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À partir d’avant-hierAnalyses, perspectives

Gaza Update: Anglo-Zionist Pier & Bifurcation Road

Par : AHH

Along with the latest news from the resistance in Gaza and the West Bank, Jon Elmer takes a look at the US military operation to build a pier in Gaza City and how that plan lines up with Israel’s ongoing construction of a highway south of Gaza City that will divide the Strip between north and south.

Confident China Lays out the Refined Roadmap

Par : AHH

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.

Empire activates its suicide squads in Europe and in the Syrian desert

Par : AHH

An excellent primer on who protects and nurtures ISIS and assorted “our good USUK terrorists” in the huge porous Syria-Iraq-KSA-Jordan desert.

The desperate beleaguered Empire (1) activates them against the Resistance Axis, and in response, (2) the Iraqi Resistance relentlessly and incrementally attrites the US bases in precisely this lawless four-state region populated by the compradore desert bedouins. These Salafi highwaymen and brigands would have long ceased to matter or be more than a nuisance (their traditional regional role for 10 millennia) if it were not for the US armed forces, who openly defend them and instrumentalize them on command.

PS — as noted, in addition to squatting and stealing Syrian oil/water/breadbasket to impoverish and to prevent rebuilding and development, the western armies (chiefly US and French bases) serve as placeholders for the rise of Erez Israel (Greater Unholy Israel, from the Nile to the Euphrates). As with gas off Gaza, they front the economic red cape, but it has ever been Eschatological, about defense of western Judeo-Christian Zionism. For this last project of the combined West, they sacrifice everything, including their reputation and posterity..


Al Tanf US base is located in the bottom lime-green half-circle, at the junction of Syria, Iraq, and Jordan — the traditional land trade route between Iraq and Syria, and located within the Great Syrian Desert. This region is home to the inter-related desert bedouin tribes of the four Sykes-Picot created states, the imperial pool of proxies..


Another unsaid objective is to sever China’s Silk Road. This ancient caravan route passed by Al Tanf and Palmyra on its way to Damascus and the Eastern Mediterranean. This informs China’s defense of Syria and the Resistance to unblock intolerable obstacles built by Zio-USUK.

2024: the Year of the Dragon

Par : AHH

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.

The Amazing Silk Road Returns!

By Neenah Payne If America and Europe want to fight endless bankrupting wars, its best to glorify Western history – starting with Greece and Rome...

The Amazing Silk Road Returns!

L’Allemagne se prépare-t-elle à reprendre la Haute-Silesie ? par Evgueni Bersenev

Située aux confins orientaux de l’Allemagne, la Haute-Silésie a successivement appartenu à la Pologne, à la Bohême, à l’Autriche, à la Prusse et au second Reich allemand. Après la Première Guerre mondiale, elle fut partagée entre la Pologne et l’Allemagne, qui s’en empara tout entière en 1939 pour finalement la perdre totalement en 1945. Il y a quelque temps, le ministre allemand de la Défense, Boris Pistorius, a déclaré que l’opération spéciale des forces armées russes en Ukraine avait modifié le rôle de Berlin et de l’armée allemande en Europe. Le ministre soulignait que « L’Allemagne, en tant qu’État le plus peuplé et le plus fort économiquement d’Europe centrale, doit devenir l’épine dorsale du confinement et de la défense collective en Europe ». A cela s’ajoute le fait, comme le soulignait en septembre dernier au Figaro, Léo Péria-Peigné, de l’IFRI, que « L’Allemagne ne considère plus la France comme son premier partenaire militaire en Europe ». Tout ceci semble faire remonter des relents que l’on aurait voulu oublier.  Et l’on est en droit de douter de plus en plus de la cohésion de l’Union Européenne.

Cet article initialement publié sur le site svpressa.ru n’engage pas la ligne éditoriale du Courrier.

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Chine: les nouvelles routes de la soie, à l’heure de ses 10 ans – par Eurasiareview

Pendant que se déroulent les conflits en Ukraine et en Israël, avec de graves craintes sur l’équilibre mondial, Pékin poursuit, presque tranquillement, le développement de son projet « Belt and Road ». Alors que la diplomatie américaine s’appuie sur le rapport force, si ce n’est la menace militaire, la Chine exploite – à grand renfort financier il est vrai – ses relations de proximité dans l’Asie du Sud Est, afin de mener à bien les projets d’infrastructures nécessaires au déploiement de sa nouvelle « route de la soie ». Le capitalisme d’Etat à la chinoise montrerait-il plus de patience que le capitalisme financier américain versé dans le court-termisme ? Et tout ceci se reflèterait-il dans la conduite de la diplomatie fondée sur l’Histoire avec un grand H ?

Cet article initialement publié sur le site eurasiareview.com n’engage pas la ligne éditoriale du Courrier.

Début octobre, l’Indonésie a finalement lancé le chemin de fer à grande vitesse (HSR) Jakarta-Bandung, le premier TGV d’Asie du Sud-Est. Surnommé « The Whoosh », cette infrastructure fait partie d’un portefeuille croissant de projets internationaux sous la bannière de la « Belt and Road Initiative » chinoise (BRI). Son ouverture coïncide avec le dixième anniversaire de ce méga projet et renforcera le profil de Pékin en tant que catalyseur de la connectivité mondiale. 

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Le plan israélien d’adhésion aux BRI et ses effets sur la sécurité nationale des États-Unis

Les Etats-unis de leur côté sont strictement opposés à la coopération chinoise avec Israël. Washington considère avec inquiétude l'impact que pourrait avoir la coopération israélienne avec la Chine sur sa sécurité nationale. Les craintes des États-Unis ont augmenté après la proposition israélienne d'adhérer officiellement à l'initiative chinoise Belt and Road et après que Tel-Aviv eut rejoint la Banque asiatique d'investissement. Washington s'inquiète de la construction par la Chine du nouveau port de la ville de Haïfa. Pour la CIA, la présence permanente de la Chine dans le port israélien signifie une opportunité pour la Chine de collecter des informations, telles que : faciliter la surveillance par la Chine des mouvements des navires américains.

L’article Le plan israélien d’adhésion aux BRI et ses effets sur la sécurité nationale des États-Unis est apparu en premier sur Strategika.

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