy that the west has repeatedly used to justify its interventions – as we saw in Iraq and Libya. The impact of western-promoted radical extremism in the middle east and central Asia is clear and noticeable after the fall of al-Assad in Syria.

“European powers and the USA have used organisations such as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to treat them as terrorists but to subsequently dress them up and use them to destabilise the region.

“Uyghur militias, which took part in operations against the Syrian government, have even openly declared their intention of ‘liberating Xinjiang from Chinese occupation’ after the coup in Damascus last week.

“The west accuses China of repressing the freedoms of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, but deliberately conceals the real facts that have been repeatedly denounced in Geneva. During my five visits to this country, I have witnessed a reality completely different from the western narrative: a sustained effort to eradicate poverty, improve infrastructure and guarantee the economic, social and cultural rights of its people …

“Compare this progress with the situation of urban peripheries in the west, such as Harlem, the Parisian banlieues or even parts of Switzerland, where neoliberal policies are generating inequality and poverty.

“But the attack on Xinjiang is not only propagandistic. In the corridors of geopolitics it has been heard that the west has financed extremist movements in the middle east that have also sought to destabilise this region of China …

“As we saw in the museum on counterterrorism yesterday, extremism funded by foreign powers has caused immense pain to the people of Xinjiang. This is a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law, which prohibits the use of mercenary forces and the promotion of armed groups for destabilising purposes.

“We must remember that China’s efforts in Xinjiang are aligned with Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which recognises the right of all peoples to self-determination and development. The enemies of self-determination seek to divide, using ethnic minorities as a tool to undermine national unity, just as they tried to do in Syria and Libya, where US and Israeli-backed militias unleashed chaos.

“Today more than ever, it is essential to raise our voices against these aggressions and defend a multipolar world based on mutual respect and cooperation …

“Western domination, led by the United States and its European allies, does not rest, and one of the tools used by them is the media and ultimately weapons. As Noam Chomsky pointed out: ‘The media is a propaganda machine designed to manufacture consensus.’ The west uses this machinery to perpetrate false narratives about countries such as China, Russia or Iran, while concealing its own atrocities.

“In terms of weapons, the west has its armed wing, Nato … an offensive war machine responsible for illegitimate aggressions in Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan. According to the principles of the Nuremberg treaty, which condemns wars of aggression as the ‘supreme international crime’, Nato’s actions should be subject to scrutiny and sanction by the international community, as its actions are not far removed from the terrorist concept.

“China and the world at large must be vigilant in this regard, as the 1970 declaration on principles of international law is now at risk.

“I conclude by calling for solidarity … In this historic moment, our trenches must be truth, justice and solidarity. Self-determination, sovereignty and respect for the fundamental principles of international law must guide our struggle.”

They Are Marching Still Today
Finally, Professor Mark Levine of the Minzu University of China (Beijing) recited this poem, written in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China:

The Chinese people took a stand,
And said we will be free.
They took control of this ancient land,
And declared the PRC.

Then led by the CPC,
They marched along their way,
For three-quarters of a century.
And are marching still today.

That’s seventy-five years of progress.
Moving forward every day
Building for the future
Going all the way.

Throughout the many decades
China’s made so many friends.
With a win-win goal for everyone
That the future does portend.

Then led by the CPC,
They marched along their way,
For three-quarters of a century.
And are marching still today.

That’s seventy-five years of progress.
Moving forward everyday
Building for the future
Going all the way.

Led by the CPC,
They marched along their way,
For three-quarters of a century.
And are marching still today.
Marching still today.


https://thecommunists.org/2025/01/01/ne ... edia-lies/

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Combating Chinese Entertainment Influence
January 24, 15:04

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Combating Chinese Entertainment Influence

In the West, anti-Chinese narratives are already being openly deployed in all directions. The expert community, which largely shapes the national security agenda, is raising the issue of "Chinese influence through digital entertainment."

They believe that China's global ambitions are no longer limited to mega-infrastructure projects or flourishing trade. Beijing is credited with a new strategy for disseminating soft power through video games. At the heart of this strategy, according to experts, is the Chinese tech giant Tencent, whose dominance in the gaming world has turned digital entertainment into a powerful means for projecting Chinese culture and influence on a global scale. Tech conglomerate Tencent owns Riot, the developer behind one of the world's leading cyber disciplines, League of Legends, and 40% of Epic Games, with its most famous product, Fortnite (with a player base of over 400 million worldwide).

According to the West, Tencent, which is already directly linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has chosen a strategy of heavily investing in popular games that attract an international audience. At the same time, there is no overt propaganda; instead, they weave in subtle threads of Chinese history, mythology, and aesthetics, attracting millions of people around the world. Apparently, this began to be considered a threat from the moment interest in Chinese culture in games began to go beyond the Western narratives that have historically dominated the gaming industry. Tencent's influence is assessed as systemically important in the global eSports industry, but the greatest concerns in the West are caused by the Chinese model of digital governance. It is believed that Tencent and other Chinese gaming companies associated with the CCP The giants ensure Chinese state interests and strategies, including building in-game payment systems and e-commerce that are not controlled by the West, primarily targeting developing countries, thereby limiting Western influence.

As video games continue to grow as the dominant form of global entertainment, China's strategic investments in the sector are aimed at long-term political dividends. The US believes that Tencent's success shows how digital entertainment can potentially allow China to become a key player in shaping global digital culture. According to experts, China is striving for dominance not only on land and at sea, but also in the immersive world.

Most likely, in the upcoming new round of the US-China trade war, Chinese companies such as Tencent, Moontoon, etc. will be beaten mercilessly, and with their feet, and it will hurt gamers around the world.

https://t.me/neinsider/8656 - zinc

By playing Genshin or Honkai, you are bringing communism closer to the West!

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9629642.html

Google Translator

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How The Chinese Beat Trump And OpenAI

The hype around Artificial Intelligence, the now failed U.S. attempt to monopolize it, and the recent counter from China are a lesson in how to innovate. They also show that the U.S. is losing the capability to do so.

In mid 2023, when the Artificial Intelligence hype gained headlines, I wrote:

'Artificial Intelligence' Is (Mostly) Glorified Pattern Recognition

Currently there is some hype about a family of large language models like ChatGPT. The program reads natural language input and processes it into some related natural language content output. That is not new. The first Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (Alice) was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s. I had funny chats with ELIZA in the 1980s on a mainframe terminal. ChatGPT is a bit niftier and its iterative results, i.e. the 'conversations' it creates, may well astonish some people. But the hype around it is unwarranted.
...
Currently the factual correctness of the output of the best large language models is an estimated 80%. They process symbols and pattern but have no understanding of what those symbols or pattern represent. They can not solve mathematical and logical problems, not even very basic ones.
There are niche applications, like translating written languages, where AI or pattern recognition has amazing results. But one still can not trust them to get every word right. The models can be assistants but one will always have to double check their results.

Overall the correctness of current AI models is still way too low to allow them to decide any real world situation. More data or more computing power will not change that. If one wants to overcome their limitations one will need to find some fundamentally new ideas.


But the hype continued. One big AI model, ChatGPT, was provided by a non-profit organization, OpenAI. But its CEO, Sam Altman, soon smelled the big amount of dollars he potentially could make. A year after defending the the non-profit structure of OpenAI Altman effectively raided the board and took the organization private:

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a move that will make the company more attractive to investors.
...
Chief executive Sam Altman will also receive equity for the first time in the for-profit company, which could be worth $150 billion after the restructuring as it also tries to remove the cap on returns for investors, sources added.


The ChatGTP large language model OpenAI provided was closed source. A black-box, running in the cloud, that one could pay to chat with or use for translating, content generation or analyzing certain problems.

The training and maintaining of ChatGTP took large amounts of computing power and money. It was somewhat expensive but there was no new technology in it. The algorithms it used were well known and the training data needed to 'program' it were freely available internet content.

For all the hype about AI is is not a secret or even new technology. The barriers to entry for any competition is low.

That is the reason why Yves at Naked Capitalism, pointing to Edward Zitron, asked: “How Does OpenAI Survive?” It doesn't. Or has little chance to do so. Discussions in the U.S. never acknowledged those facts.

Politicians thought of AI as the next big thing that would further U.S. control of the world. They attempted to prevent any potential competition to the lead the U.S. thought it had in that field. Nvidea, the last leading U.S. chip maker, lost billion when it was prohibited from selling in latest AI-specialized models to China.

Two days ago Trump announced Stargate, a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment in the US:

Three top tech firms on Tuesday announced that they will create a new company, called Stargate, to grow artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison appeared at the White House Tuesday afternoon alongside President Donald Trump to announce the company, which Trump called the “largest AI infrastructure project in history.”

The companies will invest $100 billion in the project to start, with plans to pour up to $500 billion into Stargate in the coming years. The project is expected to create 100,000 US jobs, Trump said.

Stargate will build “the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of AI,” including data centers around the country, Trump said. Ellison said the group’s first, 1 million-square foot data project is already under construction in Texas.


On the very same day, but with much less noise, a Chinese company published another AI model:

We introduce our first-generation reasoning models, DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1. DeepSeek-R1-Zero, a model trained via large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a preliminary step, demonstrated remarkable performance on reasoning. With RL, DeepSeek-R1-Zero naturally emerged with numerous powerful and interesting reasoning behaviors.

The new DeepSeek models have better benchmarks than any other available model. They use a different combination of technics, less training data and much less computing power to achieve that. They are cheap to use and, in contrast to OpenAI, real open source.

Writes Forbes:

U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors were intended to slow China's AI progress, but they may have inadvertently spurred innovation. Unable to rely solely on the latest hardware, companies like Hangzhou-based DeepSeek have been forced to find creative solutions to do more with less.
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This month, DeepSeek released its R1 model, using advanced techniques such as pure reinforcement learning to create a model that's not only among the most formidable in the world, but is fully open source, making it available for anyone in the world to examine, modify, and build upon.
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DeepSeek-R1’s performance is comparable to OpenAI's top reasoning models across a range of tasks, including mathematics, coding, and complex reasoning. For example, on the AIME 2024 mathematics benchmark, DeepSeek-R1 scored 79.8% compared to OpenAI-o1’s 79.2%. On the MATH-500 benchmark, DeepSeek-R1 achieved 97.3% versus o1’s 96.4%. In coding tasks, DeepSeek-R1 reached the 96.3rd percentile on Codeforces, while o1 reached the 96.6th percentile – although it’s important to note that benchmark results can be imperfect and should not be overinterpreted.
But what’s most remarkable is that DeepSeek was able to achieve this largely through innovation rather than relying on the latest computer chips.


Nature is likewise impressed:

A Chinese-built large language model called DeepSeek-R1 is thrilling scientists as an affordable and open rival to ‘reasoning’ models such as OpenAI’s o1.
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“This is wild and totally unexpected,” Elvis Saravia, an AI researcher and co-founder of the UK-based AI consulting firm DAIR.AI, wrote on X.
R1 stands out for another reason. DeepSeek, the start-up in Hangzhou that built the model, has released it as ‘open-weight’, meaning that researchers can study and build on the algorithm. Published under an MIT licence, the model can be freely reused but is not considered fully open source, because its training data has not been made available.

“The openness of DeepSeek is quite remarkable,” says Mario Krenn, leader of the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany. By comparison, o1 and other models built by OpenAI in San Francisco, California, including its latest effort o3 are “essentially black boxes”, he says.


Even long term Internet investors, who have seen it all, are impressed:

Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca - 9:19 UTC · Jan 24, 2025
Deepseek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen — and as open source, a profound gift to the world. 🤖🫡


Nature adds:

DeepSeek hasn’t released the full cost of training R1, but it is charging people using its interface around one-thirtieth of what o1 costs to run. The firm has also created mini ‘distilled’ versions of R1 to allow researchers with limited computing power to play with the model.

That does in fact work!

Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele - 14:34 UTC · Jan 23, 2025
Folks, I think we have done it!
If overnight tests are confirmed we have OPEN SOURCE DeepSeek R1 running at 200 tokens per second on a NON-INTERNET connected Raspberry Pi.
A full frontier AI better than “OpenAI” owned fully by you in your pocket free to use!
I will make the Pi image available as soon as all tests are complete.
You just pop it into a Raspberry Pi and you have AI!
This is just the start of the power that takes place when you TRULY Open Source an AI Model.


The latest Rasberry Pi hardware starts at $50. The software is free.

This is a death call for OpenAI:

Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand - 14:23 UTC · Jan 21, 2025
Most people probably don't realize how bad news China's Deepseek is for OpenAI.

They've come up with a model that matches and even exceeds OpenAI's latest model o1 on various benchmarks, and they're charging just 3% of the price.

It's essentially as if someone had released a mobile on par with the iPhone but was selling it for $30 instead of $1000. It's this dramatic.

What's more, they're releasing it open-source so you even have the option - which OpenAI doesn't offer - of not using their API at all and running the model for "free" yourself. ...


The backstory of DeepSeek is also amazing.

In 2007 three Chinese engineers set out to build a quant (financial speculation) fund using AI. They hired hungry people fresh from the universities. Their High-Flyer fund was somewhat successful but throughout the last years the Chinese government started to crack down on financial engineering, quant trading and speculation.

With time on their hand and unused computing power in their back room the engineers started to build the DeepSeek models. The costs were minimal. While OpenAI, Meta and Google spent billions to build their AI's the training costs for the published DeepSeek models were mere $5 to 6 million.

Henry Shi @henrythe9ths - 23:20 PM · Jan 20, 2025
7. The lesson?

Sometimes having less means innovating more. DeepSeek proves you don't need:
- Billions in funding
- Hundreds of PhDs
- A famous pedigree
Just brilliant young minds, the courage to think differently and the grit to never give up


Another lesson is that brilliant young minds should not be wasted to optimize financial speculation but to make stuff one can use.

DeepSeek demonstrates how it is impossible to use trade and technology barriers to keep technology away from competitors. They can, with decent resources, simply innovate around those.

Even billions of dollars, loud marketeers like Trump and self promoting grifters like Sam Altman can not successfully compete with a deep bench of well trained engineers.

As an author at Guancha remarks (machine translation):

In the Sino-US science and technology war, China's unique advantage comes precisely from the US ban. It can be said that our strong will to survive was forced out by Washington, and maximizing our limited resources is the secret to breaking through. In history, this kind of story is not new, that is, the weak prevail over the strong, and the small fight against the big.

The U.S. side will fall into a Vietnam-style dilemma-relying too much on its own absolute advantage, thus wasting a lot of resources and losing itself to internal consumption.


How long for the U.S. to (re-)learn that lesson?

Posted by b on January 24, 2025 at 15:46 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/01/h ... .html#more

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Challenging the purists: the Marxist debate over China’s path
The article below was submitted by Dan Farhat, an author and researcher based in Beirut, Lebanon.

Dan responds to the critique made of China by some of the (particularly Western) left, that the introduction of market mechanisms from 1978 onwards was a betrayal of socialism and that China has become – or is on its way to becoming – a capitalist country.

Comparing China’s Reform and Opening Up with the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and drawing inspiration from the writings of the Italian Marxist philosopher Domenico Losurdo, Dan argues that China’s reforms constituted a creative and successful response to the conditions faced by the country at the time, and indeed have been a key factor in China’s successes in eradicating extreme poverty and raising living standards beyond recognition.

The article further notes that, while the spread of market forces introduces contradictions, risks and challenges, the Chinese leadership has been able to manage these by maintaining the leading role of the CPC and the state sector, and “preventing the bourgeoisie from becoming a cohesive and politically powerful class”.
The following story was shared by the former deputy editor-in-chief of China Daily, Kang Bing:

Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my childhood memory is closely tied to hunger. In my home city of Xi’an, the monthly quota for one urban resident was 100 grams of cooking oil, half a kg of meat, half a dozen eggs, and 100 grams of sugar. As for milk, it was given only to families with newborns. Many families today consume the entire monthly quota of oil, meat, eggs, and sugar in one day.

Although the ration system ensured everybody had a share of the available food and prevented starvation deaths, it led to malnutrition among children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly alike. Not a single boy among my 100 male classmates who graduated from high school with me in 1977 crossed 1.8 meters in height thanks to malnutrition.


Today’s picture is very different, with the country emerging as the world’s second-largest economy. Millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, and the quality of life in China has improved significantly – indeed, at a rate never seen before in human history. This incredible transformation is in no small part testament to the profound impact of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms.

Deng himself famously said that “to build socialism it is necessary to develop the productive forces. Poverty is not socialism. To uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty.” For Deng, true socialism was not about keeping everyone equally poor; it was about lifting people out of poverty. Deng saw a socialism that, through the utilization of market mechanisms, and by focusing on development and economic growth, could transform the lives of ordinary people and elevate China’s position in the global economy.

This vision however had its critics. When China embarked on the path of economic reforms, the adoption of market forces, and allowing foreign investment, some viewed this as a departure from socialism. But were the reforms a betrayal of the revolution? Or was it a strategic and pragmatic decision for a nation that had suffered from decades of imperialist-forced isolation and economic disruptions?

Challenging the Purists: The Marxist Debate Over China’s Path

History makes it clear: market elements are not inherently incompatible with socialism. Lenin in the 1920s had to creatively respond to the disastrous reality faced by Russia after the war of intervention (waged by an imperialist alliance of Britain, France, the United States, Japan and ten other countries) by introducing private enterprise and foreign expertise to rebuild the Soviet economy (New Economic Policy). Similarly, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms utilized market mechanisms to address the pressing challenges after years of economic blockade and the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, while still maintaining a socialist framework. Both cases highlight how important adaptability is over strict adherence to ideological purity. In both instances, pragmatic policies were a necessity for economic recovery, despite the opposition from ideological purists. As was well explained by Deng:

“It is necessary to emancipate the mind, seek truth from facts, and unite as one to face the future. We must learn to emancipate the mind, to rid ourselves of old thoughts, and to recognize that new ideas are the driving force for the progress of society.”

Marx himself acknowledged that the remnants of capitalism cannot be completely done away with all at once, especially given the realities of the world still dominated by capitalist imperialism. In Critique of the Gotha Program, he argued that socialism must emerge from existing conditions (far from conforming to an idealized blueprint). Early socialist societies, Marx noted, would still bear the “birthmarks of the old society,” reflecting the ongoing influence of capitalism even within emerging socialist structures. Marx also made a clear distinction between the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ stages of socialism. The lower stage represents a transitional phase where productive forces are still developing, and society operates under the principle of “to each according to their work.” The higher stage, however, represents a society of material abundance in which the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” can be fully realized.

In this context, John Ross, in his book China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices provides a solid theoretical framework for understanding how markets can be incorporated into the socialist system. Referring to Marx’s analysis in Volume One of Capital, published in 1867, Ross argues that economic distribution based on labor (a core principle of commodity production) must involve the existence of a market. He also emphasizes that markets are an integral part of the economy during the socialist period and this is consistent with China’s vision of a ‘socialist market economy’. Deng Xiaoping and his successors applied this Marxist idea in an empirically sound manner, showing how market systems can be compatible with, and even facilitate, the development of socialism.

China’s reforms align with this pragmatic approach, which (rightfully) treats socialism as an ongoing process that requires continual adaptation to the conditions in which it exists in. Deng Xiaoping emphasized this perspective, stating:

“We have said that socialism is the primary stage of communism and that at the advanced stage the principle of ‘from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs’ will be applied. This calls for highly developed productive forces and an overwhelming abundance of material wealth. Therefore, the fundamental task for the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces. The superiority of the socialist system is demonstrated, in the final analysis, by faster and greater development of those forces than under the capitalist system.”

Critical leftists often argue that China’s adoption of market mechanisms undermines its socialist identity, since a growing private sector can lead to a reemergence of a bourgeois class that would be capable of threatening the socialist system. However, as Domenico Losurdo points out, this critique fails to consider the crucial distinction between the ‘economic’ and ‘political’ expropriation of the bourgeoisie. While market mechanisms were introduced, the Communist Party of China (CPC) maintained its strict political control, preventing the bourgeoisie from becoming a cohesive and politically powerful class.

Deng Xiaoping addressed this issue when he stated, “We shall not allow a new bourgeoisie to take shape.” Private enterprises contributed to economic growth while the Party’s dominance was protected. Deng’s 1985 remark to Zimbabwean Prime Minister Robert Mugabe that “perhaps Lenin had a good idea when he adopted the New Economic Policy” highlights the parallel between Lenin’s NEP and China’s reforms; both constituted a pragmatic approach, allowing limited private enterprise to revitalize the economy while still preserving full political authority for the working class and its allies.

Domenico Losurdo’s understanding of the NEP is consistent with that of the prominent German philosopher Walter Benjamin. During his 1927 visit to Moscow, Benjamin noted that the NEP created a separation between economic wealth and political power, with the Soviet state maintaining full political control while still allowing private economic activity. Benjamin saw that this exact separation created a ‘terrible social isolation’ of the ‘NEP man,’ as their wealth did not translate into political influence. Losurdo uses Benjamin’s insight to argue that although market reforms were introduced it did not bring back the capitalist system, as the Communist Party still held on to power.

By only focusing on theoretical ideals, critics overlook and often fail to consider the dialectical nature of Socialism, which cannot be reduced to static definitions; but rather, its relevance and survival depend on its ability to reform and adapt. Lenin’s New Economic Policy and China’s reforms show the need for flexibility rather than rigidity, in order to advance the higher cause of socialism in the modern world.

This blog post was inspired by the following works:

The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism by Carlos L. Garrido
China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices by John Ross
Has China Turned to Capitalism?—Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism by Domenico Losurdo
The East is Still Red: Socialism in the 21st Century by Carlos Martinez
Kang Bing’s Chinese People’s Journey from Malnutrition to Over-Nutrition


https://socialistchina.org/2025/01/19/c ... inas-path/

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China responds to Rubio’s remarks on South China Sea after his phone call with Philippine FM
January 25, 2025 Global Times

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Mao Ning Photo: Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs

In response to a U.S. State Department statement claiming new U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussing Beijing’s “dangerous and destabilizing actions in the South China Sea” with his Philippines counterpart Enrique Manalo over phone and underscoring the “ironclad” U.S. defense commitment to Manila, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said on Thursday that the U.S. is not a party to the South China Sea issue and has no right to interfere in the maritime issues between China and the Philippines.

Mao said “the military cooperation between the U.S. and the Philippines should not undermine China’s sovereignty and maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea, still less should such cooperation support or advance the Philippines’ illegal claims.” China will continue to take necessary steps to firmly safeguard its territorial sovereignty and maritime rights and interests and uphold peace and stability in the South China Sea, said Mao.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke Wednesday local time with Philippine Secretary of Foreign Affairs Enrique Manalo about issues of mutual concern, including so-called China’s “dangerous and destabilizing actions in the South China Sea.”

Rubio underscored the U.S.’ “ironclad commitments” to the Philippines under the Mutual Defense Treaty. The two sides also exchanged views on ways to advance security cooperation, expand economic ties for shared prosperity, and deepen avenues for further regional cooperation, according to a readout released by the U.S. Department of State on Wednesday.

Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, said that the U.S. will continue the diplomatic rhetoric, but to what extent Rubio’s remarks will turn into concrete actions in the region is still a question.

“The Marcos Jr. administration of the Philippines also needs to learn that the U.S., especially under the leadership of the Trump administration, will not be hijacked by any other countries, including its allies, for any unnecessary dangers,” Li noted.

Lü Xiang, an expert on U.S. studies and research fellow at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday that the Trump administration is likely to continue to launch groundless accusations against China’s legitimate acts in the region.

“However, the Trump administration will be less interested in getting involved too much on issues not directly related to U.S. core interests, as this is what ‘America First’ means. In addition, China now has much more strength [to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests] in the region, and the consequences of being ‘unnecessarily provocative’ would be unaffordable to both Washington and Manila,” Lü noted.

The Chinese military conducted joint sea-air combat readiness patrols in the South China Sea from January 17 to 19 to maintain peace and stability in the area, according to a statement by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command. The statement was issued after the Philippine Navy held live fire drills and carried out joint maritime exercises with the U.S. in the South China Sea.

“Any military activity that stirs up trouble in the South China Sea is within our control,” the PLA statement read. The statement directly targets the provocative exercises conducted by the Philippine navy near Huangyan Dao, and its joint exercises with the U.S., Zhang Junshe, a Chinese military expert, told the Global Times.

Humprey Arnaldo Russel, director of the China Research Center in the Institute for Strategy and Global Studies at the University of Indonesia, told the Global Times in an exclusive interview published on Tuesday that “ASEAN is a family. When a family faces a problem, it is unwise for one member to turn to external parties for ‘help.’ ASEAN, as a unity, is bound by shared values such as harmony, non-interference and the commitment to finding peaceful solutions to problems.”

“These core values will not change because of any single member’s actions. Therefore, it would be far more beneficial for the Philippines to engage directly with China, as this is where the solution lies,” said the Indonesian expert.

Source: Global Times

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2025/ ... ippine-fm/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: China

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 28, 2025 4:02 pm

The existential threat of communism
January 27, 19:18

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The existential threat of communism

In the USA, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been elevated to the rank of existential threats. The Americans are planning to form a coalition with the participation of many world countries in the concept of defeating it. As they believe overseas, and what they will persuade leaders to do, is the idea that maintaining neutrality is a false illusion, and states in the coming confrontation will have to decide who they are with. In relations between the USA and China (CPC), American allies cannot have any neutrality.

The American administration is sure that for the future of the entire Western "democratic" civilization, there can be no parity with Beijing. Neutrality for them, in essence, is a form of unwanted complicity. It is claimed that maintaining neutrality, ignoring the fundamental "American" reality, often coincides with the interests of the competing side.

The new American administration believes that Beijing operates on so-called "ambiguity", using differences between states to exert influence on them, especially in regions such as Southeast Asia and Africa, and the neutral position of such countries is perceived as tacit approval of China's actions, including its aggressive expansion in the South China Sea.

The Americans also believe that the desire for neutrality is aimed at extracting profits from both sides of the geopolitical fault line, and ultimately leads to excessive dependence on China. Using the CPC's actions to protect its domestic market, when the Chinese began to put administrative barriers to access to their consumers for Western manufacturers, by the beginning of 2025 the Americans have already displaced the Chinese as the main trading partner of such key players in the world economy as Japan, Germany, South Korea and the ASEAN countries.

As a result, countries whose economies are closely linked to Chinese productivity will be led to the imperative of a moral choice of the parties. Either they are with the Americans, or even their neutrality will be considered solidarity with the actions of the Chinese Communist Party, with all the consequences. The American ideological propaganda machine is once again spinning at full power, and as always, the world will be divided into two halves: free Western societies and the CCP, whose actions will be shown as a litany of systemic oppression and suppression of freedoms.

Based on the new narrative promoted by the United States, maintaining neutrality in this ideological struggle is indifference to the fundamental values ​​​​that underlie free societies.

https://t.me/neinsider/8695 - zinc

In essence, they are trying to play out the Cold War against China according to the old patterns, realizing that they will lose to China in ordinary economic competition.
That is why it is important for them to drive a wedge between Russia and China. And that is why promises of peace to Ukraine are connected with calls to break close ties with China. Because they are afraid that they will not be able to carry out a simultaneous active struggle against China and the Russian Federation.

And communism is simply a bugbear here, since China does not implement a strategy of promoting communist ideology on the territory of the West, which is limited to the territory of China itself, where "building socialism in a single country" is being implemented almost according to Stalin.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9636417.html

Google Translator

The 'danger of the good example' is enough to give the capitalists loose bowels.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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