Connexion
‘Anything that was good and true about Western civilization is preserved and thriving in Russia.’ And after a millennium of playing catch-up, she now has the dominant military heft and osmotic alliance with Iran and China to help craft new civilizational calculations.
By Pepe Escobar at Sputnik International.
A Holy of the Holies was shattered in the Holy Land as Iran staged a quite measured, heavily choreographed response to the Israeli terror attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus, a de facto evisceration of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic immunity.
This game-changer will directly interfere on how the Anglo-American system manages its simultaneous conflagration with Russia, China and Iran – three top BRICS members.
The key problem is escalations are already built in – and will be hard to remove. The Total Cancel War against Russia; the genocide in Gaza – with its explicit policy masterfully decoded by Prof. Michael Hudson; and the decoupling/shaping the terrain against China won’t simply vanish – as all communication bridges with the Global Majority keep being torched.
Yet the Iranian message indeed establishes a “New Equation” – as Tehran christened it, and prefigures many other surprises to come from West Asia.
Iran wanted to – and did send – a clear message. New equation: if the biblical psychopathic entity keeps attacking Iranian interests, from henceforth it will be counter-attacked inside Israel. All that in a matter of “seconds” – as the Security Council in Tehran has already cleared all the procedures.
Escalation though seems inevitable. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak: “Netanyahu is influenced by his [fundamentalist] political partners to go into an escalation so he can hold onto power and accelerate the coming of the Messiah.”
Compare it to Iranian President Raisi: “The smallest act against Tehran’s interests will be met with a massive, extensive, and painful response against all its operations.”
(L) July 2019: IRGC Aerospace Force General Amirali Hajizadeh in a meeting with his Russian counterpart General “Armageddon” Surovikin before the Russia-Ukraine war: ‘Help us build our aerospace command force, and I will help you build Russia’s drone command force’ [01] [02] ; (R) April 10, 2024: After Imam Khamenei said Israel must be punished, a subtle smile appeared on the face of General Hajizadeh. [03] ; April 17, 2024: [04]
For Tehran, regulating the intensity of the clash in West Asia between Israel and the Axis of Resistance while simultaneously establishing strategic deterrence to replace “strategic patience” was a matter of launching a triple wave: a drone swarm opening the path for cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.
The performance of the much-vaunted Iron Dome, Arrow-3 and David’s Sling – aided by F-35 fighter jets and the US and the UK naval force – was not exactly stellar. There’s no video of the “outer-layer” Arrow-3 system shooting down anything in space.
At least 9 ballistic missiles penetrated the dense Israeli defense network and hit the Nevatim and Ramon bases. Israel is absolutely mum on the fate of its Golan Heights intel installation – hit by cruise missiles.
Amidst classic fog of war, it’s irrelevant whether Tehran launched hundreds or dozens of drones and missiles. Regardless of NATOstan media hype, what’s proven beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the supposedly “invincible” Israeli defense maze – ranging from US-made AD/ABM systems to Israeli knockoffs – is helpless in real war against a technologically advanced adversary.
What was accomplished by a single operation did raise quite a few professional eyebrows. Iran forced Israel to furiously deplete its stock of interceptors and spend at least $1.35 billion – while having its escalatory dominance and deterrence strategy completely shattered.
The psychological blow was even fiercer.
What if Iran had unleashed a series of strikes without a generous previous warning lasting several days? What if US, UK, France and – traitorous – Jordan were not ready for coordinated defense? (The – startling – fact they were all directly dispensing firepower on Tel Aviv’s behalf was not analyzed at all). What if Iran had hit serious industrial and infrastructural targets?
Establishing an Equation Without Disturbing a Pivot
Predictably, there has been less than zero debate across NATOstan about the sudden collapse of the Fortress Israel Myth – which underpins the larger myth of Zionism offering Impregnable Security for those living in Israel. No more. This narrative spin is D.O.A.
Iran, for its part, could not care less about what NATOstan spins. The shift towards the New Equation in fact was generous enough to offer Tel Aviv a de-escalation escape route – which will not be taken, at Israel’s peril.
For Tel Aviv, everything that happened so far spells out Strategic Defeat across the spectrum: in Gaza, in Lebanon, with the economy tanking, totally losing legitimacy around the world, and now with the added painful loss of deterrence.
All eyes are now on what may happen next: will it finally become clear whether the Hegemon prevails or whether Israel runs the “wag the dog” show?
It’s essential to consider the Russia-China strategic partnership view. The consensus among Chinese scholars is that the Hegemon prefers not to commit too many resources to West Asia, as this would affect the – already collapsing – Project Ukraine and the strategic planning to counter China in the Asia-Pacific.
When it comes to Russia, President Raisi personally called President Putin and they discussed all relevant details over the phone. Cool, calm and collected.
Additionally, later this week Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani – who said Iran will respond “within seconds” to any new Israeli attack – visits Moscow for the Conference on Nonproliferation and will also meet with the top echelons of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
It’s quite remarkable that Iran managed to establish the New Equation without disturbing its own pivot to Eurasia – after the collapse of the 2015 nuclear deal – while protecting the complex framework engaged in the defense of Palestine.
The Hegemon’s options are dire. They run from being eventually expelled from West Asia and the Persian Gulf to an unwinnable existential clash against three civilization-states – Russia, China, Iran.
What’s left as the number one feasible scenario is a carefully calculated retreat to an easily controlled backyard: Latin America, especially South America, manipulating new, convenient, sovereign-deprived asset Argentina.
And of course maintaining control over a de-industrialized and sovereignty-deprived Europe.
That does not change the fact that US power projection on the wane, globally, is the way the wind is blowing. The Straussian neocon psycho-dementia is unsustainable. The question is whether they can be progressively purged from the US power structure before they attempt to plunge the Global Majority into their irrational depths of doom.
And Don’t Forget the New BRICS Equation
By contrast, on the Global Majority front, over 40 nations want to join BRICS – and counting, according to the head of the Russian Council Committee on International Affairs, Grigory Karasin.
After a meeting of the chairmen of the international affairs committees of BRICS Parliaments last week in Moscow, Karasin noted how many BRICS member-nations understand that they should not rush to create a rigid charter, “seeing how counterproductive and even provocative the European Union is acting.” The name of the game is flexibility.
Alastair Crooke has touched on a key theme that runs through my new book, Eurasia v. NATOstan: “Anything that was good and true about Western civilization is preserved and thriving in Russia. This is the unspoken insight that so infuriates the western elites. And it is also why, in part, BRICS states so evidently look to Russia for leadership.”
The New Equation established by Iran, a sovereign BRICS member, will do wonders to solidify this – multilateral, multicultural – state of cooperation as the Empire and its “aircraft carrier” in West Asia, except in the covert ops department, are increasingly reduced to the role of a paper tiger.
Iran’s retaliatory strikes against Israel were not conducted alone. Strategic partners Russia and China have Tehran’s back, and their role in West Asia’s conflict will only grow if the US doesn’t keep Israel in check.
By Pepe Escobar at The Cradle.
A little over 48 hours before Iran’s aerial message to Israel across the skies of West Asia, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed, on the record, what so far had been, at best, hush-hush diplomatic talk:
The Russian side keeps in contact with Iranian partners on the situation in the Middle East after the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate in Syria.
Ryabkov added, “We stay in constant touch [with Iran]. New in-depth discussions on the whole range of issues related to the Middle East are also expected in the near future in BRICS.”
He then sketched The Big Picture:
Connivance with Israeli actions in the Middle East, which are at the core of Washington’s policy, is in many ways becoming the root cause of new tragedies.
Here, concisely, we had Russia’s top diplomatic coordinator with BRICS – in the year of the multipolar organization’s Russian presidency – indirectly messaging that Russia has Iran’s back. Iran, it should be noted, just became a full-fledged BRICS+ member in January.
Iran’s aerial message this weekend confirmed this in practice: their missile guidance systems used the Chinese Beidou satellite navigation system as well as the Russian GLONASS system.
This is Russia–China intel leading from behind and a graphic example of BRICS+ on the move.
Ryabkov’s “we stay in constant touch” plus the satellite navigation intel confirms the deeply interlocked cooperation between the Russia–China strategic partnership and their mutual strategic partner Iran. Based on vast experience in Ukraine, Moscow knew that the biblical psychopathic genocidal entity would keep escalating if Iran only continued to exercise “strategic patience.”
The morphing of “strategic patience” into a new strategic balance had to take some time – including high-level exchanges with the Russian side. After all, the risk remained that the Israeli attack against the Iranian consulate/ambassador’s residence in Damascus could well prove to be the 2024 remix of the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Marco Polo with elephants and camels arriving at Hormuz on the Gulf of Persia from India – Boucicaut Master
And don’t forget the Strait of Hormuz
Tehran did manage to upend the massive Western psychological operations aimed at pushing it into a strategic misstep.
Iran started with a misdirecting masterstroke. As US–Israeli fear porn went off the charts, fueled by dodgy western “intel,” the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) made a quick sideways move, seizing an Israeli-owned container ship near the Strait of Hormuz.
That was an eminently elegant manoeuvre – reminding the collective west of Tehran’s hold on the Strait of Hormuz, a fact immeasurably more dangerous to the whole western economic house of cards than any limited strike on their “aircraft carrier” in West Asia. That did happen anyway.
And once again, with a degree of elegance. Unlike that ‘moral’ army specialized in killing women, children, and the elderly and bombing hospitals, mosques, schools, universities, and humanitarian convoys, the Iranian attack targeted key Israeli military sites such as the Nevatim and Ramon airbases in the Negev and an intel center in the occupied Golan Heights – the three centers used by Tel Aviv in its strike on Iran’s Damascus consulate.
This was a highly choreographed show. Multiple early warning signs gifted Tel Aviv with plenty of time to profit from US intel and evacuate fighter jets and personnel, which was duly followed by a plethora of US military radars coordinating the defense strategy.
It was American firepower that smashed the bulk of what may have been a swarm of 185 Shahed-136 drones – using everything from ship-mounted air defense to fighter jets. The rest was shot down over Jordan by The Little King’s military – the Arab street will never forget his treachery – and then by dozens of Israeli jets.
Israel’s defenses were de facto saturated by the suicide drone-ballistic missile combo. On the ballistic missile front, several pierced the dense maze of Israel’s air defenses, with Israel officially claiming nine successful hits – interestingly enough, all of them hitting super relevant military targets.
The whole show had the budget of a mega blockbuster. For Israel – without even counting the price of US, UK, and Israeli jets – just the multi-layered interception system set it back at least $1.35 billion, according to an Israeli official. Iranian military sources tally the cost of their drone and missile salvos at only $35 million – 2.5 percent of Tel Aviv’s expenditure – made with full indigenous technology.
A mural in Palestine Square, Tehran, reads in Hebrew: “The next slap will be harsher”
A new West Asian chessboard
It took only a few hours for Iran to finally metastasize strategic patience into serious deterrence, sending an extremely powerful and multi-layered message to its adversaries and masterfully changing the game across the whole West Asian chessboard.
Were the biblical psychopaths to engage in a real Hot War against Iran, there’s no chance in hell Tel Aviv can intercept hundreds of Iranian missiles – the state-of-the-art ones excluded from the current show – without an early warning mechanism spread over several days. Without the Pentagon’s umbrella of weaponry and funds, Israeli defense is unsustainable.
It will be fascinating to see what lessons Moscow will glean from this profusion of lights in the West Asian sky, its sly eyes taking in the frantic Israeli, political, and military scene as the heat continues to rise on the slowly boiling – and now screaming – frog.
As for the US, a West Asian war – one it hasn’t scripted itself – does not suit its immediate interests, as an old-school Deep State stalwart confirmed by email:
That could permanently end the area as an oil-producing region and astronomically raise the oil price to levels that will crash the world financial structure. It is conceivable that the United States banking system could similarly collapse if the oil price rises to $900 a barrel should Middle East oil be cut off or destroyed.
It’s no wonder that the Biden combo, days before the Iranian response, was frantically begging Beijing, Riyadh, and Ankara, among others, to hold Tehran back. The Iranians might have even agreed – had the UN Security Council imposed a permanent ceasefire in Gaza to calm the regional storm. Washington was mute.
The question now is whether it will remain mute. Mohammad Bagheri, chief of the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, went straight to the point:
We have conveyed a message to America through the Swiss Embassy that American bases will become a military target if they are used in future aggressive actions of the Zionist regime. We will consider this as aggression and will act accordingly.
The US dilemma is confirmed by former Pentagon analyst Michael Maloof:
We have got some 35 bases that surround Iran, and they thereby become vulnerable. They were meant to be a deterrence. Clearly, deterrence is no longer on the table here. Now they become the American’ Achilles heel’ because of their vulnerabilities to attack.
All bets are off on how the US–Israel combo will adapt to the new Iranian-crafted deterrence reality. What remains, for the historic moment, is the pregnant-with-meaning aerial show of Muslim Iran singlehandedly unleashing hundreds of drones and missiles on Israel, a feat feted all across the lands of Islam. And especially by the battered Arab street, subjugated by decrepit monarchies that keep doing business with Israel over the dead bodies of the Palestinians of Gaza.
Sweet coordinated moves in our Juntaland, West African Sahelian branch, among the Axes of Resistance!
Little noticed, just after Niger officially kicked out US troops (turning on the ticking clock, as with Frenchie earlier), and right after Russian advance troops arrived in town, China swooped in to provide sanctions-busting liquidity and lucrative deals. This effectively seals off Plunder Inc from one of most stupendous resource-rich regions on earth, easily to rival Russia itself. And Niger is projected to be Africa’s top growth economy this year….
Niamey, Niger protests against French occupation troops, July 2023.
@Arab_Africa:
The day after Russian troops arrived, Niger signed a $400 million oil deal with China. China asked for $400 million for the sale of crude oil. The official signing ceremony of the agreement between Niger and CNPC took place on April 12. It was attended by the Prime Minister of Niger, Mahamane Zein Lamin, and the Chinese Ambassador to Niamey. |video|
Niamey, Niger protests against French occupation troops, July 2023.
@Africa Intel:
Hundreds rally in Niger’s capital to push for U.S. military departure
Hundreds took to the streets of Niger’s capital on Saturday to demand the departure of U.S. troops, after the ruling junta further shifted its strategy by ending a military accord with the United States and welcoming Russian military instructors.
Marching arm in arm through central Niamey, the crowd waved Nigerien flags in a demonstration that recalled anti-French protests that spurred the withdrawal of France’s forces from Niger last year after the army seized power in a coup. |media|
Oh, the Chinese fan the flames. And the key Junta leaders were trained in the famous USA torture academy AKA “School of the Americas,” located in Georgia, LOL!!!!
By The Corbett Report FROM 2017: In the early 20th century, the world’s dominant superpower looked warily on the rise of a competitor to its...
Echoes of WWI: China, the US, and the Next “Great” War (2017)
… as the whole planet awaits with bated breath the avowedly inevitable Iranian response to the attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus by the biblical psychopaths responsible for the Gaza genocide.
By Pepe Escobar at Sputnik International.
Enveloped in an aura of secrecy, each passing day betrays the immensity of the challenge: the possibly asymmetrical response must be, simultaneously, symbolic, substantive, cogent, convincing, reasonable and rational. That is driving Tel Aviv totally hysterical and the deciding instances of the Hegemon extremely itchy.
Everyone with a functioning brain knows this wet dream of a stunt from the point of view of hardcore Zionists and US Christian zio-cons was a serious provocation, designed to draw the US to the long-cherished Israeli plan of striking a decisive blow against both Hezbollah and Tehran.
The IDF’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi all but gave away the game, when he said this past Sunday that “we are operating in cooperation with the USA and strategic partners in the region.”
Translation: never trust the Hegemon even as the notion is floated – via Swiss mediators – that Washington won’t interfere with Tehran’s response to Tel Aviv. One just needs to remember Washington’s “assurances” to Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War.
It’s impossible to take Hegemon back-channel assurances at face value. The White House and the Pentagon occasionally dispense these “assurances” to Moscow every time Kiev strikes deep inside the Russian Federation using US-UK satellite intel, logistics, weaponry and with NATO in de-facto operational control.
The state terror attack on Damascus, which shredded the Vienna convention on diplomatic immunity, crucially was also an attack on both the expanded BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Iran is a member of both multilateral bodies, and on top of it is engaged in strategic partnerships with both Russia and China.
"If Iran attacks from its territory – Israel will respond and attack in Iran," Israel's foreign minister threatened Iran with strikes, tweeting in Hebrew and Persian and tagging Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Iran's supreme leader, for his part, later said that the Israeli… pic.twitter.com/eWq4XDmu3Y
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) April 10, 2024
So it’s no wonder the leadership in both Beijing and Moscow carefully consider all possible repercussions of the next Iranian move.
Tel Aviv’s purposeful escalation – when it comes to expanding war in West Asia – happens to mirror another escalation: NATO’s no way out in Ukraine except by doubling down, with no end in sight.
That started with the invariably out of his depth Secretary of State Little Tony Blinken affirming, on the record, that Ukraine will (italics mine) join NATO. Which any functioning brain knows is translatable as the road map towards a Russia-NATO hot war with unbelievably dire consequences.
Little Blinkie’s criminal irresponsibility was duly picked up and reverberated by the Franco-British duo, as expressed by British FM David “of Arabia” Cameron and French FM Stephane Sejourne: “If Ukraine loses, we all lose”.
At least they got that (italics mine) right – although that took ages, when it comes to framing NATO’s approaching cosmic humiliation.
“Dual Opposition” to “Dual Deterrence”
Now let’s switch from clownish bit players to the adults in the room. As in Russian FM Sergei Lavrov and Chinese FM Wang Yi discussing literally every incandescent dossier together earlier this week in Beijing.
Lavrov and Wang could not be clearer on what’s ahead for the Russia-China strategic partnership.
They will engage together on all matters regarding Eurasian security.
They will go, in Lavrov’s words, for “dual opposition” to counterpunch the West’s “dual deterrence”.
They will be countering every attempt by the usual suspects to “slow down the natural course of history”.
Add to it the confirmation that President Putin and President Xi will hold at least two bilaterals in 2024: at the SCO summit in June and at the BRICS summit in October.
In a nutshell: the dogs of Forever Wars bark while the Eurasian integration caravan marches on.
Both Lavrov and Wang made it very clear that while steering through “the natural course of history”, the Russia-China strategic partnership will keep seeking a way to resolve the Ukraine tragedy, taking into account Russia’s interests.
Translation: NATO better wake up and smell the coffee.
This bilateral at the FM level in Beijing is yet another graphic proof of the current tectonic shift in what the Chinese usually describe as the “world correlation of forces”. Next month – already confirmed – it will be Putin’s turn to visit Beijing.
It’s never enough to remember that on February 4, 2022, also in Beijing, Putin personally explained to Xi why NATO/Hegemon expansion into Ukraine was totally unacceptable for Russia. Xi, for all practical purposes, understood the stakes and did not subsequently oppose the SMO.
This time, Lavrov could not but refer to the 12-point peace plan on Ukraine proposed by Beijing last year, which addresses the root causes “primarily in the context of ensuring indivisible security, including in Europe and the world over.”
Your “Overcapacity” is Driving Me Nuts
Both Tehran and Moscow face a serious challenge when it comes to the Hegemon’s intentions. It’s impossible to definitely conclude that Washington was not in the loop on Tel Aviv’s attack on Iran in Damascus – even though it’s counter-intuitive to believe that the Democrats in an election year would willingly fuel a nasty hot war in West Asia provoked by Israel.
Yet there’s always the possibility that the White House-endorsed genocide in Gaza is about to extrapolate the framework of a confrontation between Israel and Iran/Axis of Resistance – as the Hegemon is de facto implicated in myriad levels.
To alleviate such tension, let’s introduce what under the circumstances can be understood as comic relief: the “Yellin’ Yellen goes to China” adventure.
US Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen went to Beijing to essentially deliver two threats (this is the Hegemon, after all).
1. Yellen said that Chinese companies could face “significant consequences” if they provided “material support for Russia’s war on Ukraine.”
2. Yellen accused Chinese companies of “overcapacity” – especially when it comes to the electric-vehicle (EV) industry (incidentally, 18 of the top 20 EV companies around the world are Chinese).
The Chinese, predictably, dismissed the whole show with barely a yawn, pointing out that the Hegemon simply cannot deal with China’s competitive advantage, so they resort to yet another instance of “de-risking” hype.
In sum: it’s all about barely disguised protectionism. Chinese Commerce Minister Wang Wentao went straight to the point: China’s advantage is built on innovation, not subsidies. Others added two extra key factors: the efficiency of supply chains and ultra-dynamic market competition. EVs, in China, along with lithium batteries and solar cells, are known as the new “three major items.”
Yellin’ Yellen’s theatrics in Beijing should be easily identified as yet another desperate gambit by a former hyperpower which no longer enjoys military supremacy; no dominant MICIMATT (the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex, in the brilliant formulation by Ray McGovern); no fully controlled logistics and sea lanes; no invulnerable petrodollar; no enforced, indiscriminate fear of sanctions; and most of all, not even the fear of fear itself, replaced across the Global South by rage and utter contempt for the imperial support for the genocide in Gaza.
Just a Tawdry Greek Tragedy Remix
Once again it’s up to the inestimable Michael Hudson to succintly nail it all down:
“The official US position recognizes that it can’t be an industrial exporter anymore, though how is it going to balance the international payments to support the dollar’s exchange rate? The solution is rent-seeking. That’s why the United States says, well, what’s the main new rent-seeking opportunity in world trade? Well, it’s information technology and computer technology.
That’s why the United States is fighting China so much, and why President Biden has said again and again that China is the number one enemy. It moved first against Huawei for the 5G communications, and now it’s trying to get Europe and American and Taiwanese exporters not to export a computer chip to China, not for the Dutch to export chip-engraving machinery to China. There’s a belief that somehow the United States, if it can prevent other countries from producing high-technology intellectual property rents, then other countries will be dependent.
Rent-seeking really means dependency of other countries if they don’t have a choice to pay you much more money than the actual cost of production. That’s rent, the price over value. Well, the United States, since it can’t compete on value because of the high cost of living and labor here, it can only monopolize rent.
Well, China has not been deterred. China has leapfrogged over the United States and is producing its own etching machinery, its own computer chips. The question is, what is the rest of the world going to do? Well, the rest of the world means, on the one hand, the global majority, Eurasia, the BRICS+, and on the other hand, Western Europe. Western Europe is right in the middle of all this. Is it really going to forego the much less expensive Chinese exports at cost, including normal profit, or is it going to let itself be locked into American rent-extraction technology, not only for computer chips but for military arms?”
Graphically, this eventful week provided yet another howler: Xi officially received Lavrov when Yellin’ Yellen was still in Beijing. Chinese scholars note how Beijing’s position in a convoluted triad is admirably flexible, compared to the vicious deadlock of US-Russia relations.
No one knows how the deadlock may be broken. What is clear is that the Russia-China leadership, as well as Iran’s, know full well the dangers roaming the chessboard when the usual suspects seem to go all out gambling everything, even knowing that they are outgunned; outproduced; outnumbered; and outwitted.
It’s a tawdry Greek tragedy remix, alright, yet without the pathos and grandeur of Sophocles, featuring just a bunch of nasty, brutish specimens plunging into their unblinking, self-inflicted doom.
Tremendous weakening of the combined West in the Holy Land and the Ukraine has already led to unraveling of odious UNSC sanctions and their enforcement against North Korea, ridiculing of unilateral threats vis-a-vis Russia, and pitiful kowtowing to China in order to obtain breathing room anywhere. The Imperial Vampire Ball transitions to the Danse Macabre
Just a couple of adults in a room in Beijing..
with appreciation to Dr. Karl at karlof1’s Geopolitical Gymnasium.
Today Lavrov finished two days of intensive talks with the Russian delegation’s counterparts in Beijing, intensive because there’s so much to cover in such a short time. Further work will be done by Deputy Ministers between now and the next major meeting that will likely be a Putin/Xi Summit. What follows are two documents, a statement by Wang Yi, “the ‘Five Always’ of China-Russia Relations,” followed by Lavrov’s remarks to the press and short Q&A session:
On April 9, 2024, Wang Yi, member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Foreign Minister of the Communist Party of China, jointly met with reporters after holding talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Beijing.
Wang Yi said that this year marks the 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Russia. Over the past three-quarters of a century, China-Russia relations have gone through ups and downs, endured strength, and become increasingly mature, tenacious and deep. The two sides regard each other as priority cooperative partners, uphold the spirit of permanent good-neighborliness, friendship and comprehensive strategic coordination, elevate bilateral relations to the highest level in the history of the comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination in the new era, and set an example of friendly exchanges and win-win cooperation between major countries and neighboring countries. Looking back on the past and looking forward to the future, in order to further consolidate and develop Sino-Russian relations, we must achieve “five always”:
The two sides should always follow the strategic guidance of the diplomacy of the heads of state. President Xi Jinping and President Putin have grasped and mapped China-Russia relations from the depth of history and the height of the times, and have continuously injected new impetus into the comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination in the new era. This year, the two heads of state will continue to maintain close exchanges through various means, and the two sides will follow the consensus reached by the two heads of state as the fundamental principle to promote the steady and long-term development of bilateral relations.
The two sides should always adhere to the principle of “non-alignment, non-confrontation and non-targeting of any third party”. China and Russia have gone through ups and downs, and the two sides have summed up historical lessons and found a correct path to promote the healthy and stable development of bilateral relations. Today’s good relations between China and Russia are not easy to come by, and they deserve to be cherished and meticulously safeguarded by both sides.
The two sides must always stick to the right path in the face of major issues of right and wrong. As permanent members of the UN Security Council and major emerging powers, China and Russia should take a clear-cut stand on the side of historical progress and fairness and justice, actively respond to the universal aspirations and legitimate concerns of the people of all countries, advocate that all countries follow a new path of state-to-state exchanges based on dialogue, non-confrontation and partnership, oppose all acts of hegemony and bullying, oppose the Cold War mentality and inciting division and confrontation, and actively promote the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.
The two sides should always pursue win-win results in cooperation. China and Russia will more actively seek the convergence of the interests of the two countries, give full play to their respective advantages, carry out mutually beneficial cooperation, and achieve mutual achievements. China and Russia will continue to focus on the well-being of the two peoples, advocate inclusive economic globalization, jointly oppose unilateralism and protectionism, oppose “building walls and barriers” and “decoupling and breaking chains”, work together to maintain the stability of international industrial and supply chains, and cultivate new drivers for global development and progress.
The two sides should always promote a multipolar world in an equal and orderly manner. Both China and Russia believe that the current world is undergoing great changes and the “Global South” is gaining momentum, and that it is necessary to uphold the equality of all countries, big or small, oppose hegemonism and power politics, oppose the monopoly of international affairs by a few countries, and earnestly promote the democratization of international relations. Both China and Russia support the central position of the United Nations in the global governance system, and the two sides will further strengthen international cooperation. Russia will assume the chairmanship of the BRICS this year, and China will take over the rotating chairmanship of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) this year. The two sides will support each other’s presidency and light up the “South moment” of global governance.
We should all hope that the progress to the “South moment of global governance” isn’t derailed by the Zionist megalomaniacs and their sponsors who through their sponsorship have revealed what they really are and their true values. Now for Lavrov’s statement:
Ladies and gentlemen,
First of all, I would like to once again express my gratitude to my colleague and friend, Foreign Minister Wang Yi of the People’s Republic of China, for the invitation and warm welcome to our delegation.
Yesterday and today, we held detailed and specific talks on a wide range of issues of mutual interest. As Minister Wang Yi has just noted, we paid special attention to the schedule of contacts at the highest level, since the diplomacy of the leaders, without exaggeration, is the central element of the Russian-Chinese comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation. It is thanks to the diplomacy of the leaders (first of all) that bilateral relations have reached an unprecedentedly high level and continue to develop dynamically in a very difficult situation in the world.
As I have already said, the focus was on the schedule of contacts at the highest level, the upcoming meetings of our leaders on the sidelines of various international events, including the BRICS summit in Kazan in October of this year and the SCO summit in Astana in June of this year.
We talked about contacts between the Foreign Ministry. In your presence, we have just signed another plan for inter-ministerial consultations for 2024 and briefly touched upon certain issues of intergovernmental cooperation in practical areas. This set of tasks will be considered in more detail during the upcoming five intergovernmental commissions headed by deputy prime ministers this year in preparation for the next regular meeting of the heads of government.
The issues that we are addressing in the economy, trade, investment, and the introduction of new technologies are directly related to the struggle to establish a just multipolar world order, where there is no place for dictates, hegemony, neocolonial and colonial practices, which are now being used with might and main, by the United States and the rest of the “collective West,” which has unquestioningly submitted to the will of Washington.
China and Russia will continue to advocate the need to rectify this situation in international economic relations, advocate the democratization of these relations and a return to the principles that were once proclaimed and consist in the need to respect market processes, fair competition, the inviolability of property, the presumption of innocence and many other things, which the West is now grossly undermining with its practical steps in imposing illegal sanctions against a number of countries, including Russia. But the same policy is beginning to be actively applied to the People’s Republic of China. In particular, in the desire to limit its opportunities for economic and technological development, or, to put it simply, for the sake of eliminating competitors.
We reviewed the upcoming Russia-China Cross Years of Culture. Their opening is expected in the very near future. We also talked about other areas of humanitarian cooperation, including the preparation of new events, such as the Intervision International Song Contest, the Open Eurasian Film Award and a number of sporting events. Following the Games of the Future held in Kazan in February-March of this year, where Chinese athletes took an active part (a Chinese delegation was sent), the BRICS Sports Games, the Children of Asia Games, and the World Friendship Games will be held. There are many sporting events that, unlike some others, will be based on the very ideals of Olympism that are enshrined in the Olympic Charter and which the current leadership of the International Olympic Committee, to its shame (I hope), despises and tramples on in favor of the same hegemons who are trying to preserve this role of hegemons by hook or by crook.
As dear Minister Wang Yi mentioned, we talked about the upcoming 75th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between our countries. Let me remind you that the Soviet Union was the first to recognise the People’s Republic of China literally the day after its formation and actively cooperated in resolving the issue of restoring the Chinese state. We have agreed to prepare a series of events for this anniversary. We also discussed possible events for the upcoming 80th anniversary of Victory over German Nazism and Japanese militarism next year. The peoples of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China made a decisive contribution to the defeat of Germany and militarist Japan.
For obvious reasons, we devoted a lot of time to coordinating our actions in the international arena. This coordination is based on a broad convergence of interests and approaches to key international issues. In the light of Russia’s BRICS chairmanship, we focused on the prospects for the further development of this association, taking into account the inclusion of new members, the formation of a new category of partner countries and, in general, the prospects for the summit in Kazan, which will be held in October this year. We will consider the key issues that are being submitted for consideration by our leaders.
We talked about cooperation within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, where, following Kazakhstan, the People’s Republic of China will assume the chairmanship in June of this year. There are good prospects for harmonizing the agendas of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on the development of this vast Eurasian region, on the one hand, and the BRICS programmes, which promote the same ideals and principles at the global level. In fact, it is promoting the interests of the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America at a time when globalization, created according to the model of the West, is degrading and completely discrediting itself.
Of course, we discussed our cooperation at other venues, including the UN, the G20 and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation. Everywhere we have established close, useful and productive ties.
We talked about the current state of affairs around the Ukrainian crisis. We are grateful to our Chinese friends for their objective and balanced position and for their readiness to play a positive role in the political and diplomatic settlement. The well-known “12 points” that China singled out in 2023 clearly formulate the need, firstly, to take into account the root causes of this conflict, and secondly, to seek to eliminate these causes in the efforts to resolve them, primarily in the context of ensuring equal and indivisible security, including in Europe and in the world as a whole.Our Chinese friends clearly state the need to take into account the legitimate concerns of all parties involved, primarily in the field of security. In this context, together with our Chinese colleagues, we confirmed the conclusion that any international events that not only do not take into account Russia’s position, but completely ignore it and promote the absolutely empty, ultimatum “Vladimir Zelensky’s peace formula” and thus are completely detached from any realities.
We talked a lot about the tasks of ensuring security and stability in the Asia-Pacific region against the backdrop of the US policy of creating closed military-political alliances of a narrow size there. They have an openly anti-Chinese and anti-Russian orientation and, among other things, are aimed at breaking the security architecture that has been developing around ASEAN for many decades within the framework of the very formats that this association has proposed to its partners, and which are based on inclusiveness, consensus, mutual respect and the rejection of unilateral actions. All this does not suit the United States and its allies. As I have already said, they are promoting bloc approaches here and declaring the need to introduce the North Atlantic Alliance into this region.
With regard to the situation around Taiwan, which is an inalienable part of China, we are united with Beijing in rejecting any outside interference, since this is an internal affair of the People’s Republic of China. We talked about the situation on the Korean Peninsula. We are interested in peace and stability in this region, as are our Chinese friends.
We discussed in detail the Middle East settlement and what is happening around the Gaza Strip. We also have common positions here, which we defend in the UN Security Council.
In a broader context, we exchanged views on the prospect of forming a new security structure in Eurasia against the backdrop of complete stagnation and self-destruction of Euro-Atlantic mechanisms.
The talks were held in the traditional atmosphere of friendship in Russian-Chinese relations and once again demonstrated the commonality of our countries’ views on the main global processes and our desire to strengthen bilateral ties in the interests of peace and stability in the region and on the planet as a whole. We will continue the dialogue on the basis of the plans that we have just approved in your presence. Once again, I would like to express my gratitude to our Chinese friends.
Question: The “collective West” uses aggressive methods of “dual deterrence” against Russia and China in order to prevent their development and prevent the implementation of sovereign policy. Are you and your Chinese partners considering “double counteraction” retaliatory measures? What are these steps?
Sergey Lavrov: I won’t tell you a big secret – yesterday Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi came up with the formula “double counteraction against dual deterrence.” Our leaders, President of Russia Vladimir Putin and President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, have repeatedly emphasised the determination of Russia and China to resist attempts to slow down the formation of a multipolar world and the long-overdue processes of democratisation and justice that are knocking on the door of the modern world order. The United States and its allies, in an effort to perpetuate their unjust position in the international system, are trying to stop us and the Global South. We remember how our leaders formulated the task of standing “back to back” and “shoulder to shoulder” in the path of attempts to slow down the objective course of history.
My colleague spoke at length about the specific economic problems created by the illegal policy of unilateral sanctions. We will resolve them within the framework of BRICS and the SCO. At a time when the United States and its satellites can at any time bring down stable financing chains, logistics, transport and investment chains, it is time to address the issue of ensuring that all these tasks can be considered and resolved within other structures – the transition to national currencies, talks about the need to create alternative payment platforms, including the decisions taken in this regard within the framework of BRICS. the activities of regional organizations, such as the SCO and CELAC, mentioned today.
The West has proved that the system of functioning of global financial and economic relations that it has created and offered to the rest of the world is unreliable. Because at any moment, while leading and holding the levers of this system in his hands, he can begin to “punish” anyone who disagrees with his neocolonial policy.
These processes are taking place in almost all spheres of public life. This applies to both the economy and security issues. We have a common goal of strengthening security in Eurasia. For a long time, there was a Euro-Atlantic security structure in the form of NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. They are removing themselves from the list of relevant structures within which it is possible to conduct meaningful negotiations and agree on something on the basis of a balance of interests.
The task of forming Eurasian security suggests itself. President Vladimir Putin mentioned this in his address to the Federal Assembly. We have agreed with our Chinese friends to start a dialogue on this issue with the involvement of other like-minded people.
Question: I would like to focus on Ukraine’s drone strikes on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. The situation clearly calls for decisive action. What could be the answer?
Sergey Lavrov: As for another terrorist attack by the Ukrainian regime, this time on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Statements were made by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, our representative to the IAEA, and our representative to the UN Security Council. We are bringing this issue to special meetings of the IAEA Executive Board and the UN Security Council. We will insist on the need to get a direct assessment of the actions of the Ukrainian regime without any prevarications.
When we agreed to the permanent presence of IAEA experts at the ZNPP, we were guided, among other things, by the need to give an objective assessment of what is happening there, how the plant is managed, and how nuclear and security is ensured. We proceeded from the assumption that such attacks against the largest nuclear power plant in Europe would be recorded. Until now, provocations on the part of the Ukrainian regime, to our great regret, have only caused “regret” and “concern” in the statements of IAEA Director General Robert Grossi and his staff, without stating the obvious – where and by whom the terrorist strikes were prepared and carried out. I think that this time it will not be possible to evade responsibility.
We are interested in cooperation with the IAEA and the UN Secretariat, but we will seek from them an honest recognition of what is happening not only around the ZNPP, but also around Ukraine as a whole.
Until now, international officials’ assessments of all aspects of what is happening around this country and within the framework of the special military operation in response to the hybrid war unleashed against us by the West at the hands of Ukrainians have been, to put it mildly, one-sided. This position needs to be corrected. Regrettably, it reflects the situation when the secretariats of many intergovernmental and interstate organizations are becoming subordinate to the West and oversaturated with employees of Western countries to the detriment of the equitable geographical representation of the world’s majority countries. This issue was raised last year. We will actively promote the reform of this system. [My Emphasis]
What we’re seeing in too many areas is the increasing “privatization” [Lavrov’s term] of the UN that continues despite major Global South resistance. Do note Lavrov’s language use: “My colleague spoke at length about the specific economic problems created by the illegal policy of unilateral sanctions. We will resolve them within the framework of BRICS and the SCO.” That informs us about the current focus of work being done at those two organizations. The other key initiative is Global Security and how the members of such a structure are to be treated equally regardless of size, while no one nation of group of nations will act as hegemons. As I’ve written before, to make such a structure reality means two Blocs will be formed as it cannot be avoided due to the clear resistance shown by the Outlaw US Empire, its vassals, and their hegemonic structures—NATO, etc. This would appear to go against the need to move beyond the “Cold War Mentality,” of Bloc confrontation, but reality dictates its inevitability. IMO, over time realistic geoeconomic forces will cause the NATO/EU hegemonic structures to fracture and eventually dissolve. Yes, that will take time, and I see no way of its avoidance. IMO, the Global Majority’s peoples have learned to be patient as through their trials and struggles to defeat colonialism, which isn’t quite finished although the term Neocolonialism’s now being used; the reality is it’s that same old deal using somewhat newer tools.
As I alluded to above, the great danger currently comes from the megalomaniac Zionist peoples in West Asia as they’re clearly out-of-control. Somehow that conflict must be solved and the megalomaniac peoples neutralized so they no longer pose a threat to Humanity. I wish Lavrov or Yi had elaborated more on their discussions of that crisis, but all we’re told is they share the same position, although that position must have changed with the further gross violation of international law by the Genocidalists.
≈≈≈
The adults in the room.
Will engage together on Eurasian security.
Will go for “dual opposition” to the West’s “dual deterrence”.
Will be countering attempts to “slow down the natural course of history”.
Putin and Xi will hold at least two bilaterals in 2024.
At the SCO summit in June and the BRICS summit in October.
The dogs of Forever Wars bark while the Eurasian caravan marches on.
Impossible not to see the writing on the wall – not to mention the painting…
Together against the Hegemonic Hydra
The World System
To Victory!
Qui bono?
By Peter Koenig
3 April 2024
The collapse, at about 1 AM on 26 March 2024, of the Francis Scott Key Bridge (FSB) in Baltimore, spanning the 2.4 km large Patapsco River, is a mystery as of this day. The river is used by massive cargo ships from Baltimore Harbor to reach the Chesapeake Bay and then the Atlantic Ocean and in reverse.
The story goes that the downfall of the bridge was caused by the container ship “The Dali” hitting one of the bridges two main pilons – in the deep of night, 1 AM, when few witnesses were around.
And one may question, who made the endlessly shown same video of the collapse?
The Merchant Vessel (MV) “The Dali”, Singapore-registered, was apparently headed for Sri Lanka, coming from the Baltimore harbor, the 14th largest in the US, but the nation’s largest and most important port for specialized cargo and passenger facilities. See this.
The Dali is about 300 meters long, can carry 10,000 standard-size containers (6 m long) and weighs empty 95,000 tons. The ship was carrying about 4,700 containers with an average weight of 2.5 tons / container, total cargo weight approximately 12,000 tons. The sluggishly slow speed of The Dali, about 14 km/h, with its total weight of roughly 110,000 tons supposedly rammed one of the main pillars of the FSB, and brought the entire bridge down within seconds. The entire structure collapsed as if it was made of matchsticks.
The Dali is owned by Singapore-based Grace Ocean Private Ltd. It is managed by Synergy Marine Pte Ltd., also based in Singapore. The MV Dali was built in South Korea by Hyundai Heavy Industries, and completed in 2015, for Oceanbulk Container Management of Greece.
As of March 2024, the vessel is chartered by Maersk (Danish). The captain of The Dali, when it hit the bridge was supposedly Ukrainian.
Protocol demands that a Chesapeake Bay pilot is on board to guide large vessels in and out of the harbor. Was this the case with MV Dali?
Strangely, The Dali ship’s black box has 2-minutes of missing data right before it crashed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge. How convenient.
And there it is…
The Dali ship’s black box has 2 minutes of missing data right before it crashed into the Francis Scott Key bridge
How convenient pic.twitter.com/x75WUJecek
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) March 28, 2024
Synergy Marine Group is said to have strong business links to China, though no further explanations are given, other than apparently a growing number of Synergy Marine Group’s managed vessels are owned by China, and secondarily, because a large portion of Dali’s cargo from-and-to is between China and the United States.
There is no clear evidence on either. The destination of The Dali, leaving Baltimore harbor at mid-night was supposedly Sri Lanka.
See this. Joe Hoft, author of this article, also claims that China specializes in “Remote System Monitoring”, meaning in straight language “cyber-attacks”. But again, no justification for this accusation is given.
The complexity of flag-registration, ownership, management, construction, destination after construction, ship-chartering, is so confusing and complex that most readers will roll their eyes and stop thinking.
The first reaction by General Mike Flynn was that “the accident” was a Black Swan event, similar to 9/11 – with financial and political implications way beyond what meets the eye.
“Black Swan” means an extremely negative event that suddenly appears from nowhere, unpredicted, and unstoppable. The term is most often used in the world of finance. See this interview by “Redacted”.
Currently an almost uncountable number of rumors, “conspiracy theories”, accusations, innuendos, are making the round. None are fully substantiated.
“China Did It”
One that could immediately be expected is, China Did It. That stems from another pretense without proof, that it was a cyber-attack, and China apparently is specialized in cyber-science, leading to “cyber-attacks”; pure western hypothesis and unproven accusation.
Geopolitical analyst, Lara Logan from “Real America’s Voice”, refers to inside information (no source given, though) to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) being behind this attack. When asked whether it was a terrorist group or a state actor, she said clearly, “100% a state actor” – and meant China. But nothing is substantiated.
Lara Logan on the bridge collapse:
"This is what you call death by a thousand cuts. It's an absolutely catastrophic impact on critical infrastructure and you cannot see it because a cyberattack is unseen, just like the attack on 2020 on the voting machines that you cannot see." pic.twitter.com/NCiLKR1ppJ
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) March 27, 2024
China is a logical target for western blames. It is either – Russia, Russia, Russia! – or – China, China, China! – Most often there is no proof, just western propaganda-indoctrinated hatred. As so often, Tavistock at its best.
BOMBSHELL REPORT:
DEVELOPING..pic.twitter.com/Ug2tEcTYUi
— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) March 31, 2024
Tavistock is a UK-based agency known for its science of social engineering and mind manipulation, perfected during the last about eight decades. Tavistock is closely linked to the Pentagon thinktank, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Tavistock is responsible for many, if not most of the lies with which western societies have been brainwashed over the past decades, to believe the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) and the UN Agenda 2030 deception theories for world dominance, by a One World Order or a One World Government, is a good thing; that the elite’s silly-sounding, non-explicit slogan, of “build back better”, is good for society. It never says, what needs to be built back better, first must be destroyed, clearly expressed by the Club of Rome’s “First Global Revolution” (1991).
——-
Most westerners do not know, that an aggressive act like the downing of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, is not China’s way. Historically and philosophically, China does not know aggression western style. China is reserved, discrete, diplomatic, mediating, and does not mingle in other countries’ business and politics. China can de facto and de jure be excluded from the list of potential suspects.
Operation Bridge Takedown
More plausible versions are to be looked for “US-internally”, as in “false flag”. If it was indeed a cyber-attack that knocked out the ships navigation system and replaced it with remote cyber-guidance, one would have to ask, who has control of cybersecurity in the port?
CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency) oversees cyber security. According to Whitney Webb, CISA is controlled by Israel’s Mossad with CIA and MI6. Just like 9/11, the Deep State intelligence cartel.
See also this transcript of a podcast of Whitney Webb and Clayton Morris on Redacted, discussing Cyberreason, an outfit with close ties to Israeli Intelligence and its role in CISA activities.
CISA was created in November 2018 by then President Trump. The law was enhanced by President Biden’s Executive Order (EO) 14028, “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity” in May 2021.
Cybereason is an Israeli / Zionist agency – renown for doing “election simulations”, but being closely linked to CISA.
CISA works under the Coast Guard and CG is under the military’s oversight – so CISA (Israel) and the US military are working together. CISA is the “Deep State”, the Cabal’s cyber agency, embedded everywhere.
Journalist Whitney Webb is also referring to a Klaus Schwab (WEF) quote of a few years ago, when he talked about a coming “cyber pandemic”; and also, to the 2023 Obama produced movie “Leave this World Behind” – “predictive planning”, exactly what a diabolical Cult needs to do for its success.
See trailer (2-min clip) of “Leave this World Behind” –
and this, ending scene of “Leave this World Behind” (3-min clip)
Here is yet another theory. The taking down of the FSB is another 9/11. This interview with Ann Vandersteel, from Peak Prosperity, is pretty revealing.
She says it is not the Russians or the Chinese. The southern border crisis and destruction of borders globally is part of the One World Government agenda. It is not a war on the US specifically; she says the US is just “in the way”.
They discuss “The Declaration of North America,” signed by Biden, Trudeau (Canada) and Obrador (Mexico) in Jan. 2023, basically a revival of the Amero idea, no borders between Canada, the US and Mexico.
The collapsed bridge and the ensuing consequences is a needed disruption in American life – a borderless world, beginning with a borderless North America. It would be yet another step towards a One World Order (OWO).
All of this leads to believe the “accident” with the container cargo vessel “The Dali” ramming into one of the key pilons of the Francis Scott Key Bridge Baltimore, was not really an accident, but an event of auto-destruction, comparable to 9/11 – with economic and political implications way beyond US borders.
Now comes the bombshell
The State of the Nation says, “hard evidence is now pouring in which conclusively proves that the staged Baltimore Bridge collapse after the cargo ship hit was a deliberate sabotage carried out by all the usual suspects.”
The video shows explosives going off all over the bridge exactly at the time when The Dali hit one of bridge’s the pillars.
If this video proofs true – if ever any evidence of truth emerges – an auto-coup, self-destruction to build back better – the effects are going to be indeed similar to 9/11 – with implications worldwide.
Just look at the physical similarity. Airplanes hit the World Trade Towers. A cargo vessel hits a key pilon of an important bridge. Transportation and Trade in both cases.
Remarkably, Peggy Hall of TheHealthyAmerican, points to the strangeness of the FSK Bridge collapse. Her video, the one forever repeated video, of the sluggish moving MV Dali in direction of the bridge, what looks to be a sharp turn towards the pilon, shows that the moving 110,000 ton vessel leaves no ripples in the water, no splashing from the bow of the ship, the vessel looks like gliding over a mirror, and the splashes when Dali hits the pilon are relatively minor, as well as the immediate collapse of the entire bridge – like built on matchsticks – all very unusual.
She says the video appears like a very poorly made video game. See this 8-minute video-clip with Peggy Hall commenting. At the end she promises continuing her investigation and publish the research.
Maybe her next video will also show the explosives going off all over the bridge – reminiscent of the explosives going off under the structures and in the lower walls of the World Trade Center towers, when the supposed airplanes hit the buildings.
Supply Chain Failures
This attack on the FSK Bridge is also an attack on the Baltimore harbor, meaning an economic disaster, a supply chain disruption for the US and worldwide – food shortages, possibly famine – playing right into the Great Reset’s and the UN Agenda’s 2030 depopulation agenda.
The Baltimore port is one of the busiest on the US East Coast and the most important one for special cargos. It connects any point of the US East Coast through highway I-95 that runs all the way from Florida to Canada.
With the Baltimore port out of container service at least for several years – who knows for how long? – cargo vessels may have to be rerouted via New York, and other East Coast Sea ports, a massive cost to the US economy and a supply chain disruption affecting the world beyond the US.
In the United States, the bridge collapse may be the beginning of a series of cyber-based “false flags” – possibly leading to Biden declaring Martial Law, suspending the 2024 Presidential elections.
The globalist Deep State cabal, seeking desperately to install the New World Order, needs to sow disorder, confusion, disruption, chaos, in every sphere of western life. It must destroy to build back better, according to the wishes of a small elite that pretends to rule the new world, with a drastically reduced population. This is their goal, after implementation of their long-planned Reset which is congruent with the United Nation’s Agenda 2030.
Just to know, the UN has long ceased to be what it was created for – an institution to promote and work for Peace in the World.
As a reminder – this nefarious Dark Cult has an iron rule to follow. For their success, they must tell us in advance – in any confusing way they want – what they are planning to do. We were warned about cyber-attacks, we were warned about virus “X”, we were warned about “global climate change”, meaning in clear text, but not said, geoengineered weaponized extreme weather patterns throughout the world.
They have stuck to that rule, like an iron fist hitting for the future. So far, we just have not cared taking it seriously.
We the People, MUST resist this planned diabolical takeover.
—-
Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
It’s about hiding planned years-long Genocide in Gaza. The current war against Tik-Tok has nothing to do with the US or Americans. It is the Jews who want Tik-Tok either dead or under their control.
By Larry Romanoff at Blue Moon of Shanghai.
I will explain, but first let me back up a step.In 2023, there was a first war launched against Tik-Tok, and that war was American. The reason was simple:China was eating America’s lunch, and the Americans were infuriated. The French news site Le Monde published an interesting article titled, How Chinese apps have conquered the planet, [1] noting that “three of the four most downloaded apps on Android phones in the US are Chinese”, with Tik-Tok having more than 170 million Americans logged onto it. That is more than 50% of all Americans, and of course this made the Americans crazy.
It’s bad enough that China’s EV cars are flooding the world while the Americans can’t seem to build one, that China has engineered and repeatedly tested hypersonic missiles while the American hapless versions keep exploding.It’s bad enough that Huawei can suddenly make its own high-powered chips without copying American technology, that China has mastered the basics of quantum computing while the Americans fail, that China leads the world in solar energy, that DJI has taken over the world for small drones, and so many other cutting-edge technologies, but now all of America is running to a cute Chinese video app.
This was the last straw. The American government was livid. No “fourth-rate country” like China could be permitted to challenge the Americans who are #1 in the Universe for everything, so something had to be done. The result was the first Tik-Tok war, and the push to make ByteDance sell it to an American. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post told us, “America’s foremost adversary has no business controlling a dominant media platform in the United States”. [2] That attempt failed and, although supported by a lot of media hype, eventually the matter was dropped because forcing a sale of a foreign company for no reason, was legally complicated.
But then we had the war between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine, and everything changed. The reason is that the Jews were committing the most horrid and inhuman crimes against the Palestinian people and they didn’t want the world to know. You will have read much of this in your local media, but there is much more that hasn’t reached it.
For one thing, the Jews bombed all the hospitals in Palestine to rubble, and prohibited any medical supplies or staff from reaching the wounded. During the Vietnam war, Jews at the RAND Corporation advised the US military that American soldiers should not shoot to kill, but should shoot Vietnamese in the abdomen or the bowels so as to strain the enemy’s medical resources. This does the greatest damage to an enemy; dead bodies are relatively easy to dispose of, but millions of severely wounded will place such a strain on the nation that society itself will collapse. The Jews (or their US puppet-military) did the same in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and other nations, and they are following the same pattern for Gaza.
Sidebar —
Middle East Eye: “Former Israel general says ‘severe epidemics’ in Gaza would help Israel win the war”
WSWS: ““Slow death”: Israel weaponizes disease in the Gaza genocide“
One result was that hundreds of small children who had been severely injured and required amputation of one or more of their limbs,had to undergo those amputations without anesthetic because the Jews destroyed all the medical supplies and wouldn’t permit any to be delivered. Dr Rik Peeperkorn, the WHO representative for the occupied Palestinian territory, said, “I’ve never seen so many amputees in my life, including among children.” [3] [4] [5] [6]. There is much more, even more horrid, that is well-documented but that hasn’t reached your media.
To ensure that these atrocities would never reach the world’s people, the Jews began killing all the journalists, not only the Palestinians but all foreign journalists as well. The UK Guardian told us “Almost 100 journalists killed and 400 imprisoned in 2023 alone”, [7] and it’s become worse in 2024. And of course, Jews own or control virtually all of the Western mass media, and also in much else of the world, and they also control Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and others, so there was an effective “news embargo” on what was really happening in Palestine and especially in Gaza.
But then along came Tik-Tok. And not only journalists but Palestinian and other foreign citizens were able to film many of the Jews’ atrocities and post them for the entire world to see. Tik-Tok hasbypassed the Jewish-owned mass media and brought much of this immense tragedy to the attention of the whole world, and that is the reason for the new intense war against Tik-Tok.
Palestinian and foreign reporters posted photos and videos of the atrocities committed by the Jews in Gaza, and people from all around the world picked them up and re-posted them on Tik-Tok. So, there was no way to hide what was happening.
The Wall Street Journal began this with an article titled, How TikTok Brings War Home to Your Child. [8] The Jewish Forward was there with, Young Americans are turning against Israel — and you can thank TikTok. New analyses show that pro-Palestinian content dwarfs all others on the app, and China is likely making it worse. [9] The Jewish Chronicle told us, How TikTok is turning young minds against Israel and the West. Older people have little conception of the influence of the platform – and through it the toxic Chinese Communist Party – on a younger generation. [10] The Jewish Forward asked, How fast does TikTok send users down the antisemitic rabbit hole? A new report out today from the National Contagion Research Institute, which studies the spread of online hate, reveals substantial evidence that content on TikTok is “promoted or muted” depending on “whether it is aligned or opposed to the interests of the Chinese government.” [11]
House set to vote on bill that could trigger TikTok ban, with support from major Jewish group.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency published an article saying “(US) House set to vote on bill that could trigger TikTok ban, with support from major Jewish group.” [12] The Times of Israel tells us, “Major US Jewish group backs bipartisan bill that could see TikTok banned.” The Jewish Federations of North America says it supports the proposed law due to concerns of antisemitism proliferating on the platform. [13] And it isn’t that Jewish groups in the US are “supporting” the ban against Tik-Tok; they are leading the charge. A Florida Congresswoman blamed the Israel lobby for the vote to ban TikTok. “This is AIPAC at work”, she said. [14] This is partly what is responsible for the recent flood of retaliatory accusations against China for “human rights violations”; it is all coming from the same source: the Jews. [15] China has been prominent among all the nations in the world in calling for a cease-fire in Palestine and the creation of a real Palestinian state – and that makes China a bitter enemy of Israel and the Jews because they will never permit such a thing to happen. All their plans for a World Government controlled by the Jews would be destroyed if Palestine becomes a state.
And where is this leading? You should already have guessed. The Jews want to force ByteDance to sell Tik-Tok to an American, but who is the “American” who is planning to buy it? Not an American, but a Jew, Steven Mnuchin. [16] He says, since he cannot tell the truth, that a platform like Tik-Tok “should belong to an American”, not to a Chinese. [17][18]
And that’s the whole story.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive can be seen at
https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
He can be contacted at:
2186604556@qq.com
*
NOTES
[1] How Chinese apps have conquered the planet
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2024/03/15/how-chinese-apps-have-conquered-the-planet_6620317_19.html
[2] TikTok told to break with China’s Communist Party or lose access to US users
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3254303/us-lawmakers-seek-force-chinas-bytedance-divest-tiktok-or-face-ban
[3] ‘Never seen so many amputees in my life’
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/1/9/israel-war-on-gaza-blinken-arrives-in-israel-as-fighting-continues?update=2606470
[4] As a Gazan doctor, I’m having to amputate children’s legs without anaesthetic
[5] “Absolutely Unimaginable”: Children in Gaza Face Amputations Without Anesthesia
https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/28/palestinian_children_gaza
[6] A kitchen table amputation without anesthetic in Gaza is one of many
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/20/gaza-healthcare-crisis-amputation-anesthesia/
[7] Almost 100 journalists killed and 400 imprisoned in 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/dec/08/journalists-killed-imprisoned-2023-ifj
[8] How TikTok Brings War Home to Your Child
https://www.wsj.com/tech/tiktok-israel-gaza-hamas-war-a5dfa0ee
[9] Young Americans are turning against Israel — and you can thank TikTok
https://forward.com/opinion/574346/freepalestine-tiktok-israel-china/
[10] How TikTok is turning young minds against Israel and the West
https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/analysis/how-tiktok-is-turning-young-minds-against-israel-and-the-west-q21dxrb3
[11] How fast does TikTok send users down the antisemitic rabbit hole?https://forward.com/culture/577326/tiktok-antisemitic-hate-speech-rabbit-hole-experiment/
[12] (US) House set to vote on bill that could trigger TikTok ban, with support from major Jewish group
[13] Major US Jewish group backs bipartisan bill that could see TikTok banned
https://www.timesofisrael.com/major-us-jewish-group-backs-bipartisan-bill-that-could-see-tiktok-banned/
[14] Florida congresswoman blames Israel lobby for Democrat vote to ban TikTok. ‘This is Aipac at work,’ wrote Keith
https://www.thejc.com/news/usa/florida-congresswoman-blames-israel-lobby-for-democrat-vote-to-ban-tiktok-lbek8s6l
[15] Commentary: Israel’s bizarre human rights accusations
http://en.people.cn/n3/2024/0125/c90000-20126634.html
[16] Steven Mnuchin Says He Is Putting Together a Group to Buy TikTok
https://www.wsj.com/tech/steven-mnuchin-says-he-is-putting-together-a-group-to-buy-tiktok-3aac4a33
[17] Ex-US treasury secretary Mnuchin says he’s putting together investors to buy TikTok
https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-us-treasury-secretary-mnuchin-says-hes-putting-together-investors-to-buy-tiktok/
[18] As TikTok faces possible U.S. ban, former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin looks to buy the company
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/steve-mnuchin-looks-to-buy-tiktok
By Neenah Payne Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, is proposing The Great Reset to replace shareholder capitalism with “stakeholder capitalism” – a...
By Michael Snyder The U.S. cannot afford a war with China. The size of our military has been shrinking, and our resources are stretched way...
“… and all linked to zionists…”
Richard connects a terrible dot on the back of my mind! Yemen didn’t merely extend the Gauntlet to the Indian Ocean for the zionists, but to the same western parties they currently fight in the Red Sea. They closed the South Africa route to USUK and those of the combined West that partake of the aggression against Palestine and/or themselves in the Red Sea or hinder the Gauntlet in the Red Sea! They emphasized this on day one by droning or missiling two US ships in the Indian Ocean………..
Let’s see if they can carry it off. Assuming they will be as resourceful as only motivated Yemenis can be.. and that several civilizational-states work to ensure they get accurate targeting and manifests of cargo ships to be targetted, what would be the consequences for severing the India/China sea trade to Europe and to the eastern US seaboard?? The US has the Pacific coast option, but Europe.. would be reduced to railroads, mostly through.. Russia as they helped torch West Asia, the Ukraine, and currently stoke Transcaucasia. This is unliveable
US Troops as close as 2.5 miles from China Mainland and key city Xiamen.
By Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com
Taiwan Confirms Presence Of US Green Berets On Islands Very Close To China’s Coast
Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng confirmed on Thursday the presence of US Army Special Forces soldiers in Kinmen, a group of islands that are controlled by Taiwan but located just off the coast of mainland China.
Some parts of the Kinmen islands are just 2.5 miles away from the mainland Chinese city of Xiamen. The presence of US troops on the islands was first reported by Taiwanese media last month.
Chiu confirmed the highly provocative deployment when asked about a new report from the US outlet SOFREP that said US Green Berets have taken up “permanent positions” as military advisors in Kinmen. The US soldiers are also deployed in Penghu, a Taiwanese-controlled archipelago about 30 miles west of the main island of Taiwan and 70 miles east of mainland China.
The SOFREP report said the US Green Berets were stationed at the Taiwanese Army’s amphibious command centers. The deployment was carried out under provisions in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act, which called for the US to create a comprehensive training program for the Taiwanese military.
The new collaboration includes the US troops training Taiwanese forces on the Black Hornet Nano, a compact military drone. Chiu said the presence of the US Green Berets was a “learning opportunity” for Taiwan’s military.
The US has significantly increased its military and diplomatic support for Taiwan in recent years, ratcheting up tensions with China. Last year, the US deployed around 200 troops to Taiwan, marking the largest known US military presence on the island since the US pulled its troops out after Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979.
The US also recently began providing Taiwan with unprecedented military aid. Since 1979, the US has always sold weapons to Taiwan but never financed the purchases or provided arms free of charge until last year.
Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by Beijing-based scholar Mick Dunford to discuss what is actually happening in China’s economy, explaining its technological development and transition toward a new industrial revolution.
Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson at The Geopolitical Economy Hour.
Video:
Podcast:
Transcript:
RADHIKA DESAI: Hello and welcome to the 24th Geopolitical Economy Hour, the show that examines the fast-changing political and geopolitical economy of our time. I’m Radhika Desai.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I’m Michael Hudson.
RADHIKA DESAI: And working behind the scenes to bring you our show every fortnight are our host, Ben Norton; our videographer, Paul Graham; and our transcriber, Zach Weiser.
And with us today we have, once again, Professor Mick Dunford, professor emeritus of geography at Sussex University and now working at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, keeping a close watch, among other things, on China’s economy. So welcome, Mick.
MICK DUNFORD: Thank you very much.
RADHIKA DESAI: So, China’s economy is what we’re going to talk about today. Where is it at after decades of breakneck growth, after executing the greatest industrial revolution ever? Where is it headed?
Trying to understand this is not easy. The disinformation that is fake news and even what I often call fake scholarship that distorts the view that any honest person may be trying to take on China’s economy is simply overwhelming. It’s absolutely wall-to-wall propaganda, no matter which Western publication or website you open.
If we are to believe the Western press and the leading scholarly lights of the West, who are the major generators of the Western discourse on China, we are at peak China. That is to say, they claim that China has reached a point, reached the highest point, that is, that it ever can. And from here on, it’s only going to be downhill, more or less rapidly.
They say that China has, in recent years, inflated a huge property bubble to compensate for the West’s inability to keep up imports. And this bubble is about to burst. And when it does, it will subject China to a 1980s and 1990s Japan-style long-term deflation or secular stagnation. They have even invented a word to talk about this: “Japanification”. We are told that the Japanification of China’s economy is impending.
They say that the U.S.’s trade and technology wars are hitting China where it hurts the most, at its export and its reliance on inward foreign investment. They are saying that China has grown only by stealing technology. And now that the U.S. is making it harder for it to do so, its technological development can only stall. They are saying that China followed disastrous COVID-19 policies, leading to mass death, draconian lockdowns, and economic disaster.
They are saying that China over-invests, and its growth will not pick up unless China now permits higher consumption levels. They are saying that China has a serious unemployment crisis, that the CPC, the Communist Party of China, is losing legitimacy, because it is failing to deliver ever-higher living standards. And they are saying that Xi Jinping’s authoritarian leadership is ensuring that the private sector will stall, and with it, so will China’s growth.
All this, they say, before even beginning to talk about China’s foreign policy. And there, of course, lie another long litany of alleged disasters and misdemeanors that China is responsible for, beginning with debt-trap diplomacy and China’s allegedly voracious appetite for the world’s resources.
The only reason why Western experts ever stress the strength of China’s economy is when they want to argue that the West must redouble its efforts to contain China and to stall its rise.
So today, we’re going to take a closer look at China’s economy, and in doing so, we’re going to bust a lot of these myths. We’re going to show you that, sadly, for the purveyors of the fake news and fake scholarship about China, no amount of their huffing and puffing has been able to blow down China’s house, because, like the good, the smart little pig, China is actually building its house with bricks.
So, we have a number of topics to discuss in this show. Here they are:
1. Characterising China’s Economy: Capitalist? Socialist?
2. Growth Story
3. Covid Response
4. The Alleged Debt and Property Bubble? And Japanification?
5. Restricted Consumption? Stagnant living standards?
6. Exports in the China Story
7. China’s new growth strategy
8. China’s foreign policy
So, these are the topics that we hope to discuss. We want to begin by talking about how to characterize China’s economy. Is it capitalist? Is it socialist? Then we will do the most important and primary basic thing, we will look at the growth story with some statistics. We will then look at China’s Covid response. We will look at the alleged debt and property bubble and whether China is being Japanified.
Then we will look at the issue of whether China is overinvesting and neglecting consumption and living standards, etc. How reliant is China on exports? What is China’s growth strategy? And what is China’s foreign policy? And are those myths about it true? So, this is what we hope to discuss.
So, Mick, why don’t you start us off with your thoughts on exactly how to characterize China’s economy?
MICK DUNFORD: Ok, the way I would characterize China is as a planned rational state. I mean, right the way through, it has maintained a system of national five-year planning, and it also produces longer-term plans. But it’s a planned rational state that uses market instruments.
China has a very large state sector. And of course, some people have claimed that this state sector is, in a sense, an impediment to growth. And we’ve seen a resurrection of this idea, guo jin min tui (国进民退), which is used to refer to the idea that the state sector is advancing and the private sector is retreating.
It’s a very, very strange concept, in fact, because the third word is min (民), and min refers to people. So, what they are actually, in a sense, saying – these ideas were invented by neoliberal economists in 2002 – the private sector is equated with the people, which I find absolutely astonishing. But, I mean, the country does have a very significant public sector.
What I find striking is that one can actually turn it around and say, what is it that these Western economists seem to think China should do? And they seem to think that China should privatize all assets into the hands of domestic and foreign capitalists. It should remove capital controls. It should open the door to foreign finance capital. It should transfer governance to liberal capitalist political parties that are actually controlled by capital.
I think one of the most fundamental features of the China system is actually that it’s the state that controls capital, rather than capital that controls the state. And it’s, in fact, this aspect of the Chinese model, and in particular, the rule of the Communist Party of China that has basically transformed China from what was, effectively one of the poorest countries in the world into one of its largest industrial powers.
So, in a way, it’s a planned rational state in which the CPC has played an absolutely fundamental role. And without it, I mean, China would never have established the national sovereignty that permitted it to choose a path that suited its conditions and to radically transform the lives and livelihoods of its people.
RADHIKA DESAI: Michael, do you want to [speak]?
MICHAEL HUDSON: The question is, what is the state? There are two aspects of the state with China. One is public infrastructure. And the purpose of China’s public infrastructure is to lower the cost of doing business because infrastructure is a monopoly.
That’s what really upsets the American investors. They wanted to buy the phone system, the transportation system, so that they could benefit from charging monopoly rents, just like under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
The most important sector that China’s treated in the public is money creation and banks. Americans hope that American banks would come over and they would be making all the loans in China and benefiting from China’s growth and turning it into interest. And instead, the government’s doing that. And the government is deciding what to lend to.
And there’s a third aspect of what people think of when they say state. That’s a centralized economy, centralized planning, Soviet style.
China is one of the least centralized economies in the world because the central government has left the localities to go their own way. That’s part of the Hundred Flowers Bloom. Let’s see how each locality is going to maneuver on a pragmatic, ad hoc basis.
Well, the pragmatic ad hoc basis meant how are localities, villages, and small towns going to finance their budgets? Well, they financed it by real estate sales, and that’s going to be what we’re discussing later.
But once you realize that the state sector is so different from what a state sector is in America, centralized planning and the control of Wall Street for financial purposes, finance capitalism, hyper-centralized planning, you realize that China is the antithesis of what the usual view is.
RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. And I’d just like to add a few points, which dovetail very nicely with what both of you have said.
The fact of the matter is that this was also true of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries when they were still ruled by communist parties. We generally refer to them as socialist or communist, but in reality, they themselves never claimed to be socialist or communist. They only said they were building socialism, especially in a country that was as poor as China was in 1949.
The leadership of the Communist Party of China has always understood that there has to be a long period of transition in which there will be a complex set of compromises that will have to be made in order to steer the economy in the direction of socialism, in order to build socialism.
So, from its beginnings, the revolutionary state in China was a multi-class state and a multi-party state. People don’t realize very often that while the Communist Party of China is the overwhelmingly most powerful party in China, there are other parties that exist as well, which reflect the originally multi-class character of China.
Now, it’s true that since 1978, the government has loosened much of its control over the economy. But the important thing here is that the Communist Party retains control of the Chinese state.
The way I like to put it is, yes, there are lots of capitalists in China. Yes, those capitalists are very powerful. They are at the head of some of the biggest corporations in the world, and they are quite influential within the Communist Party. But what makes China meaningfully socialist or meaningfully treading the path to socialism, let’s put it that way, is the fact that ultimately the reins of power are held in the hands of the Communist Party of China leadership, which owes its legitimacy to the people of China.
So, the reigns of power, the reigns of state power are not held by the capitalists; they are held by the Communist Party leadership.
So, in that sense, I would say that China is meaningfully socialist. Although, as Mick pointed out, there is a fairly large private sector in China, but so too is the state sector very large. And the extent of state ownership means that even though the private sector is very large, the state retains control over the overall pace and pattern of growth and development in the country.
And I just add one final thing here, which is going to become quite important as we discuss the various other points, and that is that the financial sector in China remains very heavily controlled by the state.
China has capital controls, China practices a fair degree of financial repression, and China’s financial system is geared to providing money for long-term investments that improve the productive capacities of the economy and the material welfare of the people. And this is completely different from the kind of financial sector we have today.
So, Mick or Michael, did you want to add anything?
MICK DUNFORD: Just to reiterate, I mean, the point is, the government sets strategic targets that relate to raising the quality of the life of all the Chinese people. And it has strategic autonomy, which gives China the opportunity or the possibility of actually choosing its own development path.
And I think that’s something that very strikingly marks China out from other parts of the Global South that have had much greater difficulty, in a sense, in accelerating their growth, partly because of debt and their subordination to the Washington financial institutions.
So I think that is critically important, the role of sovereignty and autonomy in enabling China to make choices that suited its conditions, and at the same time making choices that are driven by a long-term strategic goal to transform the quality of the lives of all Chinese people.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to put in one word about sovereignty. You put your finger on it. That’s really what makes it different.
What makes other countries lose their sovereignty is when they let go, how are they going to finance their investment? If they let foreign banks come in to finance their investment, if they let American and European banks come in, what do they do? They fund a real estate bubble, a different kind of a real estate bubble. They fund takeover loans. They fund privatization.
Banks don’t make loans for new investment. China makes great money to finance new tangible investment. Banks make money so you can buy a public utility or a railroad and then just load it down with debt, and you can borrow and borrow and use the money that you borrow to pay a special dividend if you’re a private capital company. Pretty soon, the country that follows this dependency on foreign credit ends up losing its sovereignty.
The way in which China has protected its sovereignty is to keep money in the public domain and to create money for actual tangible capital investment, not to take your property into a property-owning rentier class, largely foreign-owned.
RADHIKA DESAI: Thank you. Those are very important points. Thank you.
I’d just like to add one final point on the matter of how to characterize the Chinese economy and the Chinese state. At the end of the day, it’s not just important to say that the state controls the economy, but whose state is it?
The way to look at it as well is that in the United States, essentially we have a state that is controlled by the big corporations, which in our time have become exceedingly financialized corporations, so that they are directing the United States economy essentially towards ever more debt and ever less production, whereas that is not the case in China.
And the question of whose state it is makes use of the word autonomy. The autonomy refers to the fact that it is not subservient to any one section of society, but seeks to achieve the welfare of society as a whole and increase its productive capacity.
MICK DUNFORD: If I may just add, I think also it’s important that you pay attention to the policy-making process in China. It’s an example of what one might call substantive democracy. It delivers substantive results for the whole of the Chinese population.
In that sense, it delivers improvements in the quality of the lives of all the people, and therefore, in a sense, it’s a democratic system. But it’s also a country that actually has procedures of policy-making, experimentation, design, and choice and so on that are extremely important and that have fundamental aspects of democracy about them.
When Western countries characterize China as authoritarian, they’re actually fundamentally misrepresenting the character of the Chinese system and the way in which it works, because they, in a sense, merely equate democracy with a system, whereas China, of course, does have multiple political parties, but a system with competitive elections between different political parties. There are other models of democracy, and China is another model of democracy.
RADHIKA DESAI: Mick, you’re absolutely right to talk about the substantive democracy. Indeed, in China, they have recently developed a new term for it. They call it a “whole process democracy”, and it really involves multiple levels of consultation with the people, going down to the most basic village and township levels, and then all the way up the chain.
And I think this process does work, because the other remarkable thing about the CPC leadership is its ability to change direction pragmatically. If something does not work, then it assesses what it has attempted, why it has failed, and then it revises course. So, I think we will see several instances of this as we talk as well.
Michael, you want to add something?
MICHAEL HUDSON: One thing about democracy. The definition of a democracy traditionally is to prevent an oligarchy from developing. There’s only one way to prevent an oligarchy from developing as people get richer and richer, and that’s to have a strong state.
The role of a strong state is to prevent an oligarchy from developing. That’s why the oligarchy in America and Europe are libertarian, meaning get rid of government, because a government is strong enough to prevent us from gouging the economy, to prevent us from taking it over.
So, you need a strong central state in order to have a democracy. Americans call that socialism, and they say that’s the antithesis of democracy, which means a state that is loyal to the United States and follows U.S. policy and lets the U.S. banks financialize the economy. So, just to clarify the definitions here.
RADHIKA DESAI: Very, very true, Michael. But let’s not go, I mean, maybe we should do a separate show on political theory of the state, because that’s equally important.
But for now, let’s look at our next topic. We hope, of course, that everybody understands how we characterize China’s state. But now, let’s look at China’s GDP growth.
So, here you have a chart, and we have several charts on this matter, but we’ll take them one by one and comment on them:
So, here we have a chart showing the annual rate of GDP growth from 1980 to 2028. Of course, post-2023 are their projections, which are shown by the dotted lines. And I’ve only taken a few selected countries from the Our World in Data website, and anybody can go there and look at this data, by the way.
So, you can see China and then a handful of the most important Western countries. And you can see that going back to 1980, essentially China’s growth rate, which is here, the top red line here, has absolutely been massively higher on practically any year than the other countries.
In fact, you see I left Russia in here. I should probably have taken it out. It’s a bit of a distraction, because here you see Russia’s growth rate massively bouncing up from the late 90s financial crisis. But let’s leave that aside.
All the other major countries, which you see here, they are all showing considerably lower growth. So, the United States here is this orangish line. And essentially, they’re all showing much lower growth.
And more recently as well, this is the Covid-19 pandemic. And you can see that China, again, like all the other countries, it experienced a fairly sharp decline in the growth rate, but it still remained positive, unlike all the other countries.
And it remains substantially above that of the rest of the economies that constantly are telling China how to improve its economic policy. So, that’s what I want to say about this chart.
But Mick, go ahead.
MICK DUNFORD: Can you show that table that I sent?
RADHIKA DESAI: Yeah, sure. Yes, here we go:
MICK DUNFORD: These are more recent growth rates for China, for the world, and for the G7. And I mean, first of all, they show absolutely clearly that China’s growth rate is still a long way in excess of the average growth rates of all G7 countries, many of which have actually performed abysmally. I mean, Germany is now in recession, it declined 0.3% per year this year. I mean, Italy has had extremely low rates of growth, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, all had extremely low rates of growth.
China last year achieved a growth rate of 5.2%. It itself expects to grow at 5% next year. The IMF forecast 4.6%. Even that 4.6% target is quite close to the average growth rate that China needs to achieve to meet its 2035 target. It has a 2035 target of doubling its GDP, its 2020 GDP by 2035. I think that that goal is perfectly realizable. And in that sense, I strongly disagree with people who argue that China has in a sense peaked.
But I do find it, really quite astonishing, that Western countries, whose economies have performed extremely poorly, feel in a position to lecture China about how it should address what is said to be an unsatisfactory rate of growth. That’s the first point I want to make.
I just want to say something else, if I may. When we talk about, I mean, China’s growth has slowed. And, there’s no doubt that in terms of people’s everyday lives, there are many difficulties. And I just want to quote something.
At New Year, Xi Jinping gave a speech. I wanted to cite his actual words. He recognised that in these years, China faces what he called the tests of the winds and rains. And then he said, when I see people rising to the occasion, reaching out to each other in adversity, meeting challenges head on and overcoming difficulties, I am deeply moved.
So, the leadership and all Chinese people are well aware that there are many, many difficulties and challenges confronted, because China is actually undergoing a major structural transformation about which we shall speak later. But China is also in the short term undertaking a lot of important actions that are actually designed to cope with some of the real difficulties that people confront.
So, if you listen to Li Qiang’s government work report, he addressed the problem of short-term employment generation. And there are proposals for 12 million new urban jobs to increase employment, especially for college graduates and other young people, because for young people, the unemployment rate, including college students, is in the region of 21 percent. Urban unemployment is 5 percent. So, there are issues to do with the generation of employment.
Government expenditure this year will target a whole series of strategic issues, but also livelihoods. So, affordable housing, youth unemployment, job security, insurance, pensions, preschool education, the living conditions in older communities. So, I’m just saying that, in the current context, difficult economic situation and a particularly turbulent global situation. I mean, China, as every other country in the world, faces challenges, and it is in many ways directly addressing them in very important ways.
RADHIKA DESAI: Great. Thanks, Mick. Michael, do you want to add anything?
MICHAEL HUDSON: No, I think that’s it. The question is, what is the GDP that is growing? There are a number of ways of looking at GDP. And when I went to school 60 years ago, economists usually thought of GDP as something industrial. They’d look at energy production. They’d look at railway cargo transportation.
If you look at the industrial component of what most economists used to look at, electricity is the power for industry, electricity is productivity growth for labor. If you look at these, what is the component of GDP, you realize that these differences in Mick’s charts are even wider than what he showed, because the American GDP, very largely interest, overdraft fees of credit card companies, as we’ve said, is providing a financial service. 7% of American GDP is the increase in homeowners’ view of what their rental value of their property is. That’s 7%.
Now, I doubt that China includes a measure like this in its GDP. But if it did, with all of its rise in real estate prices, its GDP would be even higher in a reality-based basis.
So real GDP, as we think of it, and the public thinks of it, is something useful and productive. Actually, China’s doing a much more efficient job in minimizing the kind of financial and rentier overhead that you have in the United States.
RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly, Michael. What I was going to point out as well is that these figures of U.S. GDP growth and the absolute level of U.S. GDP are heavily financialized.
The financial sector, which actually is not a force for good in general in the U.S. economy, it is out of which the indebtedness comes, out of which the productive weakening comes. The growth of the financial sector is counted as GDP in the United States and massively inflates U.S. GDP, which would not be as high as this.
And this is particularly important given that President Biden, for example, is congratulating himself now for having the strongest economy in the world or the Western world or whatever it is. Well, that’s what the U.S.’s boast is based on.
And China does not do that, nor does it have the kind of financial sector which creates, which destroys the productive economy. Rather, as we were saying, it has the kind of financial sector that supports it.
So, just another general point I want to make. We were talking about this chart:
This shows from 1980 to 2028, and the projections remain, by the way, even from conservative sources, that China’s growth is going to remain higher than the rest of the world, particularly the Western countries, for a long time to come.
And I also decided to show you this chart:
This is the chart of growth, which is just a more focused version of the previous one, which shows growth rates from 2008 to 2028.
So 2008 is when we had what Michael and I call the North Atlantic Financial Crisis. And since then, what we’ve seen is, yes, of course, all countries have seen a sort of a reduction in their growth rate, and certainly China has. But even since then, you can see that China’s growth remains high and stable. So, that’s another thing that we wanted to show.
And this is a chart showing the rise of per capita GDP:
That is to say, you can have a higher GDP, but if your population is expanding, then to what extent is per capita GDP rising? So, you can see here that, again, even in terms of per capita GDP, and this only again goes to 2021, but in terms of per capita GDP, China has remained head and shoulders above all the major Western countries.
And this bounce here that you see in the case of the US and the UK here, it is only a dead cat bounce from the absolute depths to which their economies had sunk during Covid, and so they came to some sort of normalcy.
Mick, you may want to say something about this chart, because you sent it to me. So, please go ahead:
MICK DUNFORD: It’s correct, of course, that China’s growth slowed. Now, in 2013, China entered what is called the New Era. At that time, China decided that its growth rate should slow. It chose slower growth. It spoke of 6 or 7 percent per year, and it more or less achieved that, until the Covid pandemic. So, China chose slower growth for very particular reasons, and I think in this discussion, we shall come to some of these reasons later on.
But in a sense, what they want is what they call high-quality growth. And what China is seeking to do is undertake a profound structural transformation of its economy, establishing new growth drivers by directing finance towards high-productivity sectors and directing finance towards the use of digital and green technologies in order to transform its traditional industries. So, in a sense, it’s undergoing a profound process of structural transformation.
And I mean, if you, for example, look at Li Qiang’s speech, the major tasks include invigorating China through science and education, so to strengthen the education, science and technology system, to improve the capabilities of the workforce, or promote innovation, industrial investment and skills, and another, striving to modernize the industrial system and accelerate the development of new productive forces, bearing in mind that we’re on the verge of a new industrial revolution. But these are very important issues, fundamentally important issues.
RADHIKA DESAI: And I would say just, and I know we’ll talk about it at greater length later on, but it is really important to bear in mind that really, when the world stands at the cusp of being able to exploit new technologies like quantum computing or nanotechnology or artificial intelligence or what have you, a relatively centralized decision-making process about how to allocate resources, for what purposes, for what social benefits, etc., is likely to prove far superior, that is to say, China’s method is likely to prove far superior than the Western tactic of leaving private corporate capital in charge of the process.
And just to give you a couple of instances of this, the fact that private corporate capital is in charge of the development of digital technologies is already creating all sorts of social harms in our Western societies, whether it is harms to children’s mental health or even adults’ mental health, to political division that the algorithms sow and so on.
And also, it is leading to a situation where even these mega-corporations, these giant corporations, actually do not have the resources to invest, the scale of resources that will be needed to invest. So, for example, you hear in the Financial Times that Sam Altman is looking for people to invest in his artificial intelligence ventures, which will require trillions of dollars, and he cannot find private investors for it. So, this is really quite interesting.
Okay, so if we’re done with the growth rate story, oh, and I just want to say one other thing about this, which is, this is a GDP per capita in purchasing power parity, and China, in the space of a few decades, essentially, has experienced the biggest spurt in per capita well-being, etc., which includes important achievements like eliminating extreme poverty.
The Communist Party has brought China to essentially per capita GDP in purchasing power terms of next to nothing in 1980 to about $20,000 per annum in 2020. This is really quite an important achievement. And to do this for a country of 5 to 10 million people would be laudable, but to do this for a country of 1.3 billion people is a massive, historic achievement, and I think that’s something to remember.
MICK DUNFORD: I just, if you just go back for one minute, I mean, I absolutely agree with what you’ve just said, Radhika.
I’ll just make a comment about this chart. It’s because we were probably going to speak about Japanification:
It basically shows that the GDP per capita of Japan, and indeed of Germany, closed in on the United States, and actually Germany overtook it in the 1980s. But after that point in time, I mean, after the revaluation of their two respective currencies, and after the, the bubble, the stock market and property market bubble in Japan, you saw stagnation set in. And there’s a question as to whether that will happen with China.
But I mean, I think that one thing that’s striking in this diagram is that China is still at a much lower level of GDP per capita than Japan, or indeed Germany was at that time. And those economies, because, they were at the technological frontier to some extent, had to innovate, move into new technologies.
China, because there is still a technological gap, has enormous opportunities to accelerate its growth in a way in which, well, Japan failed because it chose not to take up opportunities, and it gave up semiconductors manufacture. But China has enormous opportunities, and that’s one reason why we must anticipate China’s growth as continuing.
RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Thank you, Mick. Okay, so if we’re done with the growth story, let’s go to our next topic, which is what happened in China under Covid-19. Now, of course, there is just so much dispute about and controversy around Covid and Covid strategies, etc. So we don’t want to get into all of them, but I just want to emphasize two things.
We’ve already looked at the growth figures, we looked at the growth figures around Covid:
So you can see here that in 2020, all economies had a big dip thanks to Covid in their economies, but China is alone among the major economies to have remained in positive growth territory, and to have, of course, remained much higher than the rest of the other major world economies. So essentially, China, whatever China did, it did not sacrifice growth.
Now, this is very ironical, because in the Western countries, we were told that we need to, in order to continue growing, we need to, so in order to preserve livelihoods, which was the euphemism for preserving the profits of big corporations, in order to preserve livelihoods, we may have to sacrifice some lives. And the Western economies went through an absolutely excruciating process of lockdown here, and opening there, and lockdown again, and opening again, and so on.
But all of this had devastating impacts on Western economies, whereas China prioritized the preservation of life above all. And it imposed a lockdown knowing that, okay, even if we are going to develop vaccines, and remember, China developed its own vaccines, and effectively inoculated over 70 percent of the population by the time they began reopening.
China prioritized the saving of lives, and it was accused of essentially creating world shortages by shutting down its economy, etc. But in reality, China’s strategy, which focused before the availability of vaccines, on essentially physical distancing, isolation, etc., as was necessary, but China managed to do it in a way as to keep up a relatively robust growth rate, and very importantly, lose very few lives.
This is a chart, again from Our World In Data, of cumulative Covid-19 deaths per million of population:
So here we have all these countries, the United States and United Kingdom are these top two lines, Germany, Canada, Japan, even though we are told that East Asian economies did well because they had experience with SARS, etc., even then, compared to China, which is down here with a cumulative Covid death rate per million of about 149 or something people dying per million, and these numbers are over 3,000, almost 4,000 per million at this point in the United States and the UK, and then you have these other economies.
So China actually managed to avoid the worst of Covid, both in terms of lives and in terms of livelihood, and it did so because it did not compromise the saving of lives.
Does anyone else want to add anything? Mick? You were there.
MICK DUNFORD: Well, I mean, obviously, there were difficulties for some people in some places at some times. I was here right through it. All I can say is the impact personally on me was extremely limited.
It was a very effective system for protecting life. And if you lived in some places, then in fact the impact on your life, apart from having frequent nucleic acid tests and so on and ensuring that your health code was up to date, the impact on one’s life was relatively limited.
But in some places, obviously, in Wuhan at the outset, in Shanghai later on, the impact was very considerable.
But I think it’s an indication of the importance of a kind of collectivism, and the priority given to the protection of human life. And as you said, it is quite striking that actually through it, China’s economy actually kept ticking over.
And of course, China produces so many important intermediate goods that obviously it was also very important in providing things that were needed in many, many other parts of the world.
It also shared its drugs, its vaccines, which is really quite different, in a sense, from the conduct of the United States. And to some extent, the Western pharmaceutical companies.
RADHIKA DESAI: Absolutely. Michael, go ahead.
MICHAEL HUDSON: In the United States, that would be considered a failure of policy. The United States used Covid as an opportunity to kill.
For instance, the governor of New York, Cuomo, took the Covid patients and he moved them into all of the assisted living and old people’s homes. And that had a great increase in productivity. It resulted in enormous death rates for the elderly.
That helped save New York’s pension plan system. It helped save other pension plans. It helped save Social Security because the dead people were no longer what America called “the dead weight”.
The American policy was to indeed infect as many people over the age of 65 as you could. And that helped balance state, local budgets, pension plan budgets.
The increase in the death rate is now the official policy of the Center for Disease Control in the United States. They say do not wear masks. They’ve blocked any kind of mask wearing. They’ve done everything they could to prevent the use of HIPAA filters or airborne disease. The Disease Control Center says that Covid is not an airborne disease. Therefore, do not protect yourself.
Well, the result is many children have been getting Covid and that weakens their resistance system. And they’re getting measles and all sorts of other things. And all of that is greatly increasing GDP in America. The health care costs of America’s destructive policy.
I think Marx made a joke about this in Capital. He said when more people get sick, the doctors and the economic output goes up. Are you really going to consider sickness and destruction and fires rebuilding and cleanup costs? Are you going to count all of this there?
RADHIKA DESAI: But the irony is Michael, even with all of that, America’s GDP plunged so deeply down.
Well, I think we should move on to the next topic, but I will just say one thing. It is generally said that China is in a panic, the Chinese government reversed its draconian Covid policies because there were popular protests, and blah blah and so on. I would not agree with that.
Certainly, there were some popular protests. It also seems as though at least some of them were being pushed by the National Endowment for Democracy with the typical color revolution style. They have one symbol that symbolizes it. So, they decided to put up blank pieces of paper, etc. So, there’s no doubt that there was some of this going on. And as Mick said, undoubtedly, there were local difficulties in many places.
But what becomes very clear is that China decided to lift Covid restrictions towards the end of 2022 only after it has satisfied itself that the risk. And I should also add one thing. It was under pressure to lift these restrictions a great deal because the fact was that the rest of the world was not following China’s footsteps apart from a handful of other countries. And they were socialist countries. They were not following China’s footsteps.
So, it’s very hard to be the only country that’s doing it. But nevertheless, despite all those pressures, China had a very deliberate policy. It lifted Covid restrictions after assuring itself that enough of the population had been vaccinated, as to achieve something close to herd immunity.
And these figures of deaths per million demonstrate that China’s bet proved right, and China continues to monitor the situation. Covid hasn’t gone away.
And so, in all of these ways, I think that it’s important for us to understand that China’s policy has actually been above all about protecting people’s lives.
MICK DUNFORD: Just from my recollection, the demonstrations of which you spoke, where the slogans were written in English, I wonder who they were talking to, were on the 1st of December. China had, on the 11th of November, already announced the steps of, in a sense, removing restrictions. And then they were finalized in early December. So, the change was already underway.
RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. Great. So, I think we are at almost, I think, 50 minutes or so. So, let’s do the next topic, which is the property bubble. And then we will stop this episode and we will do a part two of this episode, and do the other four topics that remain in part two.
So, Mick, do you want to start us off about the property bubble and the alleged Japanification, impending Japanification of China’s economy?
MICK DUNFORD: Okay. Well, if you want, you can just show the chart:
Basically, you can see that throughout this period, Chinese house prices have risen quite substantially. You know, in a sense, the story started, with housing reform, after 1988, when China moved from a welfare to a commodity system. And then, in 1998, it actually privatized Danwei housing, and it adopted the view that housing should be provided, as a commodity by developers.
And in 2003, that course of action was confirmed. And from that point in time, one saw very, very substantial growth in the number of developers, many of which, the overwhelming majority of which were private developers. So, in a sense, they moved towards a fundamentally market system.
And they very quickly had to make certain adjustments because they found that while the quality of housing and the amount of housing space per person was going up, these developers were orienting their houses towards more affluent groups. So, there was an under-provision of housing for middle-income groups and for low-income groups.
And so, there were progressively, you saw over the years, increasing attention paid to the provision of low-cost housing and of low-cost rented housing. And in fact, in the current five-year plan, 25% of all housing is meant to be basically low-cost housing.
So, the important point is that this problem emerged in a system that was liberalized, actually, I mean, in line with recommendations that were made in 1993 by the World Bank.
So, in other words, it’s an example of a liberalized, predominantly market-led, private-led system, in which these difficulties and these problems have emerged.
So, that’s the first thing I want to say. And I mean, obviously, to address housing needs, China has had, over the course of time, to considerably move back in the direction of providing low-cost housing in order to meet the housing needs of the Chinese people.
But basically, in August 2020, the government got very, very deeply concerned about, on the one hand, increasing house prices and, on the other hand, the explosion of borrowing and the fact that the liabilities of many of these developers substantially exceeded their assets.
And of course, the other line on that chart is a line indicating house prices in the United States. And of course, it was the crash of prices in the subprime market that, in a sense, precipitated the financial crisis. So, China, in the first place, is absolutely determined that it should not confront that kind of problem that was generated by the liberalized housing system in the United States.
So, I mean, that’s the first thing I basically want to say.
If you want, I can say something about the case of Evergrande. But basically, what China did in 2020 was it introduced what it called Three Red Lines, which were basically designed to reduce financial risks.
But it had a number of consequences because it, to some extent, deflated the housing market. Housing prices started to fall. Some of these developers found themselves in a situation where their liabilities substantially exceeded their assets. There was a decline in housing investment.
But to some extent, I think this is a part of a deliberate goal of basically diverting capital towards, as I said earlier, high productivity activities and away from activities, especially the speculative side of the housing market. So, I’ll just say that for the moment, but I can come back and say something about Evergrande, if you wish, in a few minutes.
RADHIKA DESAI: Okay, great. Michael, do you want to add anything?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, what I’d like to know as the background for this is what is the, how much of this housing is owner-occupied and how much is rental housing? That’s one question. The other question is how much is the ratio of housing costs to personal income? In America, it’s over 40% of personal income for housing. What’s the ratio in China?
I’d want to know the debt-equity ratio. How much debt, on the average, for different income groups? Debt relative to the value of housing. In America, for the real estate sector as a whole, debt is, the banker owns more of the house than the nominal house owner, whose equity ratio for the whole economy is under 50%.
These are the depth dimensions that I’d want to ask for these charts, if you know anything about them.
RADHIKA DESAI: Okay, thanks for that. And so, I just want to add one thing, which is that, this graph actually really says it all, and in some ways implicitly answers Michael’s questions:
Because the blue line, which shows the United States property prices, you can see that they reached a certain peak at 150% of the value of its 2010 values in 2008. Then it went down to below the level of 2010.
But U.S. monetary policy, Federal Reserve policy, its continuing deregulated financial sector, the easy money policy that was applied in a big way with zero interest rate policies, with quantitative easing, etc., etc., has simply led to a new property boom, where the prices of property prices have reached a peak, which is even higher than that of 2007-8, which was such a disaster. And this was all made possible precisely by the, by increasing housing debt, etc.
Whereas in China, a big driver of the housing boom has actually been that people are investing their savings in it. So, by logically, it means that the extent of a debt in the housing market will be comparatively lower. The entities that are indebted are actually the developers.
And that’s a very different kind of problem than, than the, than the owners being indebted. So that’s the main thing I want to say.
And Mick, you wanted to come back about, about Evergrande, so please do. And then remember also that we want to talk about this chart in particular, and deal with the question of Japanification:
So, please go ahead, Mick. Let’s talk about that.
MICK DUNFORD: Okay, well, I mean, as Radhika just said, the problem is, the indebtedness of developers, and the existence of debts that considerably exceed the value of their assets.
And the way in which this situation has come about, and I mean, as I said, the Chinese government, in a sense, wants to address the financial risks associated with that situation, and did so by introducing these so-called Three Red Lines.
It also is interested in reducing house prices, and it’s also interested in redirecting finance towards productivity-increasing activities.
So, Evergrande is an enormous real estate giant. It has debt of 300 billion dollars. It has 20 billion of overseas debt, and its assets, according to its accounts at the end of the last quarter of last year, are 242 billion. And 90 percent of those assets are in mainland China. So, its liability asset ratio was 84.7 percent, and the Three Red Lines set a limit of 70, 70 percent. So, it’s substantially in excess of the red line.
In 2021, it defaulted. And then, in January this year, it was told to liquidate after international creditors and the company failed to agree on a restructuring plan. In September, by the way, last year, its chair, Su Jiayin, was placed under mandatory measures, on suspicion of unspecified crimes. Basically, it was a Hong Kong court that called in the liquidators.
And the reason was that, in a way, outside China, Evergrande looked as a massively profitable distressed debt trade opportunity. There were 19 billion in defaulted offshore bonds with very substantial assets and, initially, a view that the Chinese government might prop up the property market.
So, large numbers of U.S. and European hedge funds basically piled into the debt, and they expected quite large payouts. But it seems as if this negotiation was, to some extent, controlled by a Guangdong risk management committee. And the authorities, basically, were very, very reluctant to allow offshore claimants to secure onshore revenues and onshore assets.
And, in fact, to stop the misuse of funds, I think about 10 Chinese local provinces actually took control of pre-sales revenues. They put it into custodial accounts, and the idea was that this money should basically—the priority is to ensure that the houses of people who’ve paid deposits on houses are actually built, and people who’ve undertaken work in building houses, are basically paid. So, that, then saw the value of these offshore bonds collapse very rapidly, indeed.
And I think that, to some extent, explains the concerns of the international financial market about the difficulties of this particular case. But I think, it’s clear that China intends, basically, to deflate this sector and to put an end to this speculative housing market as much as it possibly can, and to direct capital, towards productivity increasing, essentially, the industrial sector. And we shall talk about this direction of finance later on.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Evergrande debt, and other real estate debt, is to domestic Chinese banks and lenders. Certainly, many Chinese home buyers did not borrow internationally.
So, I want to find out how much the domestic Chinese banking system, or near banking system — not the Bank of China itself, but the near banks intermediaries who lent — to what extent have the banks given guarantees for the loans for Evergrande and others?
I understand that there are some guarantees domestically, and if the banks have to pay them, the banks will go under, just as occurring here in New York City. Do you have any information on that?
MICK DUNFORD: No, I don’t really have any information, except, I mean, some of the literature that I’ve read suggests that these creditors, bondholders and also other creditors, basically shareholders, are going to take a very, very major haircut.
RADHIKA DESAI: Exactly. I think that this is the key, that there will be an imposition of haircuts on the rich and the powerful, not just subjecting ordinary people to repossession of their homes, which they should have access to.
So, as Mick has already said, the Chinese government is doing everything possible to make sure that the ordinary buyers who have bought these houses do not lose out, which is the opposite of what was done in trying to resolve the housing and credit bubble in the United States.
So, I just want to say a couple of things. I mean, the Chinese government is quite aware, as Mick pointed out, the whole thing has begun by, this whole property bubble is in good part a product of the fact that when relations between China and the West were much better, China accepted some World Bank advice, and this is partly a result of that and the kind of deregulation that the World Bank had suggested.
But very clearly, now relations between China and the West are not good. In fact, they’re anything but good. China is unlikely, once bitten, twice shy, to accept such bad advice again, even if they were good. And now that they’re not good, there will be, and China is clearly looking at distinctively pragmatic, socialistic ways out.
And you see in the new address to the NPC by the Premier [Li Qiang], that social housing has become a major priority, not building houses for private ownership, but rather building houses which will be kept in the public sector and rented out at affordable rates. And I think this is really an important thing, really the way to go.
And finally, I would say that, the property bubble in Japan and the property bubble in the United States were bound to have very different consequences, partly because, well, for two reasons, mainly. Number one, the nature of their financial systems were very different.
In the case of Japan, the financial system was being transformed from one that resembles China’s financial system to something that resembles much more the US financial system. And Japan has continued this transformation and has suffered as a result. I would say in short, really, Japan has paid the price of keeping its economy capitalist. So in many ways is the United States.
And the second reason, of course, is that, funnily enough, one of the effects of the Plaza Accord was that, by the time the Plaza Accord came around, Japan was no longer interested in buying US treasuries. And as a result, the United States essentially restricted its access to US markets in a much bigger way. And so, essentially, Japan lost those export markets.
And it did not do what China is able to do. It perhaps could not do what China is able to do, being a capitalist country, which is massively reorient the stimulus for production away from exports and towards the domestic market, including the market for investment.
So I think that we are, maybe this is the cue at which we can talk about Japanification. So maybe you can start us off by commenting on this chart, and then Michael and I can jump in as well:
MICK DUNFORD: Ok, the blue line, of course, is the flow of loans to different sectors. So the blue line is the flow of loans to the real estate sector.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Only the Bank of China or by?
MICK DUNFORD: All the banks. You can see from 2016, the share going to real estate has diminished very significantly, whereas, where it says industrial MLT, that’s medium and long term loans for industrial investment, you can see a very, very strong, steady increase in the share of loans going to industrial investment. In agriculture, it declines. And then also, that has actually increased since 2016. So this is a directing of investment towards manufacturing and towards the industrial sector of the economy.
So why is that? Well, I think the first thing one can say is that, in the past, basically, the growth drivers of the Chinese economy were, to some extent, export manufactures. But China was predominantly involved in processing activities, employing very unskilled labor and associated with very low levels of labor productivity.
So one of China’s goals is to significantly, basically, strengthen, upgrade the quality of these traditional industries, to make them digital, to make them green, and to radically increase productivity through a large-scale investment wave.
And then, secondly, we’re on the verge of a new industrial revolution, which Radhika has spoken about. So the aim in this case is, basically, to divert investment towards the industries that are associated with the next industrial revolution.
The other main growth drivers in the past, alongside this export sector, were obviously real estate, which, I mean, if you look at GDP by expenditure, was accounting probably with household appliances and furniture and household goods and so on, about 26, 27 percent of the economy.
But it’s a sector that’s associated with relatively low productivity, and of course, it was associated with very substantial speculation and generated very considerable financial instability.
So, as Radhika said, there will be, in dealing with this financial crisis, basically an underwriting of existing, of obligations to existing home buyers, and in the future, an attempt to establish a more sustainable housing market.
The other area of the economy was basically this sort of platform economy. But this platform economy was associated with very, very strong tendencies towards monopoly, and in the, about four or five years ago, a series of measures were adopted, basically, to restrict, some aspects of this platform economy, and other areas, like private tutoring, which was generating large disparities in the educational system, and is associated with the fact, that the cost of raising children in China is extremely high. I mean, it’s the second highest in the world after South Korea, actually.
So, these growth drivers, these old growth drivers, are basically seen as not offering potential to sustain the growth of the Chinese economy into the years ahead, and so there’s this attempt to look for new growth drivers. And basically, for that reason, you’ve seen this redirection of investment.
And I think one can distinguish that, from what happened to Japan, because basically, in Japan, industrial investment did not increase, largely, I think, because the profitability of investment was not sufficiently high. And also Japan, in a sense, adopted a neoliberal program. It didn’t implement industrial policies.
Whereas China is seeking to undertake this transformation, basically, through, it’s a kind of supply-side restructuring, driven by industrial policy, and driven by financial policies, providing strategic funding for industrial transformation.
Then linking that also to the transformation of education, to try to ensure that the output of the education system, in terms of skill profiles, and so on, corresponds much, much more closely with the profile of work and employment, with much more emphasis upon STEM, in the context of this new industrial revolution, radically raising productivity, and by radically raising productivity, you increase income, and ultimately, you’ll increase consumption, and so on.
So I think that the Japanification course is not one that China will follow, that China will actually address this need to innovate and transform its industrial system, in order to, in a sense, address the problems that are associated with the earlier drivers of Chinese development.
MICHAEL HUDSON: We probably need a whole other program to talk about the difference in structure. Real estate is the largest sector of every economy, and China is so different from Japan.
The Ginza district in Japan, right around the palace, that small district, was larger than all of the real estate value in California. So, we’re dealing with a huge debt finance explosion there, and then you have the largest collapse of property prices in Japan, everywhere, anywhere in the world.
In a way, what you’ve described brings us back to what we were talking about at the beginning of the show, about China’s structure. The effect of the real estate slowdown and falling in prices has a disastrous effect on localities, small villages and towns in China, who are dependent on real estate sales as funding their budget.
So, the real estate crash in China, if we’re talking about what policy is China going to take, how is it going to solve the problem of local budgets without solving it by creating a booming real estate market for towns to sell off their property to developers, and developers to make a profit selling off a property to private buyers, mainly.
I assume they’re not just selling it to the government to make a profit. I think there’s a lot of structure that I’d like to know. I don’t know what it is now, but it’s so different from what you have everywhere else.
I think that really is what I hope will be the focus of our show, the geopolitics of different real estate structures and the real estate tax that goes with it.
RADHIKA DESAI: That’s a really interesting question, and much of that we will be discussing in the second part of this show, which we’ll be recording in a week or so, I think.
But let me maybe then just bring this to a conclusion by simply agreeing with what both of you have said, which is that China has a very good chance, in fact, very likely, China is not going to follow the Japanification model because, as Michael is emphasizing, the structure of China’s economy and the imperatives generated by that structure are very different.
To name just one, if something is not profitable in a capitalist economy, it will not get done. Whereas in the case of the Chinese economy, the Chinese government can always say, well, if it’s necessary, we’ll do it even if it isn’t profitable, because it is necessary for the welfare of the people or the productive capacity of the economy, etc. So, profitability just does not play the role of a brake in the same way as it does in capitalist societies.
Secondly, the role of the state, both in terms of initiating new projects and taking responsibility for new projects, and we can already see in the current NPC and the discussions there that the role of the state is already once again expanding again in China, and it can continue to do so. And I think that’s a very good thing.
And remember also that, Mick, you emphasized in the case of when you were discussing one of the graphs, that the per capita GDP of China today is considerably lower than what it was in Japan, even in the late 80s and early 90s.
And that means that, number one, domestic consumption can be a big stimulus for further economic expansion. And secondly, of course, the industrial opportunities, the opportunities for a new industrial revolution are many, and China in particular, because of the important state role in the Chinese economy, the centrality of the state role in the Chinese economy, and the aim of the Chinese economy and the Chinese economy’s managers to develop China’s productive capacity in whatever way that works, not necessarily through private ownership.
These elements are actually going to ensure that China will exploit the opportunities of the new technologies much more effectively and execute a transition to the next industrial revolution much more successfully, and that will be an important road to avoiding what’s called Japanification.
MICK DUNFORD: You know, I think the difference is that Japan, I thought, in the 1980s was at the technological frontier, and China is not. But just, what Michael was referring to is the fact that in China, local government revenue came to depend to a very considerable extent on what is called land revenue.
You know, basically all land is state-owned, is either state-owned or owned by the rural collectives. But what happened was that if land was converted for use for urbanization, was converted for use for urbanization, for housing, then basically the local government could in effect sell leases, 90-year leases, or depending on the activity, different lengths of lease. They could sell these leases to developers. And then that revenue was used by local government to fund infrastructure.
To some extent that model has come up against limits. And I think, the issue Michael raised really concerns how in future will local government be funded, and will there be a reform in the system of taxation?
Will a property tax be introduced in order to generate government revenue rather than relying upon this land tax? Because of course that did encourage local government to allocate that land to people who are going to build housing for upper-income groups, because the implications for land value were under that situation, they would actually be higher rather than providing that land to construct housing for low income groups.
So, this issue of land revenue is one that has to be addressed basically by someone who’s an expert in public finance.
MICHAEL HUDSON: That should be what we talk about in the next show, I think.
RADHIKA DESAI: Great. So I think that we should bring this part of the show, the first part of this show to an end. And let me just do that by going back to our list of topics.
So just to conclude, we managed to cover the first four, although the question of Japanification and the alleged property bubble will resonate into all the rest of the topics, certainly the question of consumption, exports and China’s new growth strategy. So we will return to it.
But in the next [Geopolitical Economy] Hour, we will be talking about these topics, restricted consumption, exports, new growth strategy, and of course, China’s foreign economic policy.
So thanks very much both. Thanks to all the listeners. And we look forward to seeing you in another week or two. Thank you and goodbye.
As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive. Forever Wars never die. Bring it on. The Dragon is ready.
By Pepe Escobar at Strategic Culture.
This is the Year of the Wooden Dragon, according to China’s classic wuxing (“five elements”) culture. The dragon, one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, is a symbol of power, nobility and intelligence. Wood adds growth, development and prosperity.
Call it a summary of where China is heading in 2024.
The second session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was finalized on Sunday in Beijing.
The wider world should know that within the framework of grassroots democracy with Chinese characteristics, an extremely complex – and fascinating – phenomenon, the importance of the CPPCC is paramount.
The CPPCC channels wide-ranging expectations of the average Chinese to the decision level, and actually advises the central government on a vast range of issues – from everyday living to high-quality development strategies.
This year, most of the discussion focused on how to drive
China’s modernization even faster. This being China, concepts – like flowers – were blooming all around the spectrum, such as “new quality productive forces, “deepening reform,” “high-standard opening-up,” and a fabulous new one, “major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.”
As the Global Times emphasized, “2024 is not only a critical year for achieving the goals of the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ but also a key year for achieving the transition to high-quality development of the economy.”
Betting on strategic investment
So let’s start with Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s first “work report” delivered a week ago, which opened the annual session of the National People’s Congress. The key takeaway: Beijing will be pursuing the same economic targets as in 2023. That translates as 5% annual growth.
Of course deflationary risks, a downturn in the real estate market and somewhat shaky business confidence simply won’t vanish. Li was quite realistic, emphasizing Beijing is “keenly aware” of the challenges ahead: “Achieving this year’s targets will not be easy.” And he added: “Global economic growth lacks steam and the regional hotspot issues keep erupting. This has made China’s external environment more complex, severe and uncertain.”
Beijing’s strategy remains focused on a “proactive fiscal policy and prudent monetary policy”. In a nutshell: the song remains the same. There won’t be a “stimulus” of any kind.
Deeper answers should be found in the work report/budget released by the National Development and Reform Commission: the focus will be on structural change, via extra funds to science, technology, education, national defense, agriculture. Translation: China bets on strategic investment, the key for a high-quality economic transition.
In practice, Beijing will be heavily invested in modernizing industry and developing “new quality productive forces” such as new-energy vehicles, biomanufacturing and commercial space flight.
Science Minister Yin Hejun made it clear: there was an 8.1% increase in national investment in research and development in 2023. He wants more – and he will get it: R&D spending will grow by 10% to a total of 370.8 billion yuan.
The mantra is “self-reliance”. On all fronts – from chipmaking to AI. A no holds barred tech war is on – and China is totally focused to counter “tech containment” from the Hegemon as much as its ultimate goal is to wrest tech supremacy from its prime competitor. Beijing simply cannot allow itself to be vulnerable to U.S.-imposed tech choke points and supply chain disruptions.
So short-term economic problems will not be causing sleepless nights. The Beijing leadership is always looking ahead – focusing on long-term challenges.
Learning lessons from the Donbass battlefield
Beijing will continue to steer the economic development of Hong Kong and Macau, and invest even more in the crucial Greater Bay Area, which is the premier southern China high tech, services and finance hub.
Taiwan of course was central to the work report; Beijing fiercely opposes “external interference” – code for Hegemon tactics. That will become even trickier in May, when William Lai Ching-te, who flirts with independence, becomes president.
On defense, there will be only a 7.2% increase in 2024, which is peanuts compared to the Hegemon’s defense budget now approaching $900 billion: China’s stands as $238 billion, even as China’s nominal GDP is approaching the U.S.
A great deal of China’s defense budget will go for emerging tech – considering the immensely valuables lessons the PLA is learning out of the Donbass battlefield, as well as the deep interactions part of the Russia-China strategic partnership.
And that brings us to diplomacy. China will continue to be firmly positioned as a champion of the Global South. That was made explicit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.
Wang Yi’s priorities: to “maintain stable relations with major powers; join hands with its neighbouring countries for progress; and strive for revitalisation with the Global South”.
Wang Yi once again stressed that Beijing favors an “equal and orderly” multipolar world and “inclusive economic globalization”.
And of course he could not allow U.S. Secretary of State Little Blinken – always out of his depth – to get away with his latest “recipe”: “It is impermissible that those with the bigger fist have the final say, and it is definitely unacceptable that certain countries must be at the table while others can only be on the menu.”
BRI as a global accelerator
Crucially, Wang Yi re-emphasized the drive for “high-quality” cooperation within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. He defined BRI as “an engine for the common development of all countries and an accelerator for the modernisation of the whole world”. Wang Yi actually said he’s hopeful about the emergence of a “Global South moment in global governance” – in which China and BRI play an essential part.
Li Qiang’s work report, incidentally, had only one paragraph on BRI. But then we find this nugget as Li refers to the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor – which links China’s landlocked southwest with the eastern seaboard, via Guangxi province.
Translation: BRI will be focusing on opening new economic roads for China’s less developed regions, diversifying from the previous emphasis on Xinjiang.
Dr Wei Yuansong is a member of the CPPCC and also the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party – which happens to be one of the eight non-CCP parties in Chinese politics (very few outside of China know about this).
He offered some fascinating comments on BRI to Fengmian News and also stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” to avoid “conflict and incidents” along the BRI road. For that, Wei suggests the need to use an “international language” in telling these stories; that implies using English.
As for what Wang Yi said in his press conference, in fact that was discussed in detail at the closed-door Central Conference on Foreign Affairs Work in late 2023, where it was established that China faced “strategic opportunities” to raise its “international influence, appeal and power” despite “high winds and choppy waters”.
The key takeaway: the narrative war between China and the Hegemon will be pitiless. Beijing is confident it’s capable of offering stability, investment, connectivity and sound diplomacy to the whole Global South, instead of Forever Wars.
That is reflected, for instance, by Ma Xinmin, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s legal advisor, telling the International Court of Justice that the Palestinians have the right to armed resistance when it comes to fighting the colonialist, racist, apartheid state of Israel. Therefore, Hamas cannot be defined as a terrorist organization.
This is the overwhelming position across the lands of Islam and across the majority of the Global South – linking Beijing with fellow BRICS member Brazil and President Lula, who compared the genocide in Gaza to the Nazi genocide in WWII.
How to resist collective West sanctions
The Two Sessions did reflect Beijing’s full understanding that Hegemon containment and destabilization tactics remain the biggest challenge to China’s peaceful rise. But simultaneously it reflected Chinese confidence on its global diplomatic clout as a force for peace, stability and economic development. It’s an extremely sensitive balance that only the Middle Kingdom seems capable of pulling off.
Then there’s the Trump factor.
Economist Ding Yifan, a former deputy director of the World Development Institute, part of the State Council’s Development Research Centre, is one among those who’s aware China is learning key lessons from Russia on how to resist collective West sanctions – which will be inevitable against China especially if Trump is back at the White House.
And that brings us to the absolute key issue being currently discussed in Moscow, within the Russia-China partnership, and soon among the BRICS: alternative settlement payments to the U.S. dollar, increasing trade among “friendly nations”, and controls on capital flight.
Nearly all Russia-China trade is now in yuan and rubles. As much as Russian trade with the EU fell by 68% in 2023, trade with Asia rose by 5.6% – with new landmarks reached with China ($240 billion) and India ($65 billion) – and 84% of
Russia’s total energy exports going to “friendly countries”.
The Two Sessions did not get into detail on some extremely thorny geopolitical issues. For instance, India’s version of multipolarity – considering New Delhi’s unresolved love affair with Washington – is quite different from China’s. Everyone knows – and no one more than the Russians – that within BRICS 10 the biggest strategic issue is how to accommodate the perpetual tension between India and China.
What’s clear even behind the fog of goodwill enveloping the Two Sessions is that Beijing is fully aware of how the Hegemon is – deliberately – already crossing a key Chinese red line, officially stationing “permanent troops” in Taiwan.
Since last year U.S. Special Forces have been training Taiwanese in operating Black Hornet nano microdrones. In 2024 U.S. military advisers are deployed full time at army bases on Kinmen and Penghu islands.
Those actually driving U.S. foreign policy behind the Crash Test Dummy at the White House believe that even as they are powerless to handle the Houthi Ansarallah in the Red Sea, they are capable of poking the Dragon.
No posturing will alter the Dragon’s roadmap. The CPPCC’s political resolution on Taiwan calls for uniting “all patriotic forces”, “deepen integration and development in various fields across the Taiwan Straits”, and go all out on “peaceful reunification”. That will translate in practice into increased economic/trade cooperation, more direct flights, more cargo ports and logistics bases.
As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive. Forever Wars never die. Bring it on. The Dragon is ready.
The World Youth Festival in southern Russia was a stunning achievement — a Special Cultural Operation (SCO) encompassing the young Global South
By Pepe Escobar at Sputnik.
It starts with the incomparable setting – the 2014 Olympics park of science and art, nested between snowy mountains and the Black Sea – all the way to the stars of the show: over 20,000 young leaders from over 180 nations, Russians and mostly Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, as well as assorted dissidents from the sanctions-obsessed Western “garden”.
Among them are scores of educators, PhDs, public sector or culture activists, charity volunteers, athletes, young entrepreneurs, scientists, citizen journalists, as well as teenagers from 14 to 17, for the first time the focus of a special program, “Together into the Future”. These are the generations that will be building our common future.
President Putin is once again quite sharp: he emphasized how a clear distinction applies between citizens of the world – including the Global North – and the intolerant, extremely aggressive Western plutocracy. Russia, a multinational, multicultural civilization-state, by principle welcomes all citizens of the world.
The World Youth Festival 2024, taking place seven years after the last one, renews a tradition that harks back to the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students when the USSR welcomed everyone on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
The idea of an open platform for young, committed, very organized people attracted by Russian conservative/family values permeates the whole festival – in sharp contrast to the artificial, cancel culture-obsessed “open society” P.R. incessantly sold by the usual hegemonic foundations.
Each day at the festival is dedicated to a main theme. For instance, March 2 was on “responsibility for the fate of the world”; March 3 was for “unity and cooperation among nations”; March 4 was for “a world of opportunities for everyone”.
No less than 300,000 youngsters from around the world applied to come to the festival. So obviously to select a little over 20,000 was quite a feat. After the festival, 2,000 foreign participants will travel to 30 Russian cities for cultural exchange. Exactly what comrade Xi Jinping defines as “people to people’s exchanges”.
It’s no wonder the festival organizers, Rosmolodezh, the Russian federal agency for youth affairs, call it “the largest youth event in the world”. Director Ksenia Razuvaeva noted, “we are destroying the myth that Russia is isolated.”
Putin’s Address to Youth Festival: ‘It’s Up to You to Create Safe World’
Vladimir Putin declared the World Youth Festival open in an address to the participants. The main message of his speech:
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) March 2, 2024
The Pitfalls of “Asynchronous Multipolarity”
The festival is all about networking among youth groups, intercultural/business ties ranging from the sustainable community level to the larger geopolitical level.
I had the huge honor and responsibility to address a truly multi-Global South audience at the Belgorod oblast pavilion, invited by the Russia Knowledge Foundation, alongside a consultant from Hyderabad, India.
The Q&A session was terrific: ultra-sharp questions from Iran to Serbia, from Brazil to India, from Palestine to Donbass. A true microcosm of the multicultural Young Global South, eager to know everything about the current geopolitical Great Game as well as how national governments can facilitate international cultural and scientific cooperation among young people.
Pepe at the World Youth Festival with comrades of the Donbass Orthodox Christian batallions
“After my talk at the World Youth Festival: Palestine, Pakistan, Iran, Donbass, Brazil, all points South.”
“I had the huge honor and responsibility to address a fab audience from all points Global South at the Belgorod oblast pavilion”
Sidebar: immersion at #WYF2024
The Valdai Club is running a particularly attractive daily program at the forum, The World in 2040.
A workshop on Sunday, for instance, focused on “The Future of a Multipolar World”, anchored by the excellent Andrey Sushentsov, dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO, arguably the best international relations school on the planet.
The discussion on “asynchronous multipolarity” was particularly useful to the audience (a solid Chinese presence, mostly PhDs), and elicited ultra-sharp questions by researchers from Serbia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and of course China.
Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of China studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, elaborated on the key concept of “Asian multipolarity” – the many Asias within Asia, something that totally baffles simplistic Western categorizations. After the session we had an excellent exchange about it.
Yet nothing at the forum compares to going from room to packed room, getting a glimpse of the in-depth discussions and then wandering the pavilions in total networking mode. I was approached by everyone from Sudan to Ecuador, from New Guinea to a group of Brazilians, from Indonesians to an official of the Communist Party of the United States.
And then there’s the special prize: the stands of the several Russian republics. That’s when you get the chance to be immersed in a Yamal tea ritual; to receive first-hand information on the Nenets Autonomous Region; or to discuss the procedure to embark on a trip in a nuclear icebreaker in the Northern Sea Route – or Arctic Silk Road: the connectivity channel of the future. Once again: multipolar Russia in effect.
Now compare this peaceful, pan-global gathering focused on all forms of sustainable community programs, drenched in hopes and dreams, to NATO launching a two-week, massive warmongering exercise dubbed “Nordic Response 2024”, carried out by Finland, Norway and newcomer Sweden less than 500 km away from the Russian borders.
By Neenah Payne Former US Army officer Brad Miller explains in the video below that the top of the US military are failing service members...
CHINA OPEN THREAD
In the last days, the US has taken fateful steps toward conflict with China. It deliberately crossed one of China’s red-lines, officially stationing “permanent troops” on its province of Taiwan, even though they had been permanent since transfer by the United States Seventh Fleet of the losing fascists to this island in 1949. March is promising to be a month to remember for the millennium..
Why is the Empire making the move now? To threaten China against bringing sense to the Europeans and end the Ukrainian bloodbath before it openly turns into Russia versus NATO? A nothing-burger to change narratives from absolute catastrophes in 404 and West Asia? It can’t handle the Ansar Allah gauntlet and wants to poke the Dragon, standing in ranks with Russia and DPRK..
I have limited knowledge on Asia-Pacific, and lack time as remain focused on West Asia. And for sure I am no exorcist-cum-shrink, which would needed to unwind what the sinking Empire of Chaos hopes to achieve in detonating a THIRD front for its favored ritual of seppuku. Pl those with access to the China writer’s group or locals there or knowledgeable, share with us! Use as Open Thread
@MyLordBebo:
ESCALATION: Deployment of American special forces in Taiwan and its islands is reported.
American special forces are training units of the Taiwanese Army
The United States has taken the unprecedented step of permanently stationing special forces in Taiwan.
Since 2023, American special forces have been training Taiwanese in operating Black Hornet Nano microdrones, and also helping to develop manuals and training materials.
This year, U.S. military advisers began permanently stationing themselves at army bases on Kinmen and Penghu islands, expanding their training program to include new special forces units.
We are talking about Alpha Company from the 2nd Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group of the Green Berets, which is reportedly located at the base of the 101st Airborne Reconnaissance Battalion (Kinmen Headquarters) of the Taiwanese Armed Forces.
US plans also include sending officials to Taiwan, but their movements remain secret.
In addition, since last year, American special forces have been stationed at the Taiwanese special forces base in the Longtan region (Taoyuan), which manages expensive equipment and training facilities used to train the island’s units.
Taiwan Institute of National Defense and Security official Su Ziyun stated that “Green Berets are special forces designed to build defenses and counter infiltration by the enemy in cooperation with Taiwanese intelligence units.
These include the 1st Reconnaissance Company in Kinmen, the 2nd Reconnaissance Company in Matsu, and the 3rd Reconnaissance Company in Penghu, as well as at the mouth of the Tamsui River
— china3army
China resumes shuttle diplomacy as Ukraine war drums get louder… in this foreboding backdrop, what is it that Li Hui can hope to achieve?
By Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar at the Indian Punchline.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry announcement on Wednesday that Beijing’s Special Representative on Eurasian Affairs Li Hui will set out from home on March 2 on a “second round of shuttle diplomacy on seeking a political settlement of the Ukraine crisis” may seem a mismatch.
Just two days earlier, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke up that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of putting Western boots on the ground in Ukraine in order to prevent a Russian victory. Li Hui is expected to visit Russia, the EU headquarters in Brussels, Poland, Ukraine, Germany and France.
The Chinese spokesperson Mao Ning kept the expectations low by adding that “Behind this, there is only one goal that China hopes to achieve, that is, to build consensus for ending the conflict and pave the way for peace talks. China will continue to play its role, carry out shuttle diplomacy, pool consensus and contribute China’s wisdom for the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis.”
Macron spoke up after a summit of European leaders in Paris on Monday. But in diplomacy, there is always something more than what meets the eye. Macron later insisted that he had spoken quite deliberately: “These are rather serious topics. My every word on this issue is weighted, thought through and calculated.” Nonetheless, representatives of most of the 20 participating countries at the Paris conclave, especially Germany, later took a public position that they had no intention to send troops to Ukraine and were strongly opposed to participation in military operations against Russia.
The French Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne since explained that the presence of Western military in Ukraine might be necessary to provide some types of assistance, including de-mining operations and instruction of Ukrainian soldiers, but that did not imply their participation in the conflict.
The White House reaction has been a reaffirmation that the US would not send troops to Ukraine. The National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said in a statement that Biden “has been clear that the US will not send troops to fight in Ukraine.” The NSC spokesman John Kirby also denied that US troops could be sent for de-mining, arms production or cyber operations. However, Kirby underscored that it would be a “sovereign decision” for France or any other NATO country whether to send troops to Ukraine.
Interestingly, though, two days after the White House reacted, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin added a caveat during a hearing at the House Armed Services Committee that if Ukraine falls, Russia and NATO could come into a direct military conflict, as the Russian leadership “won’t stop there” if Ukraine is defeated. “Quite frankly, if Ukraine falls, I really believe that NATO will be in a fight with Russia,” Austin said.
What emerges out of this cacophony is that quite possibly, the ground is being prepared for a soft landing for the idea of western military deployment in Ukraine in some form going forward. Within hours of Austin’s testimony on Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on the Telegram channel, “Is this an overt threat to Russia or an attempt to cook up an excuse for Zelensky? Both are insane. However, everyone can see who the aggressor is — it is Washington.”
The NATO has been steadily climbing the escalation ladder while the Russian reaction has been by and large to rev up the “meat grinder” in the war of attrition. But then, it is the Ukrainian carcass being ground and that doesn’t seem to matter to the Brits or Americans.
There was a time when attack on Crimea was deemed to have been a “red line.” Then came the October 2022 Crimean Bridge explosion — on the day after the 70th birthday of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Well, Russia successfully repaired the bridge and reopened it to traffic. An emboldened West thereupon began a string of attacks against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
Russia repeatedly alleged that the British, along with the US, acted as spotters, supplying the Kiev regime with coordinates of targets and that the attacks against the Black Sea Fleet were actually literally conducted under the direction of British special services. The Russian MFA spokesperson Maria Zakharova said yesterday, “In general, the question that should be asked is not about Britain’s involvement in separate episodes of the conflict in Ukraine, but about the unleashing and participation of London in the anti-Russian hybrid war.” Indeed, recent reports mentioned that none other than the UK’s Chief of the Defense Staff Admiral Tony Radakin played a significant role in developing Ukraine’s military strategy in the Black Sea.
In retrospect, a NATO roadmap exists to bring the war home to Russia, the latest phase being a new air strike campaign against the Russian oil and gas industry. The escalation on such scale and sophistication is possible only with the direct or indirect participation of NATO personnel and real-time intelligence provided by the US satellites or ground stations. Equally, there is no more any taboo about what Ukraine can do with the weapons the NATO countries have provided.
Lately, the CIA began to brazenly speak about all that, too. The New York Times featured an exclusive news article Monday that a CIA—supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years going back to the coup in Kiev in 2014, that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border.
Suffice to say, while on the diplomatic track, Russia’s repeated attempts to halt the fighting have been ignored by the West — the Istanbul negotiations in late March 2022; Putin’s proposal for a freeze on frontline movements and a ceasefire as early as autumn 2022, and then again in September 2023 — the CIA and Pentagon have been working hard to achieve victory at all costs.
Even after September 2023, Putin signalled willingness to freeze the current frontline and move to a ceasefire and even communicated this through a number of channels, including through foreign governments that have good relations with both Russia and the US. But the faction that wants to crush Russia militarily at all costs has prevailed. Austin’s remark on Friday suggests that this passion seems to be impervious to facts on the ground.
Make no mistake, on February 24, Canada and Italy joined the UK, Germany, France and Denmark to sign 10-year security agreements with Kiev. These agreements underscore a collective commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty and its aspirations to join the NATO military alliance, implying that their aim is a long-term confrontation with Russia. And Europe is now discussing the deployment of boots on the ground in Ukraine.
In this foreboding backdrop, what is it that Li Hui can hope to achieve as he meets up with the deputy head of the department Mikhail Galuzin, a middle ranking Russian diplomat in the foreign ministry, on March 3? Succinctly put, while China’s interest in resolving the Ukrainian crisis is not in doubt, Li Hui’s “shuttle diplomacy” can only be seen as an effort to understand the current positions of the parties, as the situation has changed since May 2023 when he last touched base — and the fact remains that there are active discussions about further steps regarding the conflict in the West after the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Conceivably, this upgrade of the opinions of the parties will enable Beijing to make decisions about its actions. A potential Europe trip by President Xi Jinping is also being talked about that may include France.
China is painstakingly rebuilding trust with the European powers and both sides eye pragmatic cooperation despite geopolitical frictions. China remains intrigued by Macron’s advocacy of Europe’s “strategic autonomy.” Meanwhile, the spectre of Donald Trump haunts both Europe and China, which, hopefully, may boost the latter’s chances at winning Europe’s trust.
The unity of the Resistance from the river to the sea is not only inspiring from afar, but has yielded practical results for the Palestinians.
By Ganna Eid of Al Mayadeen
Daud Abdullah wrote an erudite and comprehensive analysis of Hamas’s foreign policy which was released by the Afro-Middle East Center (AMEC) in 2020. The majority of the writing was done in 2019, and thus there are a few lacunae based on the last 5 years of world affairs.
On the world scale, the Covid-19 pandemic rocked production, distribution, and public health sectors; the Russian special military operation in Ukraine gave us the first of a series of likely wars in the decline of Atlanticist hegemony. In Palestine, the “Unity Intifada” — also known as Seif Al-Quds battle–highlighted the connectivity of the various Resistance factions within Palestine.
Now, today, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and its aftermath have changed the regional geometry, with even more unity among all factions of the Axis of Resistance across the region.
I will first analyze some of Abdullah’s policy prescriptions for Hamas based on the world situation in 2020, and then see to what extent these policy prescriptions have been undertaken by the Islamic movement or to what extent they still require action. In this article, three elements of Hamas’s foreign policy stick out to me: their relations with Russia and China, the shifts and reconfigurations of the Axis of Resistance, and finally, Hamas’s ability to politically and diplomatically maneuver after October 7th.
Russian FM Lavrov meets with Hamas politburo members Khaled Meshal and Osama Hamdan, Moscow, circa 2015
The first topic to discuss revolves around Hamas’s relations with Russia and China.
Abdullah’s analysis of Hamas’s relations with Russia and China is one of the most honest, sober, and important analyses I have read in some time. With reference to Russia, Abdullah points out that early on in Hamas’s existence, Russia was willing to break with the iron grip of the Quartet and defend Hamas from the ‘terrorist’ label. Hamas officials and delegates have gone to Moscow on a number of occasions, the latest being in early 2024. At these meetings, Hamas has been treated as a regular political party and a representative of the Palestinians, which has afforded the movement and its leaders meetings with high-ranking officials in Russia, such as Sergey Lavrov.
Yet, the two-headed eagle of Russia stands at a crossroads still. While Ukraine has fallen out of the news cycle, the war is slowing down and there have been some signals of a peace treaty in the near future. Putin–and Russia–understand that the Ukrainian regime are puppets of the imperialists tasked with bringing down the Eurasian superpower, yet this analysis is not extended to “Israel”. Why is this? Is it that a great many “Israeli” citizens are of Russian origin? Is it because Putin, like the double-headed eagle of Russia’s standard, is balancing his role as the post-Soviet liberal statesman and his role as the Eurasianist Hercules whose sword hovers over the Gordian Knot of NATO imperialism? This delicate balancing act will have to come to an end, especially with the carnage wrought by “Israel” and the USA in Gaza today.
Armed Fatah militants reading copies of ‘Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung,’ Jordan, 1970
With reference to China, Abdullah does not spare the People’s Republic from criticism of their position vis-a-vis Palestine and Hamas. While China–like Russia–has from the start shielded Hamas from the ‘terrorist’ label, and has treated Hamas as a legitimate governing party, they are involved in their own balancing act.
China has extensive trade relations with the Zionist colony, and uses this along with their recognition of Hamas as a means to try and enter the region as a ‘fair and honest peace broker’. While their brokering of rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia is laudable, China is yet to use their global clout to help isolate and sanction the Zionists. It still clings to the dead and buried ‘two-state’ solution as their official position.
Yet as Abdullah points out, the relationship between the more radical Chinese intelligentsia and the Chinese state is a close one, and one which Hamas should exploit:
As things stand, China’s intelligentsia are increasingly questioning whether the ‘keep a low profile’ policy is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. In this context, Hamas has nothing to lose and everything to gain by positioning itself to benefit from changes that seem imminent in China’s foreign policy.
The above quote from Abdullah is one with which I agree; Chinese intellectuals, such as Zhang Weiwei and Minqi Li, are theorizing multipolarity and the ongoing fall of US hegemony. The Chinese intelligentsia are also involved in President Xi’s ideological campaigns in the PLA, which aim to politicize the army and involve them further in socialist construction. The growing rift in Sino-US relations is an opportunity for Hamas and the Palestinian national movement.
Hamas’s reconciliation with the Assad government in Damascus is an important development after the two parties had differing stances on the civil war and eventual proxy war in Syria in 2012. This subsequently improved relations between Iran and Hamas, which had suffered after 2012 as well. The ability of Hezbollah, and indeed Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah himself, to orchestrate this reconciliation shows the seriousness and importance of the Arab strategic depth.
A driving force of this reconciliation was the 2021 ‘Unity Intifada’ and the shifts on the ground in the region which have strengthened the Resistance. The 2021 ‘Unity Intifada’ is important for a number of reasons, primarily that the Resistance in Gaza–the liberated land base from which the national liberation struggle is being launched–and the Resistance in the occupied territories went hand-in-hand into battle for the first time since the Hamas-Fatah split in 2007.
The unity of the Resistance from the river to the sea is not only inspiring from afar, but has yielded practical results for the Palestinians. The internal crises of the Zionist colony highlight the contradictory trend: while the Palestinians are uniting after years of division, the Zionists are at each other’s throats. The unity of the Resistance and the disintegration of social relations in the colony continue today, in the midst of Operation Al Aqsa Flood.
Since October 7, Hamas and other Resistance factions inside Palestine (notably PIJ, PFLP, and DFLP) have relentlessly unleashed a guerilla war on the Zionist colony. This has not led to military victories alone; Hamas has the potential to come out of this in a better position diplomatically. As with all things, this depends on the balance of forces. Hamas has insisted that the only end which they see fit in any ‘ceasefire’ is an all-for-all prisoner swap. The magnitude of Palestinian prisoners compared to “Israeli” ones is already a numeric victory if this is to happen, and it seems that the Zionists may have to concede to this because their American masters are attempting to tighten the leash. Yet, why should Hamas stop there? The Ansar Allah forces in Sanaa have shown their willingness to disrupt global trade in support of Palestine.
Hezbollah is showing signs of escalating battles on the northern front, which is not an irrational fear for the Zionists given what happened in 2000 and 2006. So how could Hamas secure a larger victory? If the Resistance is able to enfeeble the Zionists and settle a temporary truce at the 1967 borders, that then increases the size of the land base and improves the logistics for launching a war of total liberation because there will be some territorial contiguity. This would also shift internal developments in Palestine, such as the potential formation of a unity government which gets rid of the comprador elements of Fatah. Indeed, PCPSR polling shows that the corrupt PA is as unpopular as ever.
The potential creation of a unity government then opens diplomatic space for powerful countries like Russia and China to support one democratic state, which they currently do not. As the battle for Palestine rages on, we will indeed see how Hamas’s foreign policy space waxes and wanes. As always, the patient and calculated tenor of the Axis of Resistance will provide us with a beacon toward total liberation.
≈≈
This is a timely article reviewing internal political maneuvering and realigments amongst the Palestinians. In two days, on February 29th, all Palestinian factions are hosted in Moscow in the attempt to create a unity government presenting a common political front.
By Brian Berletic at The New Atlas.
“Strategery” in short:
How did this same approach work for UkroNazis on land?? Insanity: doing the same task repeatedly with heightened expectations of success. And they face a third enemy’s overwhelming advantage — numerical, logistic, moral ground — arguably even more against China as Taiwan is an official subcomponent of China.
≈≈
Video Description:
References:
He summarizes the nuttiness and insolence of the dying Old Order, out of its depth, overstretched, outgunned, outmanned, and yet charging into war against all mankind on too many fronts to count:
“they’ve created all these dilemmas for China, and constantly holding the prospect of peace and stability in the region hostage, trying to force China into simply submitting to the US-led international Order, allowing the US to reassert itself and prevent the rise of China — surpassing of the United States by China — [and] the rise of multipolarism. That is why the US is creating these dilemmas. They’ve created a similar system of dilemmas for Europe and Russia, and also in the Middle East as we can see….”
For a crazed bluff to work, there must be demonstrable capability based on appreciable reality. And certainly not while the Ukie corpses are still smoking nor the beleaguered zionists screaming their last.
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A moment of truth for the West and the whole world
In the spring, somewhere in March-April, but hardly later in May, a moment of truth comes for the West. The point is not only that while maintaining the current dynamics (and why would she change?) by this time, the Ukrainian front will roll back very noticeably (per kilometers per day along the entire or almost the entire line) and non-stop. In the worst case scenario, such a development of events was predicted and prepared for it.
We have repeatedly considered various options worked out by Washington, which came down to one general decision — due to the delay in hostilities in Ukraine, creating a new military conflict or without it (just by maintaining a high level of tension and deploying troops in border areas) to ensure post-Ukrainian deterrence of Russia by Europe, after which to switch to China.
Each time I considered the next option, I wrote: « If they succeed, but they will try very hard ». They tried. But the logic of the development of events turned out to be stronger than their efforts, and now all the plans to contain Russia in the West by creating a stalemate in a conflict situation turned out to be almost unrealizable.
To maintain the resistance of the Armed Forces by introducing the own forces of NATO countries to Ukraine, the West is catastrophically late with the deployment of new contingents in Poland and the Baltic states. New divisions cannot simply be placed in a clean field — it is necessary to provide them with military towns, a repair base, warehouses, training grounds, etc. All this is not, nor are there any troops ready for operational deployment on a long-term basis (American are needed in the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East, and European armies, due to many years of chronic lack of recruits, were reduced to almost a trained composition).
The presence of certain parts of constant readiness does not change the essence of the matter. Today, the readiness of the armies of European NATO members for a real war is lower than that of the Russian army in the most difficult time « of the 90s ». The unfolding Russian offensive and the stubborn intransigence of Russian diplomacy ( not wanting to listen to any world if it is not on Russian conditions ) finally convinced the West that, that the introduction of symbolic contingents to Ukraine to designate the red line will not solve the problem. The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation will not stop, but simply move « allies » Ukraine together with the Armed Forces themselves, putting the West before the need to choose between recognition of a shameful defeat, with a defeat on the battlefield of NATO units proper, and the beginning with Russia of a full-fledged war, which the European armies cannot wage, and the Americans have no strength for it,for they are going to engage in China at this moment.
Perhaps the Europeans would have somehow solved this problem. But there is something worse than a shortage of troops. EU countries have run out of military equipment and shells. Everything that was gone to Ukraine. The rest is enough for a week or two (with a very economical approach for a month) of hostilities, industry is not only able to satisfy the needs of the front, but even to replenish the spent stocks it takes two to three years, according to optimistic estimates. The Americans have some reserves (it is not clear how large), but they are again needed in the Chinese direction and to help Israel, which, unlike the initial optimistic statements, said, that the Hamas war will last at least until 2025 (and there, except for Hamas, who want to pinch the Tel Aviv tail — car and small cart).
In general, there is no one to fight Europeans and nothing, and there is no one to help them in this grief. Hence, all American architecture « Russian containment » in the West is crumbling.
Moreover, there is no certainty even that European countries will be able to maintain the sanctions mechanism for a long time. US Allied governments are under severe pressure not only from the opposition, but also from the vast majority of their own citizens, who, in unison with French farmers, say: « We are for continuing to support Ukraine, but not at the expense of the interests of their own population. If there is not enough money for everything, then first the problems of our own citizens should be solved, and only then will it be possible to think if something remains for Ukraine ».
Among other things, it means, that even the late (for Kiev belatedly catastrophic) EU decision to allocate 50 billion euros to Ukraine for five years (which will need to be reapproved every year) with a high degree of probability may not be implemented. Mass strikes and protest marches of workers, on the one hand, and the growing popularity of the opposition, on the other, leave very little room for maneuver for pro-American governments in the EU. An attempt to follow the power path of the prohibitions of opposition parties, which the Scholz government in Germany is hinting at, fraught with the emergence in Europe of its « Texas » with unpredictable (but in any case catastrophic for the current system) results.
The United States cannot leave the Russian front unattended and focus on China. In this case, Russia without any war (military operations in Ukraine will quickly end, and Europe will pretend that it just passed by) will be the leader of Europe (at least most of it), much faster than the United States will be able to achieve some kind of hypothetical success in the Chinese direction. It is also impossible to postpone the suppression of China and focus on Russia. In this case, China will win in Asia much faster than the United States can hope to at least stabilize the situation in Europe, reaching a mutually blocked political position in the Russian direction (which they are not a fact, what can they create).
Failure in any of the directions devalues even victory in another, since the overall balance is not in favor of the United States. But the fact is that we can’t talk about Washington’s victory in this option: the best that Americans can hope for is — a draw in one direction (without peace, with armed confrontation, but without war) with an American defeat on the other.
The United States is in a strategic impasse, which is reinforced by the fact that the situation around Texas has shown: the White House does not control the situation within the United States and cannot count on consolidated support not only for the population, but also for elites, he decide on a big war.
The United States lost the main thing — they lost time. Donbass paid for this victory with his lives, while for many years the Russians in Ukraine who remained under Nazi occupation paid for it. During the Great Patriotic War, Smolensk and Kiev, for two years, Minsk for three years, part of the Baltic states were under occupation for four years (until the end of the war), and Leningrad survived the blockade for three years, so that the country can gather strength, exhaust the enemy and win not one battle, but the whole war.
The West has no good solution. He (in the person of the ruling elites) cannot agree to peace on Russian terms, but he does not have the strength to continue raising rates: he no longer pulls a big war not only on the outside, but also according to internal indicators (the population may rebel, and the army — will not fulfill the order if it comes to a big war, especially under the curtain of cadence of unpopular governments, on the eve of the elections they lost in advance).
Moreover, the West is not able to wage a proxy war against Russia beyond 2024. Ukrainian proxies are ending. Even if they manage to hold out not only until the fall, but until December 2024 (which is very doubtful), the end of Ukraine is still near, and to replace them, the West was not able to prepare yet another one who wanted to die for the United States in a proxy war with Russia.
This is a civilizational catastrophe — the first since the fall of the Roman Empire (except for the defeat of American Indian civilizations, which from the point of view of the traditional European approach to history were peripheral and did not affect global processes). The civilization of the traditional West is collapsing before our eyes. On his example, we can understand how not only Roman, but also Assyrian and other military civilizations collapsed, yesterday, still prosperous and in a matter of years, suddenly running from the masters of the world to garbage under the feet of new winners.
// //
There is another problem to which we have devoted a lot of discussions, but which is updated in connection with the sharp weakening of the West and its entry into the finish line leading to the civilizational catastrophe. Against the background of this huge tragedy, no one knows what to do with the remnants of Ukraine.
On the one hand, no one wants to set a precedent for the liquidation of the state — of the UN founder by decision of an international conference (will anyone else be lucky?) On the other hand, no one has the desire or resources to contain « independent Ukraine », which not only cannot exist independently, but tightly inscribed in the old outgoing civilizational system (as a resource of the dying part, used to restrain the growth of new forces) and without this old civilizational system, it is a political and historical misunderstanding, interfering with everything and not inspiring anyone.
Russia has no answer to this question (more precisely, there are many of them, but not one has yet been designated as the final solution). There is no answer to this question in the West. Perhaps against the background of « the death of Atlantis » of the modern West, this issue will be decided by itself (as the Angles, Saxons and Uuts decided in the 5th century the fate of Roman Britain left by legions). But not a fact.
At an interesting time we live.
(machine translation)
Journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar joins to discuss the latest in the widening U.S. war in the Middle East, a coming Gaza ceasefire, how travels to Russia , the conflict in Ukraine and much more in the multipolar world!
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Journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar:
https://t.me/rocknrollgeopolitics on Telegram
https://twitter.com/RealPepeEscobar on Twitter (X)
Danny Haiphong YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@geopoliticshaiphong
There will be no peaceful road towards the new Westphalian world order. Fasten your seat belts – it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
By Pepe Escobar at Strategic Culture
A new book by scholar Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World Order, out in mid-February, asks the make-or-break question of the young 21st century: will the Hegemon accept a new geopolitical reality, or will it go Captain Ahab on Moby Dick and drag us all to the depths of a – nuclear – abyss?
An extra touch of poetic beauty is that the analysis is conducted by a Scandinavian. Diesen is a professor at the University of Southeast Norway (USN) and an associate editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal. He had a stint at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, working closely with the inimitable Sergey Karaganov.
It goes without saying that European MSM won’t touch him; rabid yells – “Putinista!” – prevail, including in Norway, where he’s been a prime target of cancel culture.
That’s irrelevant, anyway. What matters is that Diesen, an affable, unfailingly polite man and an ultra-sharp scholar, is aligned with the rarified cream of the crop who is asking the questions that really matter; among them, whether we are heading towards a Eurasian-Westphalian world order.
Apart from a meticulous deconstruction of the proxy war in Ukraine that devastatingly debunks, with proven facts, the official NATOstan narrative, Diesen offers a concise, easily accessible mini-history of how we got here.
He starts to make the case harking back to the Silk Roads: “The Silk Road was an early model of globalization, although it did not result in a common world order as the civilizations of the world were primarily connected to nomadic intermediaries.”
The demise of the Heartland-based Silk Road, actually roads, was caused by the rise of the thalassocratic European powers reconnecting the world in a different way. Yet the hegemony of the collective West could only be fully achieved by applying Divide and Rule across Eurasia.
We did not in fact have “five centuries of western dominance”, according to Diesen: it was more like three, or even two (see, for instance, the work of Andre Gunder Frank). In a historical Long View that barely registers.
What is indeed The Big Picture now is that “the unique world order” produced by controlling “the vast Eurasian continent from the maritime periphery is coming to an end”.
Mackinder is hit by a train
Diesen hits the nail on the head when it comes to the Russia-China strategic partnership – on which the overwhelmingly majority of European intellectuals is clueless (a crucial exception is French historian, demographer and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, whose latest book I analyzed here.)
With a lovely on the road formulation, Diesen shows how “Russia can be considered the successor of the Mongolian nomads as the last custodian of the Eurasian land corridor”, while China revives the Ancient Silk Roads “with economic connectivity”. In consequence, “a powerful Eurasian gravitational pull is thus reorganizing the supercontinent and the wider world.”
Poviding context, Diesen needs to engage in an obligatory detour to the basics of the Great Game between the Russian and British empires. What stands out is how Moscow already was pivoting to Asia all the way to the late 19th century, when Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte started to develop a groundbreaking road map for a Eurasia political economy, “borrowing from Alexander Hamilton and Friedrich List.”
Witte “wanted to end Russia’s role as an exporter of natural resources to Europe as it resembled ‘the relations of colonial countries with their metropolises’”.
And that implies going back to Dostoyevsky, who argued that “Russians are as much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans (…) It will be better for us to seek alliances with the Asiatics.” Dostoyevsky meets Putin-Xi.
Diesen also needs to go through the obligatory references to Mackinder’s “heartland” obsession – which is the basis of all Anglo-American geopolitics for the past hundred and twenty years.
Mackinder was spooked by railway development – especially the Trans-Siberian by the Russians – as it enabled Moscow to “emulate the nomadic skills of the Scythians, Huns and Mongols” that were essential to control most of Eurasia.
Mackinder was particularly focused on railways acting “chiefly as feeders to ocean-going commerce”. Ergo, being a thalassocratic power was not enough: “The heartland is the region to which under modern conditions, sea power can be refused access.”
And that’s what leads to the Rosetta Stone of Anglo-American geopolitics: to “prevent the emergence of a hegemon or a group of states capable of dominating Europe and Eurasia that could threaten the dominant maritime power.”
That explains everything from WWI and WWII to the permanent NATO obsession in preventing a solid rapprochement between Germany and Russia, by any means necessary.
The Little Multipolar Helmsman
Diesen offers a succinct perspective of Russian Eurasianists of the 1920s such as Trubetskoi and Savitsky, who were promoting an alternative path to the USSR.
They conceptualized that with Anglo-American thalassocracy applying Divide and Rule in Russia, what was needed was a Eurasian political economy based on mutual cooperation: a stark prefiguration of the Russia-China drive to multipolarity.
Savitsky in fact could have been writing today: “Eurasia has previously played a unifying role in the Old World. Contemporary Russia, absorbing this tradition”, must abandon war as a method of unification.
Cue to post-Maidan in 2014. Moscow finally got the message that trying to build a Greater Europe “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” was a non-starter. Thus the new concept of Greater Eurasian Partnership was born. Sergey Karaganov, with whom Diesen worked at the Higher School of Economics, was the father of the concept.
Greater Eurasia Partnership repositions Russia “from the periphery of Europe and Asia to the center of a large super-region.” In short, a pivot to the East – and the consolidation of the Russia-China partnership.
Diesen dug up an extraordinary passage in the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, proving how the Little Helmsman in 1990 was a visionary prefiguring multipolar China:
“In the future when the world becomes three-polar, four-polar or five-polar, the Soviet Union, no matter how weakened it may be and even if some of its republics withdraw from it, will still be one pole. In the so-called multipolar world, China too will be a pole (…) Our foreign policies remain the same: first, opposing hegemonism and power politics and safeguarding world peace; and second, working to establish a new international political order and a new international economic order.”
Diesen breaks it down, noting how China has to a certain extent “replicated the three-pillared American System of the early 19th century, in which the U.S. developed a manufacturing base, physical transportation infrastructure, and a national bank to counter British economic hegemony.”
Enter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); the AIIB; the de-dollarization drive; the China International Payment System (CIPS); increased use of yuan in international trade; the use of national currencies; Made in China 2025; The Digital Silk Road; and last but not least, BRICS 10 and the NDB, the BRICS development bank.
Russia matched some of it – as in the Eurasia Development Bank (EDB) of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and in advancing the harmonization of financial arrangements of BRI and EAEU projects via the SCO.
Diesen is one of the very few Western analysts who actually understands the drive to multipolarity: “BRICS+ is anti-hegemony and not anti-Western, as the objective is to create a multipolar system and not assert collective dominance over the West.”
Diesen also contends that the emerging Eurasian World Order is “seemingly based on conservative principles.” That’s correct, as the Chinese system is drenched in Confucianism (social integration, stability, harmonious relationships, respect for tradition and hierarchy), part of the keen sense of belonging to a distinct, sophisticated civilization: that’s the foundation of Chinese nation-building.
Can’t bring Russia-China down
Diesen’s detailed analysis of the Ukraine proxy war, “a predictable consequence of an unsustainable world order”, is extrapolated to the battleground where the future, new world order is being decided; it is “either global hegemony or Westphalian multipolarity.”
Everyone with a brain by now knows how Russia absorbed and re-transformed everything thrown by the collective West after the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO). The problem is the rarified plutocracy that really runs the show will always refuse to acknowledge reality, as Diesen frames it: “Irrespective of the outcome of the war, the war has already become the graveyard of liberal hegemony.”
The overwhelming majority of the Global South clearly sees that even as what Ray McGovern indelibly defined as MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex) cast the Russia-China partnership as the main “threats” – in reality those that created the “gravitational pull to reorganize the world order towards multipolarity” – they can’t bring Russia-China down geoeconomically.
So there’s no question “the conflicts of the future world order will continue to be militarized.” That’s where we are at the crossroads. There will be no peaceful road towards to Westphalian world order. Fasten your seat belts – it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.
Lavrov: “They believe that for 500 years they have ruled the world as they wish, living at the expense of others, and they think this should continue…”
by Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar at Indian Punchline
There is an old proverb that when misfortunes come, they come in battalions. Coming on top of reports of American soldiers going down like nine-pins on a drone strike against the super secret CIA station for intelligence and covert operations on the Syrian-Jordanian border, ’nyet’ is the word from Beijing to the Biden administration’s entreaties seeking intervention with Tehran to rein in the Houthis of Yemen, against the foreboding backdrop of the Axis of Resistance expanding its operations against American and Israeli interests.
President Biden deputed his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to handle this highly delicate mission with Beijing, instead of the US’s top diplomat Antony Blinken. Sullivan is uniquely placed to switch roles between the US’ domestic and foreign policies. He is a trusted hatchet man of the president and is actively involved in Biden’s re-election campaign.
Sullivan stayed overnight in Thailand On Friday/Saturday to launch his charm offensive vis-a-vis Foreign Minister Wang Yi. But he came away with no sign that China is willing to use its influence with Tehran.
Later, an unattributable media briefing by a senior NSC official via teleconference was hastily arranged by the White House to cover Sullivan’s back side. It brought home that reading the Chinese tea leaves is an art in itself. As the NSC official put it, “Beijing says they are raising this with the Iranians … but we’re certainly going to wait before we comment further on how effectively we think they’re actually raising it.”
Sullivan seems to have hit a brick wall. This is curious because the Biden Administration should have learnt from previous experience with Beijing in trying to prod China to convince close ally North Korea to scale back its nuclear weapons programme or roll back its “no limits” friendship with Russia over Ukraine.
Actually, South Korea’s military said on Sunday that North Korea fired several cruise missiles, extending a streak in weapons tests that are worsening tensions with the US and reflecting Pyongyang’s efforts to expand its arsenal of weapons designed to overwhelm remote US targets in the Pacific, including Guam!
Evidently, the Biden administration failed to comprehend that Beijing was under no obligation to use its influence on Pyongyang for serving American interests. It is sheer naïveté to expect Beijing to fall for selective engagement on issues that aim to buy time for the president to give his best shot in the upcoming November elections.
What does China get in return? The question doesn’t occur to the Biden Administration. The assumption in DC is that China is on an ego trip and begging for selective engagement with the No 1 military and economic power on the planet. On the contrary, China too has some legitimate demands to make — such as, for instance, the US not inciting Taiwan surreptitiously to travel on the path of independence, or allowing China a level playing field for setting new technology standards at the global level as an innovative country.
Interestingly, compared to the taciturn readout by the White House on the Sullivan-Wang Yi meeting in Thailand, the Chinese Foreign Ministry issued a candid full-bodied statement on Saturday to set the record straight and pre-empt the spin doctors in the Biden White House from scripting some false narrative. The relevant excerpts from the Chinese statement titled Wang Yi held a meeting with Sullivan, assistant to the President of the United States for National Security Affairs are reproduced below:
(Unofficial translation)
“The two sides conducted frank, substantive and fruitful strategic communications around the implementation of the consensus of the San Francisco meeting between the heads of state of the two countries and the proper handling of important and sensitive issues in Sino-US relations.
“Wang Yi said that this year marks the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States.The two sides should take this as an opportunity to summarise their experiences and learn lessons, treat each other equally rather than condescendingly, seek common ground while preserving differences rather than highlighting differences, effectively respect rather than harm each other’s core interests, and work together to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation to build a correct way for China and the United States to get along.
“Wang Yi emphasised that the Taiwan issue is China’s internal affairs, and Taiwan’s regional elections cannot change the basic fact that Taiwan is a part of China.The biggest risk to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait is “Taiwan independence”, and the biggest challenge to Sino-US relations is also “Taiwan independence”.The United States must abide by the one-China principle and the three joint communiqués between China and the United States, implement the commitment not to support “Taiwan independence” into actions, and support China’s peaceful reunification.
“ Wang Yi pointed out that all countries have national security concerns, but they must be justified and reasonable. They cannot engage in pan-politicisation and pan-security, let alone curb and suppress the development of other countries.The two sides agreed to further discuss the boundary between national security and economic activities…
“The two sides also discussed international and regional issues such as the Middle East, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula, and the South China Sea.”
The Chinese readout did not even make any specific mention of the Houthis or Tehran! Instead, it underscored the perceived threat of Taiwan independence as “the biggest challenge to China—US relations.” And, furthermore, it reiterated Beijing’s concerns that the US is using export restrictions “to contain and suppress the development of other countries” and said that the two countries will discuss “the boundary between national security and economic activities” in future meetings.
What do we make out of this? Simply put, China’s reluctance to use its diplomatic and economic heft to support US moves to address the Red Sea disruptions by reining in the Axis of Resistance (or restrain North Korea’s behaviour) underscores the limitations of the Biden administration’s diplomatic outreach efforts or charm offensive to win over Beijing and get it committed to a selective engagement over Washington’s priorities on flash points that might otherwise become raging controversies in electoral politics till November.
By the way, the Chinese readout also acknowledged that there are areas where Beijing is indeed interested in an engagement with the US at this transformative point in time — viz., the joint implementation of the so-called “San Francisco Vision,” which translates as:
How come the US and its western allies get it all horribly wrong? For an answer, the final word must go to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov who said in New York while on a brief visit to the UN hqs last weekend:
“They believe that for 500 years they have ruled the world as they wish, living at the expense of others, and they think this should continue. This logic completely ignores the objective reality, in particular the fact that the vast majority of former colonies have gained independence, become aware of their national interests, want to strengthen their national, cultural and religious identity and are growing so fast that they have left the West behind – at least the BRICS members are.”
The bottom line is, Beijing will not fall for US attempts to create misperceptions in China’s relations with Iran or North Korea. China has no intentions to help the US to pull its chestnuts out of the fire in West Asia or the Far East. The international environment is rather fraught and Beijing has set its compass to be on the right side of history.
What Putin, Xi and Raisi have been explaining to the Global South, explicitly or in quite subtle ways, is that we are right in the crux of a civilizational war.
by Pepe Escobar at Sputnik
In the late 1930s, with WWII in motion, and only months before his assassination, Leon Trotsky already had a vision of what the future Empire of Chaos would be up to.
“For Germany it was a question of ‘organizing Europe’. The United States must ‘organize’ the world. History is bringing mankind face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism…Under one or another pretext and slogan the United States will intervene in the tremendous clash in order to maintain its world dominion.”
We all know what happened next. Now we are under a new volcano that even Trotsky could not have identified: a declining United States faced with the Russia-China “threat”. And once again the entire planet is affected by major moves in the geopolitical chessboard.
The Straussian neocons in charge of US foreign policy could never accept Russia-China leading the way towards a multipolar world. For now we have NATO’s perpetual expansionism as their strategy to debilitate Russia, and Taiwan as their strategy to debilitate China.
Yet in these past two years, the vicious proxy war in Ukraine only accelerated the transition towards a multipolar, Eurasia-driven world order.
With the indispensable help of Prof. Michael Hudson, let’s briefly recap the 5 key variables that are conditioning the current transition.
Losers Don’t Dictate Terms
1. The stalemate: That’s the new, obsessive US narrative on Ukraine – on steroids. Confronted with the upcoming, cosmic NATO humiliation in the battlefield, the White House and the State Dept. had to – literally – improvise.
Moscow though is unfazed. The Kremlin has set the terms a long time ago: total surrender, and no Ukraine as part of NATO. To “negotiate”, from the Russia point of view, is to accept these terms.
And if the deciding powers in Washington opt for turbo-charging the weaponization of Kiev, or to unleash “the most heinous provocations in order to change the course of events”, as asserted this week by the head of the SVR, Sergey Naryshkin, fine.
The road ahead will be bloody. In case the usual suspects sideline popular Zaluzhny and install Budanov as the head of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the AFU will be under total control of the CIA – and not NATO generals, as it’s still the case.
This might prevent a military coup against the sweaty sweatshirt puppet in Kiev. Yet things will get much uglier. Ukraine will go Total Guerrilla, with only two objectives: to attack Russian civilians and civilian infrastructure. Moscow, of course, is fully aware of the dangers.
Meanwhile, chatterbox overdrive in several latitudes suggest that NATO may even be getting ready for a partition of Ukraine. Whatever form that might take, losers do not dictate conditions: Russia does.
As for EU politicos, predictably, they are in total panic, believing that after mopping up Ukraine, Russia will become even more of a “threat” to Europe. Nonsense. Not only Moscow couldn’t give a damn to what Europe “thinks”; the last thing Russia wants or needs is to annex Baltic or Eastern European hysteria. Moreover, even Jens Stoltenberg admitted “NATO sees no threat from Russia toward any of its territories.”
2. BRICS: Since the start of 2024, this is The Big Picture: the Russian presidency of BRICS+ — which translates as a particle accelerator towards multipolarity. The Russia-China strategic partnership will be increasing actual production, in several fields, while Europe plunges into depression, unleashed by the Perfect Storm of sanctions blowback against Russia and German de-industrialization. And it’s far from over, as Washington is also ordering Brussels to sanction China across the spectrum.
As Prof. Michael Hudson frames it, we are right in the middle of “the whole split of the world and the turning towards China, Russia, Iran, BRICS”, united in “an attempt to reverse, undo, and roll back the whole colonial expansion that’s occurred over the last five centuries.”
Or, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov defined at the UN Security Council this process of BRICS leaving Western bullies behind, the changing world order is like “a playground scuffle – which the West is losing.”
Bye Bye, Soft Power
3. The Lone Emperor: The “stalemate” – actually losing a war – is directly linked to its compensation: the Empire squeezing and shrinking a vassalized Europe. But even as you exercise nearly total control over all these relatively wealthy vassals, you lose the Global South, for good: if not all their leaders, certainly the overwhelming majority of public opinion. The icing in the toxic cake is to support a genocide followed by the whole planet in real time. Bye bye, soft power.
4. De-dollarization: All across the Global South, they did the math: if the Empire and its EU vassals can just steal over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves – from a top nuclear/military power – they can do it to anyone, and they will.
The key reason Saudi Arabia, now a BRICS 10 member, is being so meek on the genocide in Gaza is because their hefty US dollar reserves are hostage to the Hegemon.
And yet the caravan moving away from the US dollar will only keep growing in 2024: that will depend on crucial crossover deliberations inside the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and BRICS 10.
5. Garden and Jungle: What Putin and Xi have essentially been telling the Global South – including the energy-rich Arab world – is quite simple. If you want improved trade and economic growth, who’re you gonna link to?
So we’re back to the “garden and jungle” syndrome – first coined by imperial Britain orientalist Rudyard Kipling. Both the British concept of “white man’s burden” and the American concept of “Manifest Destiny” derive from the “garden and jungle” metaphor.
NATOstan, and hardly all of it, is supposed to be the garden. The Global South is the jungle. Michael Hudson again: as it stands, the jungle is growing, but the garden isn’t growing “because its philosophy is not industrialization. Its philosophy is to make monopoly rents, meaning rents that you make in your sleep without producing value. You just have a privilege of a right to collect money on a monopoly technology that you have.”
The difference now, compared to all those decades ago of an imperial free lunch, is “an immense shift of technological advance”, away from North America and the US, to China, Russia and selected nodes across Asia.
Forever Wars. And No Plan B
If we combine all these variants – stalemate; BRICS; the Lone Emperor; de-dollarization; garden and jungle – in search of the most probable scenario ahead, it’s easy to see that the only “way out” for a cornered Empire is, what else, the default modus operandi: Forever Wars.
And that brings us to the current American aircraft carrier in West Asia, totally out of control yet always supported by the Hegemon, aiming for a multi-front war against the whole Axis of Resistance: Palestine, Hezbollah, Syria, Iraqi militias, Ansarullah in Yemen, and Iran.
In a sense we’re back to the immediate post-9/11, when what the neocons really wanted was not Afghanistan, but the invasion of Iraq: not only to control the oil (which in the end they didn’t) but, in Michael Hudson’s analysis, “to essentially create America’s foreign legion in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq.” Now, “America has two armies that it’s using to fight in the Near East, the ISIS/al-Qaeda foreign legion (Arabic-speaking foreign legion) and the Israelis.”
Hudson’s intuition of ISIS and Israel as parallel armies is priceless: they both fight the Axis of Resistance, and never (italics mine) fight each other. The Straussian neocon plan, as tawdry as it gets, essentially is a variant of the “fight to the last Ukrainian”: to “fight to the last Israeli” on the way to the Holy Grail, which is to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran (copyright John McCain) and provoke regime change.
As much as the “plan” did not work in Iraq or Ukraine, it won’t work against the Axis of Resistance.
What Putin, Xi and Raisi have been explaining to the Global South, explicitly or in quite subtle ways, is that we are right in the crux of a civilizational war.
Michael Hudson has done a lot to bring down such an epic struggle to practical terms. Are we heading towards what I described as techno-feudalism – which is the AI format of rent-seeking turbo-neoliberalism? Or are we heading to something similar to the origins of industrial capitalism?
Michael Hudson characterizes an auspicious horizon as “raising living standards instead of imposing IMF financial austerity on the dollar block”: devising a system that Big Finance, Big Bank, Big Pharma and what Ray McGovern memorably coined as the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex) cannot control. Alea jacta est.
By Jim Nash A U.S. privacy case in state court that accuses a Chinese surveillance camera maker of “corporate voyeurism” has been narrowed to the...
Sprawling Biometric Privacy Legal Assault on Camera Maker Churns On
Joining us today is @CarlZha , a Chinese-born political commentator and the host of the “Silk And Steel Podcast.” We’ll be delving into Zelensky getting shut down by China at Davos, the Taiwan Elections, and exploring safe methods for traversing the Red Sea.
He discusses at length:
Even Lavrov was forced to use the Palestinian Authority as official face of Palestine at the UN, despite being discredited and reviled by Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza in most recent polls, since the PLO remains the only consensual modus vivendi to enforce an urgent permanent ceasefire. Yet both Hamas and the Zionists are dead set against coexistence (and do you blame Palestinians after the frank unrepentant satanism they face??). The forms must be observed, including this two-state offer by the arabs, guaranteed to be rejected by the combined West through their zionist proxy, further exposing them. This will serve as the equivalent of the Russian Ultimatum of December 2021, with a subsequent free hand given to the Resistance Axis to enforce peace. Organized by the same Russians at the UN and through the Saudis and OIC! Priceless
Chinese Vice-Premier Liu Guozhong wins support for speech calling for overhaul of global systems in the G77 + China Summit
Jevans Nyabiage for the South China Morning Post
China rallies G77 countries for major reform of WTO and Bretton Woods at Kampala summit
China is rallying the Group of 77 developing countries to push for reform of the global governance system which – according to some leaders in Africa, Asia and Latin America – disproportionately favours the West.
Chinese vice-premier Liu Guozhong said on Sunday that developing countries “should jointly support the reform of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the international financial system”.
Liu was speaking in Kampala at the third South Summit – the decision-making body of the 134-country G77 and China, which does not consider itself a member of the grouping. Uganda also assumed chairmanship of the group at the meeting, taking over from Cuba.
China joins a growing list of countries, especially from Africa and Asia, that have been piling on the pressure for a reorganisation of the global political and economic order – especially the UN Security Council and the WTO, as well as the World Bank and the IMF.
The increasing calls for a review of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are based on concerns that the structure, location and mandate of the Bretton Woods institutions are no longer fit to deal with changing global trends.
The US played an outsize role in the creation of the IMF and World Bank and continues to command considerable influence, as one of the largest shareholders in both organisations, which are also headquartered in Washington.
Liu’s call to reform the WTO comes a few months after Chinese President Xi Jinping urged more effort in reforming the organisation, which has become the world’s largest goods trader and a key partner for more than 140 countries since China joined in 2003.
Liu, who is attending the summit as Xi’s special representative, said that it was crucial to make international development agencies more efficient in supporting countries in the Global South – broadly categorised as Latin America, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
“The collective rise of the countries of the Global South is unstoppable, yet the unjust and inequitable international political and economic order from the past continues to have lingering effects.”
Liu said that, as part of China’s initiative to reform the global financial system, Beijing had helped to establish the New Development Bank, the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Silk Road Fund.
These institutions are providing alternative lending for countries that cannot access international financial markets, and have funded multibillion projects in Asia and other overseas markets, he said.
Liu said developing countries, especially those in the Global South, should raise their representation and voices in meaningful ways to tackle the age-old problems of international governance.
At the same time, he urged developed countries to deliver on their development and climate financing commitments, and to speed up implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Goals Development (SGD) agenda.
“China supports countries of the south to realise common development,” Liu said. He added that his country was doing its part, with investments through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Global Development Initiative.
Liu highlighted the more than 3,000 belt and road projects, worth more than US$1 trillion, that China has bankrolled around the world in the past decade.
Xi had “underlined that China is a developing country and one of the Global South countries” and had stood with fellow developing countries “through thick and thin”, Liu said. He added that South-South cooperation would continue to be a priority.
Liu’s sentiments won support among the leaders present, including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who was also encouraged by Liu to nominate a special envoy for poverty eradication.
In his address, Guterres said the international system is “out of date, out of time, and out of step, reflecting a bygone age when many of your countries were colonised”.
“The United Nations Security Council is paralysed by geopolitical divisions. Its composition does not reflect the reality of today’s world. It must be reformed,” he added.
The UN chief said the global financial system, including the Bretton Woods institutions, had failed to provide a global safety net for developing countries in distress.
But he added that the Summit of the Future, taking place in New York in September, would be considering “deep reforms” to the international financial architecture.
Dennis Francis, president of the UN General Assembly, told the gathering that multilateral organisations – including the United Nations and international financial institutions – must undergo urgent reforms to better recognise and leverage the significance of the Global South.
“We need an international financial system rooted in inclusion and equity, inspiring full commitment to multilateralism, fostering SDG-aligned investments, and breaking the vicious cycles of debt and interest for developing countries,” Francis said.
In his first speech as chairman of the G77 and China, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni rallied the leaders to remain united in their demands to the international community – to support developing countries to urgently address global challenges such as poverty, hunger, the digital divide and climate change.
“As the G77 and China, we should continue to work collectively to ensure that we achieve an international economic order that is just and equitable, as envisaged 59 years ago at the founding of the group,” Museveni said.
He added that Uganda supports the urgent reform of the international financial architecture to ensure that it is fit for purpose to respond to the financing needs of developing countries.
Since its inception in 1964 as a group of 77 developing countries, the G77 has promoted economic cooperation among its member states. Beijing has provided political and financial support to the grouping since 1994.
Seifudein Adem, an Ethiopian global affairs professor at Doshisha University in Japan, said that the G77 and China, like the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), seeks to represent the interests of developing countries.
“China has almost ceased to be a part of the Third World. It is regarded today as a superpower. Yet some observers see China’s interests as aligning or at least intersecting with the interests of G77,” Adem said.
“Unlike the NAM, which suffered a crisis of purpose with the end of the Cold War, the raison d’être of G77 remains valid,” he said, pointing out that the international political and economic conditions which led to the G77’s formation are still there.
Western Cold War win? Israel’s collapse, Iran’s rise, China’s dominance & Russia’s conquest prove otherwise
Cold War II includes 4 blocs, not only 2
with thanks to Ramin Mazaheri via Ramin’s Substack
The Cold War was always only “cold” for the two main combatants – the USSR and the USA. For everyone else it was as hot as blood, and nowhere more so than in the attempted colonisation of Palestine.
It’s often forgotten that the 1947 creation of Israel is permeated with the West’s three primary Cold War goals: fending off de-colonisation (failure), destroying the rise of socialism (failure) and entrenching as many far-right reactionaries as possible to foment the 1%-er ideology of liberal democracy (successful).
The propping up of Israel immediately after the end of World War II didn’t happen by accident: it was the Western beachhead to try and ensure Western control of oil, French domination of West and North Africa, and Anglo-American control of the Indian Ocean and its passageways.
Israel is now crumbling internally and externally, and their atrocious military and diplomatic decisions ensure that it’s not a viable colony for much longer. The writing is on the wall, and the biggest graffiti reads: The West lost the Cold War.
We can imagine the incredible grudging with which The New York Times two longtime Middle East correspondents – David Sanger and Stephen Erlanger – were forced to publish the following analysis on January 7th:
“‘I see Iran as well positioned, and it has checkmated the U.S. and its interests in the Mideast,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House, aka the British Royal Institute of International Affairs. Vakil isn’t being lawyerly (forgive a Persian language joke) – the Beltway, Wall Street and 10 Downing Street have been forced to admit that they have been outplayed by a revolution expressly unobsessed with earthly profit.
The fundamental Achilles’ heel of Western thought – and elevated to a global scale by pretentiously aristocratic and arrogantly bourgeois Liberal Democracy – is that the natives are simply incapable of any progress.
It’s a belief which has existed for over five centuries (and which allegedly permitted the genocide of so many peoples) and it explains why the West has been repeatedly caught off-guard by military advancements by Russia, urban planning advancements by China and nuclear technology by Iran, to name just a few key areas. The non-West is playing for survival, but the West merely plays for the profits of a few.
This Achilles’ heel is destined to be endlessly pierced and poisoned by that arrow of the 99% – socialist-inspired democracy, which demands more progress, more distribution of wealth and more social peace.
Those four major Western defeats helps explain the world’s new political architecture.
But the same principle of “hands off the big guys” applies in our new Cold War II, only the number of “hands off” combatants has increased to four: there will be no direct attacks on the US, Russia, China or Iran by these four adversaries, and this fact was relayed by one of those same top propagandists of The New York Times (Erlanger) in an article on January 14:
“Yet in Ukraine, nearly two years in, a similar, unspoken set of restraints has worked – somewhat to the amazement of even President Biden’s closest aides. Early on, Mr. Biden directed the military to do anything it could to support Ukraine – as long as American forces did not take on Russia’s directly, whether in land, in the air or on the Black Sea.”
The article relates what appears clear to many: Washington and Tehran are going out of their way to warn each other of attacks so that their own citizens don’t get killed and spark World War III. There’s no red phone between them, but implicit is the idea that both are too powerful to attack each other directly. The idea of a US attack on Chinese nationals is similarly considered impossible.
This is a huge development in modern history.
It means there’s a new Cold War pitting the West versus China, Russia and Iran – everywhere else, including Israel, is part of the front lines again.
The conflict in Palestine is unfolding as I predicted: Iranian allies (falsely called “Iranian proxies” by the West) are doing damage to Israeli and Western imperialism long before Iran ever gets directly involved, and also that we remain just one major unexpected development away from a free Palestine.
Hezbollah is so strong they are not even being tested – instead it’s the Houthis who have proven unexpectedly successful in the resistance. Anglo-American power has rested on the navy for over two centuries – following 25 years of attacks on the progressive French Revolution by reactionary, monarchical England – but Yemen is closing off the Mediterranean from the Indian Ocean for Western interests.
In the January 14 article the illustrious Times reporters published a quote from a retired US Navy Admiral which illustrates both reckless wishful thinking and foolish journalistic analysis, and I am referring to after when the Admiral said, “the Houthi rebels, who are really just Iranian pirates”. He continued, “‘Our experience with Somali pirates shows years ago that you can’t just play defense; you have to go ashore to solve a problem like this.”
Yemen’s involvement isn’t something that can be stopped – they are not like Japan in 1853, to be cowed, “opened” and converted to a lifetime of Western-aping via the arrival of a few gunboats. Pained Western shipping giants, like the Dutch, would like to sabre-rattle that they’re about to disembark and fight in Yemen – a war theatre possibly even more treacherous than even Afghanistan – but the fact is that they’re just going to have pay more to ship tulips until they rein in Israel’s genocidal desires.
The idea that the Houthis have no agency in their relationship with Iran stems from the false mindset of the capitalist-imperialist colonist: i.e. one who wages total societal control to aim at war ends, which is the basis of “totalitarianism”, and who assumes the natives can do nothing without their consent. The mistake here is assuming that Iran is capitalist-imperialist when it’s clearly been fighting that awful ideology since 1979.
Iran has no grand control; did not know about Hamas’ counter-attack on January 7; simply provides support for local grassroots struggles when those struggles are politically righteous. The “guidance” is mainly political and technical – give a man a drone and he can stop shipping for a day, but teach him how to make a drone and he can stop shipping for… who knows how long the Houthis can keep this up? They’ve already resisted American bombs – launched by the House of Saud – for over a decade, after all.
Cold War I wrested away Eastern Europe for the Western 1%’s colonisation schemes – this is the clear result of the European Union. Cold War II finds impregnable and allied China, Russia and Iran – and their loud or quiet allies across the Global South – facing an American superpower in decline with their vassals in turmoil. How can capitalism, imperialism and elitist Liberal Democracy become rejuvenated enough to defeat any of the ideologically-supercharged three, or even supposedly apolitical Yemeni “pirates”?
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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of my articles is approved and appreciated.
It’s possible to advance that the Year of the Dragon will be a year where Sovereignty reigns. China, Russia and Iran will take the fight towards a more equal and just system to the next level…
By Pepe Escobar and first posted at Strategic Culture
As we enter incandescent 2024, four major trends will define the progress of interconnected Eurasia.
1. Financial/trade integration will be the norm. Russia and Iran already integrated their financial message transfer systems, bypassing SWIFT and trading in rials and rubles. Russia-China already settle their accounts in rubles and yuan, coupling immense Chinese industrial capacity with immense Russian resources.
2. The economic integration of the post-Soviet space, tilting towards Eurasia, will predominantly flow not so much via the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) but interlinked with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
3. There will be no significant pro-Western inroads in the Heartland: the Central Asian “stans” will be progressively integrated into a single Eurasia economy organized via the SCO.
4. The clash will become even more acute, pitting the Hegemon and its satellites (Europe and Japan/South Korea/Australia) against Eurasia integration, represented by the three top BRICS (Russia, China, Iran) plus the DPRK and the Arab world incorporated to BRICS 10.
On the Russian front, the inimitable Sergey Karaganov has laid down the law: “We should not deny our European roots; we should treat them with care. After all, Europe has given us a lot. But Russia must move forward. And forward does not mean to the West, but to the East and the South. That is where the future of humanity lies.”
And that leads us to the Dragon – in the Year of the Dragon.
The Mao and Deng road maps
There were a whopping 3.68 billion Chinese trips by rail in 2023 – an all-time record.
China is fast on the way to become an AI global leader by 2030. Tech giant Baidu, for instance, recently released Ernie Bot to rival ChatGPT. AI in China is expanding fast on healthcare, education, and entertainment.
Efficiency is the key. Chinese scientists have developed the ACCEL chip – capable of performing 4.6 quadrillion operations per second, in comparison to NVIDIA’s A100, which delivers 0.312 quadrillion operations per second of deep learning performance.
China graduates no less than one million more STEM students than the U.S., year after year. This goes way beyond AI. Asian nations always reach the top 20% in science and mathematics competitions.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) may be lousy on geopolitics. But at least they did a public service showing nations that lead the planet in 44 critical technology sectors.
China is number one, leading on 37 sectors. The U.S. leads on 7. Everyone else leads zero sectors. These include Defense, space, robotics, energy, the environment, biotechnology, advanced materials, key quantum technology and of course AI.
How did China get here? It’s quite enlightening today to revisit a 1996 tome by Maurice Mesner: The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994.
First of all, one needs to know what happened under Mao:
“From 1952 to the mid-1970s, net agricultural output in China increased at an average per annum rate of 2.5 percent, whereas the figure for the most intensive period of Japan’s industrialization (from 1868 to 1912) was 1.7 percent.”
Across the industrial sphere, all indicators went up: steel production; coal; cement; timber; electric power; crude oil; chemical fertilizers. “By the mid-1970s, China was also producing substantial numbers of jet airplanes, heavy tractors, railway locomotives, and modern oceangoing vessels. The People’s Republic also became a significant nuclear power, complete with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Its first successful atomic bomb test was held in 1964, the first hydrogen bomb was produced in 1967, and a satellite was launched into orbit in 1970.”
Blame it on Mao: he transformed China “from one of the world’s most backward agrarian countries into the sixth-largest industrial power by the mid-1970s.” On most key social and demographic indicators, China compared favorably not only with India and Pakistan in South Asia but also with “’middle-income’ countries whose per capita GNP was five times that of China.”
All these breakthroughs laid down the path for Deng: “The higher yields obtained on individual family farms during the early Deng era would not have been possible had it not been for the vast irrigation and flood-control projects – dams, irrigation works, and river dikes – constructed by collectivized peasants in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Of course there were distortions – as the Deng drive produced a de facto capitalist economy presided by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie: “As has been true of the histories of all capitalist economies, the power of the state was very much involved in establishing China’s labor market. Indeed, in China a highly repressive state apparatus played a particularly direct and coercive role in the commodification of labor, a process that has proceeded with a rapidity and on a scale that is historically unprecedented.”
It remains an inextinguishable source of debate to what extent this fabulous economic Great Leap Forward under Deng generated calamitous social consequences.
The Empire of kakistocracy
As the Xi era definitely tackles – and tries to solve – the drama, what makes it even more complicated is the constant interference of the notorious “structural contradictions” between China and the Hegemon.
China-bashing is the number one politically correct game across the Beltway – and that’s bound to go out of control in 2024. Assuming a Democratic debacle next November, there are few doubts a Republican presidency – Trump or no Trump – will unleash Cold War 3.0 or 4.0, with China, not Russia, as the top threat.
Then there is the upcoming Taiwan election. If pro-independence candidates win it, incandescence will exponentially rise. Now imagine that compounded with a rabid Sinophobe occupant of the White House.
Even when China was militarily weak, the Hegemon could not defeat it, either in Korea or in Vietnam. There is less than zero chance Washington would defeat Beijing on a South China Sea battlefield now.
The American problem is encapsulated in a Perfect Storm.
Hegemon hard and soft power have been hurled down a black void with the imminent, cosmic NATO humiliation in Ukraine, compounded with complicity with the Gaza genocide.
Simultaneously, Hegemon global financial power is about to take a very hard hit as the Russia-China strategic partnership leading BRICS 10 starts offering quite viable alternatives to the Global South.
Chinese scholars, in priceless exchanges, always remind their Western interlocutors that History has been a consistent playground pitting aristocratic and or/plutocratic oligarchies against each other. The collective West now happens to be “led” by the most toxic variety of plutocracy: kakistocracy.
What Chinese qualify, correctly, as “crusader nations” are now significantly exhausted – economically, socially, and militarily. Worse: nearly totally de-industrialized. Those with a functioning brain among the crusaders at least have understood that “decoupling” from China will be a major disaster.
None of that eliminates their arrogant/ignorant drive for a war on China – even as Beijing has exercised immense restraint by not giving them any excuse to start another Forever War.
Instead, Beijing is reversing Hegemon tactics – as in sanctioning the Hegemon and assorted vassals (Japan, South Korea) on rare earth imports. Even more effective is the concerted Russia-China drive to bypass the U.S. dollar and weaken the euro – with full support of BRICS 10 members, Opec+ members, EAEU members and most SCO members.
The Taiwan riddle
The Chinese masterplan, in a nutshell, is a thing of beauty: to finish off the “rules-based international order” without firing a shot.
Taiwan will remain the prime not-yet-engaged battlefield. Roughly, it’s fair to argue that the majority of the population of Taiwan does not want unification; at the same time, they don’t want an American-engineered war.
They want, essentially, the current status quo. China is not in a hurry: Deng’s master plan pointed to reunification sometime before 2049.
The Hegemon, on the other hand, is in a tremendous hurry: it’s all about Divide and Rule, all over again, promoting chaos and destabilizing China’s inexorable rise.
Beijing tracks literally anything that moves in Taiwan – via monumental, meticulous dossiers. Beijing knows that for Taipei to thrive in a peaceful environment, it needs to negotiate while it still has something to negotiate with.
Every Taiwanese with a brain – and there are plenty of first-class scientific brains in the island – knows they can’t expect Americans to die fighting for them. First of all because they know the Hegemon won’t dare fighting a conventional war with China, because the Hegemon will lose – badly (the Pentagon gamed all options). And there won’t be a nuclear war either.
Chinese scholars are fond of reminding us that when the Middle Kingdom was totally fragmented in the 19th century under the Qing dynasty (1644-1912), “the Sino-Manchu ruling class was incapable of relinquishing their self-image and of taking the draconian necessary steps.”
The same applies to the Exceptionalists now – even as they go on serial somersaults trying to preserve their own, mythological self-image: Narcissus drowned in a pool of his own making.
It’s possible to advance that the Year of the Dragon will be a year where Sovereignty reigns. Hegemon fits of Hybrid War rage and collaborationist comprador elites will be obstacles constantly hampering the Global South. Yet at least there will be three poles with the spine, the resources, the organization, the vision and the sense of Universal History to take the fight towards a more equal and just system to the next level: China, Russia and Iran.
An American appeals to Taiwan: Don’t vote to be Ukraine 2.0
On January 13, the people of Taiwan, officially designated the Republic of China (ROC), will elect a new president and unicameral legislature known as the Legislative Yuan. The election hinges on the question of Taiwan’s policy toward the mainland, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). That polin
A member of our China Writer’s Group, John Walsh, updated the situation in Asia Times –
I chose mainly technical issues from Godfree Roberts newsletter for this time, and as usual, it is astonishing.
A quick reference to corn and wheat US-China corn imports fell 83% in August YoY, while corn imports from Brazil went from zero last August to 580,000 metric tons in August 2023. Imports of Brazilian corn are expected to reach 1.22 MMT in September and US imports drop to 70,000 metric tons. Read article →
The reason why I start with that is that BRICS with the mix of membership countries currently, are qualified to open their own grain bourse.
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US treasuries are no longer the bedrock of global portfolios.
China’s eonomy grew by $1.6 trillion PPP. US GDP grew by $300 billion:
SOE salaries are double private enterprise wages.
The $212 million Meridian Space Weather Monitoring network links 300 instruments – including some of the world’s most powerful – to provide all-time, all-weather monitoring of space weather, which disrupts satellite operations and knocks out power grids on Earth.
Huawei’s 7nm chip renders US chip blockade obsolete, its NearLink is six times faster than WiFi, its revenues hit $1 billon, it has taken Apple’s #1 spot. Its 2019 Mate30 had 42% domestic content, the 2023 Mate60 is 90% domestic, thanks to its own, $30 billion chip fab network.
China leads the world in expanding semiconductor production, with 18 new fabs beginning production in 2024.
First ever integrated neuro-memristor improves learning ability, cuts energy consumption. 1,000 layers, billions of synapses will obsolete circuit boards.
Mach 30 Wind Tunnel tests scramjet’s high-speed oblique detonation wave engine.
Remote Sensing Satellite #41 monitors US military 24×7, using onboard AI.
First 232 layer stacked flash memory–made by YMTC.
New high-rate quantum key distribution record.
First superionic hydride ion conductor at ambient conditions.
First primate brain-computer interface offers hope for robotic limbs.
First human kidneys grown in pig embryos.
First chimeric monkey live birth.
First high-temperature gas-cooled reactor, HTGR, produces 200,000 kW for the grid.
7,000 ft. physics laboratory is the world’s deepest, largest underground lab.
After #1 Nature and #2 Science, China’s Young Science is the world’s #3 journal.
America’s Frontier exascale computer has 10,000 nodes. Sunway’s has 2 million cores across 40,000 nodes.
First high-energy lasers stay cool, generate laser beams for as long as desired.CATL batteries get 400 km on 15 min. charge, 700 km. on a regular charge across all temperature ranges.
First high-orbit Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite provides all-weather, all-day observations.
Only China has a complete industrial IC chain.
LandSpace’s world-first, liquid oxygen methane rocket lifts 6 tonne payload into a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO).
China installed 290,000 industrial robots, as much as the rest of the world combined.
754 million 5G subscribers, 3.2 million base stations, 8,000 ‘5G+ Industrial Internet’ projects, 1,800 5G factories, and 5G industry applications integrated into 67 national economic categories, with 100,000 application cases.
Chinese chip foundries bought 62% of machinery equipment domestically this year, 47% last year.
With $228 Bn R&D budget, 3 million Chinese corporate scientists applied for 29,853 AI-related patents in 2022, compared to USA’s 16,805, Japan’s 8,870 and S. Korea’s 7,899.
China is far ahead of US in GPS inertial navigation, magnetic field, multispectral and hyperspectral imaging sensors, radar systems, and sonar and acoustic sensors – and even in quantum sensors, atomic clocks, and gravitational sensors.
235 Chinese EV models average $35,000. Americans 51 EVs average $70,000.
It would be one thing if China’s performance in these industries was proportional to the size of its economy. But location quotients (LQ) show China punches 47% above its weight, the US 17% below. Read article →
China now dominates the strategically important industries in ITIF’s Hamilton Index, producing more than any other nation in absolute terms and more than all but a few others in relative terms. Its gains are coming at the expense of the United States and other G7 and OECD economies, and time is running short for policymakers to mount an industrial comeback. Read article →
Newly installed PV hits 80 million kW, up 154%. PV now generates 266 billion kWh in H1, up 30% YoY. PV capacity hits 500 GW.
China produces 30,000 tons of green hydrogen annually.
Giant Rice hybrid has a bumper crop.
Seawater aquafarming in Xinjiang?
Wind provides 15% of China’s energy.
Gasoline demand peaked in 2023. Diesel peaks in 2024.
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Godfree’s newsletter is available here: https://www.herecomeschina.com/order-page/
https://english.news.cn/20231231/4e0fc2697d994cd2b4dcb5dca525a611/c.html
BEIJING, Dec. 31 (Xinhua) — On New Year’s Eve, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered his 2024 New Year message via China Media Group and the Internet. The following is the full text of the message:
Greetings to you all! As energy rises after the Winter Solstice, we are about to bid farewell to the old year and usher in the new. From Beijing, I extend my best New Year wishes to each and every one of you!
In 2023, we have continued to forge ahead with resolve and tenacity. We have gone through the test of winds and rains, have seen beautiful scenes unfolding on the way, and have made plenty real achievements. We will remember this year as one of hard work and perseverance. Going forward, we have full confidence in the future.
This year, we have marched forward with solid steps. We achieved a smooth transition in our COVID-19 response efforts. The Chinese economy has sustained the momentum of recovery. Steady progress has been made in pursuing high-quality development. Our modernized industrial system has been further upgraded. A number of advanced, smart and green industries are rapidly emerging as new pillars of the economy. We have secured a bumper harvest for the 20th year in a row. Waters have become clearer and mountains greener. New advances have been made in pursuing rural revitalization. New progress has been made in fully revitalizing northeast China. The Xiong’an New Area is growing fast, the Yangtze River Economic Belt is full of vitality, and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area is embracing new development opportunities. Having weathered the storm, the Chinese economy is more resilient and dynamic than before.
This year, we have marched forward with robust steps. Thanks to years of dedicated efforts, China’s innovation-driven development is full of energy. The C919 large passenger airliner entered commercial service. The Chinese-built large cruise ship completed its trial voyage. The Shenzhou spaceships are continuing their missions in space. The deep-sea manned submersible Fendouzhe reached the deepest ocean trench. Products designed and made in China, especially trendy brands, are highly popular with consumers. The latest models of Chinese-made mobile phones are an instant market success. New energy vehicles, lithium batteries, and photovoltaic products are a new testimony to China’s manufacturing prowess. Everywhere across our country, new heights are being scaled with dogged determination, and new creations and innovations are emerging every day.
This year, we have marched forward in high spirits. The Chengdu FISU World University Games and the Hangzhou Asian Games presented spectacular sports scenes, and Chinese athletes excelled in their competitions. Tourist destinations are full of visitors on holidays, and the film market is booming. The “village super league” football games and “village spring festival gala” are immensely popular. More people are embracing low-carbon lifestyles. All these exhilarating activities have made our lives richer and more colorful, and they mark the return of bustling life across the country. They embody people’s pursuit of a beautiful life, and present a vibrant and flourishing China to the world.
This year, we have marched forward with great confidence. China is a great country with a great civilization. Across this vast expanse of land, wisps of smoke in deserts of the north and drizzles in the south invoke our fond memory of many millennium-old stories. The mighty Yellow River and Yangtze River never fail to inspire us. Discoveries at the archeological sites of Liangzhu and Erlitou tell us much about the dawn of Chinese civilization. The ancient Chinese characters inscribed on oracle bones of the Yin Ruins, the cultural treasures of the Sanxingdui Site, and the collections of the National Archives of Publications and Culture bear witness to the evolution of Chinese culture. All this stands as testament to the time-honored history of China and its splendid civilization. And all this is the source from which our confidence and strength are derived.
While pursuing its development, China has also embraced the world and fulfilled its responsibility as a major country. We held the China-Central Asia Summit and the Third Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, and hosted leaders from across the world at many diplomatic events held in China. I also paid visits to a number of countries, attended international conferences, and met many friends, both old and new. I shared China’s vision and enhanced common understandings with them. No matter how the global landscape may evolve, peace and development remain the underlying trend, and only cooperation for mutual benefit can deliver.
Along the way, we are bound to encounter headwinds. Some enterprises had a tough time. Some people had difficulty finding jobs and meeting basic needs. Some places were hit by floods, typhoons, earthquakes or other natural disasters. All these remain at the forefront of my mind. When I see people rising to the occasion, reaching out to each other in adversity, meeting challenges head-on and overcoming difficulties, I am deeply moved. All of you, from farmers in the fields to workers on factory floors, from entrepreneurs blazing the trail to service members guarding our country — indeed, people from all walks of life — have done your very best. Each and every ordinary Chinese has made an extraordinary contribution! You, the people, are the ones we look to when we fight to prevail over all difficulties or challenges.
Next year will mark the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. We will steadfastly advance Chinese modernization, fully and faithfully apply the new development philosophy on all fronts, speed up building the new development paradigm, promote high-quality development, and both pursue development and safeguard security. We will continue to act on the principle of seeking progress while maintaining stability, promoting stability through progress, and establishing the new before abolishing the old. We will consolidate and strengthen the momentum of economic recovery, and work to achieve steady and long-term economic development. We will deepen reform and opening up across the board, further enhance people’s confidence in development, promote vibrant development of the economy, and redouble efforts to boost education, advance science and technology and cultivate talents. We will continue to support Hong Kong and Macao in harnessing their distinctive strengths, better integrating themselves into China’s overall development, and securing long-term prosperity and stability. China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.
Our goal is both inspiring and simple. Ultimately, it is about delivering a better life for the people. Our children should be well taken care of and receive good education. Our young people should have the opportunities to pursue their careers and succeed. And our elderly people should have adequate access to medical services and elderly care. These issues matter to every family, and they are also a top priority of the government. We must work together to deliver on these issues. Today, in our fast-paced society, people are all busy and face a lot of pressure in work and life. We should foster a warm and harmonious atmosphere in our society, expand the inclusive and dynamic environment for innovation, and create convenient and good living conditions, so that the people can live happy lives, bring out their best, and realize their dreams.
As I speak to you, conflicts are still raging in some parts of the world. We Chinese are keenly aware of what peace means. We will work closely with the international community for the common good of humanity, build a community with a shared future for mankind, and make the world a better place for all.
Right at this moment, when the lights in millions of homes light up the evening sky, let us all wish our great country prosperity, and let us all wish the world peace and tranquility! I wish you happiness in all the four seasons and success and good health in the year ahead!
Thank you! ■
It was noted at the conference that great transformation is accelerating across the world. Changes of the world, of our times, and of historical significance are unfolding like never before, and the world has entered a new period of turbulence and transformation. Yet the overall direction of human development and progress will not change, the overall dynamics of world history moving forward amid twists and turns will not change, and the overall trend toward a shared future for the international community will not change. We must have full confidence in these trends of historical impact.
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202312/t20231228_11214416.html
The Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs was held in Beijing on December 27-28. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), President of the People’s Republic of China and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, attended the conference and delivered an important address. Members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee Li Qiang, Zhao Leji, Wang Huning, Cai Qi, Ding Xuexiang and Li Xi, and Vice President Han Zheng attended the conference.
In his important address, Xi Jinping presented a systematic review of the historic achievements and valuable experience of major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics in the new era, gave a profound exposition on the international environment and historical mission of China’s external work on the new journey, and made comprehensive plans for China’s external work for the present and coming periods. Presiding over the conference, Li Qiang emphasized the importance of ensuring sound external work on the new journey under the guidance of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy, and set out requirements for studying and implementing the guiding principles of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s important address.
It was made clear at the conference that since the 18th CPC National Congress, historic achievements have been secured and historic changes have taken place in China’s external work on the great journey of advancing the cause of socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era. First, we have established and developed Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy, opening up new vistas in the theory and practice of China’s diplomacy and providing the fundamental guideline for advancing major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics. Second, we have showcased distinct Chinese characteristics, style and ethos in our diplomacy, and established the image of a confident, self-reliant, open and inclusive major country with a global vision. Third, we have advocated the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, pointing the right direction for human society leading to common development, lasting peace and security, and mutual learning between civilizations. Fourth, we have followed the strategic guidance of head-of-state diplomacy, and played an increasingly important and constructive role in international affairs. Fifth, we have taken a holistic approach to our relations with all parties, with a view to fostering major-country dynamics featuring peaceful coexistence, overall stability and balanced development. Sixth, we have expanded a comprehensive strategic layout, and formed a wide-ranging, high-quality global network of partnerships. Seventh, we have advanced high-quality Belt and Road cooperation, and established the world’s most broad-based and largest platform for international cooperation. Eighth, we have worked to both pursue development and safeguard security, and effectively upheld China’s sovereignty, security and development interests with a firm will and an indomitable fighting spirit. Ninth, we have taken an active part in global governance, and shown the way in reforming the international system and order. Tenth, we have strengthened the centralized, unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, and brought about greater coordination in China’s external work.
It was underlined at the conference that in the decade of the new era, we have seen high winds and choppy waters and overcome various difficulties and challenges in China’s external work. We have opened up new prospects in major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, and gained much more strategic autonomy and initiative in our diplomacy. China has become a responsible major country with enhanced international influence, stronger capacity to steer new endeavors, and greater moral appeal.
It was pointed out at the conference that a range of valuable experience has been gained in the new era of Chinese diplomacy. It is imperative to uphold principles. On major issues concerning the future of humanity and the direction of the world, we must take a clear and firm position, hold the international moral high ground, and unite and rally the overwhelming majority in our world. It is imperative to shoulder China’s responsibility as a major country. We need to advocate the spirit of independence, champion peaceful development, and promote global stability and prosperity. It is imperative to apply systems thinking. With a correct understanding of history and of the big picture, we must navigate the prevailing trends, adopt a coordinated approach, and seize the initiative. It is imperative to uphold fundamental principles and break new ground. We need to follow the fine tradition and fundamental direction of China’s diplomacy, and at the same time work progressively for innovation in both theory and practice. It is imperative to carry forward our fighting spirit. We must reject all acts of power politics and bullying, and vigorously defend our national interests and dignity. It is imperative to leverage our institutional strengths. Under the centralized, unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, all regions and all departments must coordinate with each other and build strong synergy.
It was noted at the conference that great transformation is accelerating across the world. Changes of the world, of our times, and of historical significance are unfolding like never before, and the world has entered a new period of turbulence and transformation. Yet the overall direction of human development and progress will not change, the overall dynamics of world history moving forward amid twists and turns will not change, and the overall trend toward a shared future for the international community will not change. We must have full confidence in these trends of historical impact.
It was highlighted at the conference that looking ahead, China faces new strategic opportunities in its development. On the new journey, major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics will enter a new stage where much more can be accomplished. We must focus on the central task of the CPC and the country, seek progress while maintaining stability, break new ground while upholding fundamental principles, and firmly safeguard China’s sovereignty, security and development interests. We will explore new frontiers in China’s diplomatic theory and practice, foster new dynamics in the relations between China and the world, and raise China’s international influence, appeal and power to shape events to a new level. We will create a more favorable international environment and provide more solid strategic support for building China into a great modern socialist country in all respects and advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through the Chinese path to modernization.
It was pointed out at the conference that building a community with a shared future for mankind is the core tenet of Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy. It is how China proposes to solve the questions of what kind of world to build and how to build it based on our deepening understanding of the laws governing the development of human society. It reflects the Chinese Communists’worldview, perception of order, and values, accords with the common aspiration of people in all countries, and points the direction for the progress of world civilizations. It is also the noble goal pursued by China in conducting major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics for the new era. Since the dawn of this new era, building a community with a shared future for mankind has developed from a Chinese initiative to an international consensus, from a promising vision to substantive actions, and from a conceptual proposition to a scientific system. It has served as a glorious banner leading the progress of the times. In summary, in building a community with a shared future for mankind, the goal is to build an open, inclusive, clean and beautiful world of lasting peace, universal security and shared prosperity, the pathway is promoting global governance that features extensive consultation and joint contribution for shared benefit, the guiding principle is to apply the common values of humanity, the basic underpinning lies in building a new type of international relations, the strategic guidance comes from the implementation of the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative, and the platform for action is high-quality Belt and Road cooperation. On this basis, we seek to bring countries together to meet challenges and achieve prosperity for all, and usher in a bright future of peace, security, prosperity and progress for our world.
It was pointed out at the conference that given the series of major issues and challenges facing the world today, China calls for an equal and orderly multipolar world and a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization. An equal and orderly multipolar world is one in which all countries, regardless of size, are treated as equals, hegemonism and power politics are rejected, and democracy is truly promoted in international relations. To keep the progress toward greater multipolarity generally stable and constructive, the purposes and principles of the United Nations Charter must be observed by all, the universally recognized, basic norms governing international relations must be upheld by all, and true multilateralism must be practiced. A universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization is one that meets the common needs of all countries, especially the developing countries, and properly addresses the development imbalances between and within countries resulting from the global allocation of resources. It is important to resolutely oppose the attempt to roll back globalization and abuse the concept of security, oppose all forms of unilateralism and protectionism, firmly promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, overcome the structural problems hindering the healthy development of the world economy, and make economic globalization more open, inclusive, balanced and beneficial to all.
It was made clear at the conference that in the current and upcoming periods, China’s external work shall be guided by Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era and Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy in particular. It should serve the goals and missions of Chinese modernization, and follow the principles of self-confidence and self-reliance, openness and inclusiveness, fairness and justice, and win-win cooperation. Focusing on the theme of building a community with a shared future for mankind, we need to strengthen strategic planning in sync with the changing times, deepen and improve our diplomatic layout, follow a problem-oriented approach, and apply a systematic way of thinking. We need to identify the strategic tasks of Chinese diplomacy in a more multi-dimensional and comprehensive manner. We need to act with a stronger sense of historical responsibility and a more vibrant spirit of innovation to make new headway in our major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.
It was pointed out at the conference that upholding fundamental principles and breaking new ground in our external work is the natural requirement of making new headway in our major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics on the new journey, and of providing a stronger underpinning for Chinese modernization. It is important to strengthen the intellectual and theoretical competence of the foreign service, deepen reform of systems and institutions, promote the building of a contingent of personnel involved in foreign affairs, and continue to make our external work more science-based, forward-looking, proactive and innovative.
It was stressed at the conference that we must unswervingly uphold the CPC central leadership’s ultimate authority over foreign affairs, conscientiously uphold the centralized, unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee, and further strengthen the systems and institutions for the CPC’s leadership over external work. All localities and departments should keep in mind the big picture and coordinate with each other to implement the decisions and plans of the CPC Central Committee on our external work in both letter and spirit.
Wang Yi gave concluding remarks. Leading officials of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, the International Department of the CPC Central Committee, the Ministry of Commerce, the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission and Yunnan Province, and a representative from the Permanent Mission of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations gave presentations at the conference.
Members of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and members of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, leaders of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, State Councilors, President of the Supreme People’s Court, Procurator General of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, and leaders of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference attended the conference.
Members of the Central Commission for Foreign Affairs, major officials of provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities directly under the Central Government, cities separately listed in the state plan, and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, of the relevant departments of central CPC and State institutions, relevant people’s organizations, relevant departments of the Central Military Commission, and of some financial institutions under the direct management of the Central Government, as well as Chinese ambassadors, ambassadorial-rank consuls general posted overseas and representatives to international organizations participated in the conference.
While the dogs of war bark, lie and steal, the Russia-China caravan strolls on.
By Pepe Escobar and first posted at Strategic Culture.
2023 may be defined for posterity as The Year of the Russia-China Strategic Partnership. This wonder of wonders could easily sway under a groove by – who else – Stevie Wonder: “Here I am baby/ signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours.”
In the first 11 months of 2023, trade between Russia and China exceeded $200 billion; they did not expect to achieve that until 2024.
Now surely that’s One Partnership Under a Groove. Once again signed, sealed and delivered during the visit of a large delegation to Beijing last week, led by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and revisited and upgraded the whole spectrum of the comprehensive partnership/strategic cooperation, complete with an array of new, major joint projects.
Simultaneously, on the Great Game 2.0 front, everything that need to be reaffirmed was touched by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s detailed interview to Dimitri Simes on his Great Game show.
Add to it the carefully structured breakdown written by head of the SVR Sergey Naryshkin, defining 2024 as “the year of geopolitical awakening”, and coming up with arguably the key formulation following the upcoming, cosmic NATO humiliation in the steppes of Donbass: “In 2024, the Arab world will remain the main space in the struggle for the establishment of a new order.”
Confronted with such detailed geopolitical fine-tuning, it’s no wonder the imperial reaction was apoplexy – revealed epidermically in long, tortuous “analyses” trying to explain why President Putin turned out to be the “geopolitical victor” of 2023, seducing vast swathes of the Arab world and the Global South, solidifying BRICS side by side with China, and propelling the EU further into a black void of its own – and the Hegemon’s – making.
Putin even allowed himself, half in jest, to offer Russian support for the potential “re-annexation” of country 404 border regions once annexed by Stalin, eventually to be returned to former owners Poland, Hungary & Romania. He added that he is 100% certain this is what residents of those still Ukrainian borders want.
Were that to happen, we would have Transcarpathia back to Hungary; Galicia and Volyn back to Poland; and Bukovina back to Romania. Can you feel the house already rocking to the break of dawn in Budapest, Warsaw and Bucharest?
Then there’s the possibility of the Hegemon ordering NATO’s junior punks to harass Russian oil tankers in the Baltic Sea and “isolate” St. Petersburg. It goes without saying that the Russian response would be to just take out Command & Control centers (hacking might be enough); burn electronics across the spectrum; and blockade the Baltic at the entrance by running a “Freedom of Navigation” exercise so everyone becomes familiar with the new groove.
That China-Russian Far East symbiosis
One of the most impressive features of the expanded Russia-China partnership is what is being planned for the Chinese northeastern province of Heilongjiang.
The idea is to turn it into an economic, scientific development and national defense mega-hub, centered on the provincial capital Harbin, complete with a new, sprawling Special Economic Zone (SEZ).
The key vector is that this mega-hub would also coordinate the development of the immense Russian Far East. This was discussed in detail at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok last September.
In a unique, startling arrangement, the Chinese may be allowed to manage selected latitudes of the Russian Far East for the next 100 years.
As Hong Kong-based analyst Thomas Polin detailed, Beijing is budgeting no less than 10 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) for the whole thing. Half of it would be absorbed by Harbin. The blueprint will reach the National People’s Congress next March, and is expected to be approved. It has already been approved by the lower house of the Duma in Moscow.
The ramifications are mind-boggling. We would have Harbin elevated to the status of direct-administered city, just like Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing. And most of all a Sino-Russian Management Committee will be established in Harbin to oversee the whole project.
Top flight Chinese universities – including Peking University – would transfer their main campuses to Harbin. The universities of National Defense and National Defense Technology would merge with Harbin Engineering University to form a new entity focused on defense industries. High-tech research institutes and companies in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen would also move to Harbin.
The People’s Bank of China would establish its HQ for northern China in Harbin, complete with markets trading stocks and commodities futures.
Residents of Heilongjiang would be allowed to travel back and forth to designated Russian Far East regions without a visa. The new Heilongjiang SEZ would have its own customs area and no import taxes.
That’s the same spirit driving BRI connectivity corridors and the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC). The underlying rationale is wider Eurasia integration.
At the recent Astana Club meeting in Kazakhstan, researcher Damjan Krnjevic-Miskovic, Director of Policy Research at the ADA University in Baku, gave an excellent presentation on connectivity corridors.
He referred for instance to the C5+1 (five Central Asian “stans” plus China) meeting three months ago in Dushanbe joined by Azerbaijan’s president Aliyev: that translates as Central Asia-Caucasus integration.
Miskovic is paying due attention to everything that is evolving in what he defines, correctly, as “the Silk Road region” – interlinking the Euro-Atlantic with Asia-Pacific and interconnecting West Asia, South Asia and wider Eurasia.
Strategically, of course, that’s the “geopolitical hinge where NATO meets the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and where the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) connects with Turkiye and the territory of the EU.” In practical terms, Russia-China know exactly what needs to be done to propel economic connectivity and “synergistic relationships” all across this vast spectrum.
The War of Economic Corridors heats up
The fragmentation of the global economy is already polarizing the expanding BRICS 10 (starting on January 1st, under the Russian presidency, and without flirting-with-dollarization Argentina) and the shrinking G7.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko – a key Asia hand -, talking to TASS, once again reaffirmed that the key drive for the Greater Eurasia Partnership (official Russian policy) is to connect the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) with BRI.
As Russia develops a carefully calibrated balance between China and India, the same drive applies to developing the INSTC, where Russia-Iran-India are the main partners, and Azerbaijan is also bound to become a crucial player.
Add to it vastly improved Russian ties with North Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan (a BRI and SCO member) and ASEAN (except Westernized Singapore).
BRI, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, is on a roll. I’ve just been to Moscow, Astana and Almaty for three weeks, and it was possible to confirm with several sources that trains in all connectivity corridors are packed to the hilt; via the Trans-Siberian; via Astana all the way to Minsk; and via Almaty to Uzbekistan.
Russian International Affairs Council Program Manager Yulia Melnikova adds that “Moscow can and should integrate more actively into transit operations along the China – Mongolia – Russia route” and accelerate the harmonization of standards between the EAEU and China. Not to mention invest further in Russia-China cooperation in the Arctic.
Enter President Putin, at a Russian Railways meeting, unveiling an ambitious, massive 10-year infrastructure expansion plan encompassing new railways and improved connectivity with Asia – from the Pacific to the Arctic.
The Russian economy has definitely pivoted to Asia, responsible for 70% of trade turnover amid the Western sanctions dementia.
So what’s on the menu ahead is everything from modernization of the Trans-Siberian and establishing a major logistical hub in the Urals and Siberia to improving port infrastructure in the Azov, Black, and Caspian Seas and faster INSTC cargo transit between Murmansk and Mumbai.
Putin, once again, almost as an afterthought, recently remarked that trade through the Suez Canal cannot be considered effective anymore, compared to Russia’s Northern Sea Route. With a single, sharp geopolitical move, Yemen’s Ansarullah has made it graphic – for everyone to see.
Russian development of the Northern Sea Route happens to run in total synergy with the Chinese drive to develop the Arctic leg of BRI. On the oil front, Russian shipments to China via its Arctic coast takes only 35 days: 10 days less than via Suez.
Danila Krylov, researcher with the Department of the Middle East and Post-Soviet Asia at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences, offers a straightforward insight:
“I view the fact that the Americans are getting involved in Yemen as part of a great game [scenario]; there is more to it than just a desire to punish the Houthis or Iran, as it is more likely driven by a desire to prevent the monopolization of the market and hinder Chinese export deliveries to Europe. The Americans need an operational Suez Canal and a corridor between India and Europe, while the Chinese don’t want it because these are two direct competitors.”
It’s not that the Chinese don’t want it: with the Northern Sea Route up and running, they don’t need it.
Now freeze!
In sum: in the ongoing, ever more fractious War of Economic Corridors, the initiative is with Russia-China.
In desperation, and no more than an option-deprived, headless chicken victim in the War of Economic Corridors, the Hegemon’s EU vassals are resorting to twisting the Follow the Money playbook.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has defined the freezing of Russian assets – not only private, but also state-owned – by the EU as pure theft. Now Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov is making it very clear that Moscow will react symmetrically to the possible use of income from these frozen Russian assets.
Paraphrasing Lavrov: you confiscate, we confiscate. We all confiscate.
The repercussions will be cataclysmic – for the Hegemon. No Global South nation, outside of NATOstan, will be “encouraged” to park its foreign currency/reserves in the West. That may lead, in a flash, to the whole Global South ditching the U.S.-led international financial system and joining a Russia-China-led alternative.
The peer-competitor Russia-China strategic partnership is already directly challenging the “rules-based international order” on all fronts – improving their historical spheres of influence while actively developing vast, interconnected connectivity corridors bypassing said “order”. That precludes, as much as possible, direct Hot War with the Hegemon.
Or to put it on Silk Road terms: while the dogs of war bark, lie and steal, the Russia-China caravan strolls on.
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