Connexion
Executive Summary:
Editor’s note: This is the final article in a four-part series. The previous three articles can be read here, here, and here.
For decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has placed the development and expansion of comprehensive national power (CNP; 综合国力) at the center of both Party ideological frameworks and its understanding of international competition. [1] Its current general secretary, Xi Jinping, has repeatedly tied CNP to core issues of Party legitimacy. In 2018, he explained that “liberating and developing social productive forces and enhancing the [CNP] of socialist countries is socialism’s essential demand and fundamental task” (解放和发展社会生产力，增强社会主义国家的综合国力，是社会主义的本质要求和根本任务), echoing a formulation established by Deng Xiaoping nearly 30 years earlier (Xinhua, December 18, 2018). [2] In 2021, he framed success in the Party’s core aim of achieving national rejuvenation in terms of winning the advantage in CNP competition, linking this directly to another pillar of the Party’s legitimacy (Xinhua, September 26, 2021). [3]
In the coming years, efforts to build CNP in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will increasingly emphasize dominating technological innovation. Recent statements by leading CCP figures and in top Party publications make a clear link between CNP as the key metric by which the leadership assesses PRC national strength and advances in strategic and emerging technologies. Politburo standing committee member Ding Xuexiang (丁薛祥) recently described computing power as “an important manifestation of a nation’s CNP” (国家综合国力的重要体现); and shortly thereafter a People’s Daily article described leading science and technology talents as “a concentrated reflection of a country’s … CNP” (一个国家的 … 综合国力的集中体现) (People’s Daily, May 19, May 30).
Pinning success in developing CNP on the Party’s legitimacy narratives makes the stakes very high, particularly as its pursuit of CNP faces challenges, including from competition with the United States. A decline in the country’s comparative CNP and lost ground in its efforts to change the international order would reflect negatively on the Party leadership, perhaps in dangerous ways for either the leadership core or the Party more broadly. While the CCP continues to assess that it is on a long-term positive trajectory, that trajectory will not be linear. Bad policy choices could damage CNP growth, and provide openings that the United States or others could exploit.
Growing CNP Could Lead to More Aggressive Behavior
Evolving out of the 19th Party Congress in 2017, the CCP leadership has expressed increasing dissatisfaction with efforts to translate its accrued national strength as measured by CNP into a more powerful position globally. Efforts to date have focused on enhancing the country’s discourse power, but if this fails then Chinese leaders may turn to more assertive methods in the coming decade, perhaps leading to a far more dangerous PRC (China Brief, January 6). The combination of increased confidence in its comparative position globally, continued expansion of CNP across core elements of national strength, and growing dissatisfaction with the international order will likely change what deters Beijing over time, increasing the risk for those working to ensure that the CCP remains deterred from destabilizing military action in the region or coercive economic or political actions globally.
PRC behavior internationally has already changed as Chinese analysts and CCP leaders have become more confident in the PRC’s relative power in the international system. This shift will complicate how the lessons learned from Chinese behavior over the period 1978–2010 informs and enables prediction of how the country may act in the future. For example, a common perspective among China analysts is that Chinese leaders are so concerned with their international reputation that they will not take aggressive actions or can be shamed into “responsible” behavior as the West might define it. As Chinese confidence in its position globally continues to grow, however, Beijing instead will be less concerned with reputational costs. This has played out in recent years in the South China Sea, where significant public attention to destabilizing and aggressive Chinese actions against the Philippines has had little discernable impact on PRC behavior to date (China Brief, April 28, 2008, June 21, 2013, June 21, 2024, June 11). This publicity may even reinforce Beijing’s efforts to deter other actors in the region by demonstrating strength and will against potential adversaries.
Miscalculation Would be Dangerous
The PRC’s approach to measuring CNP could lead to dangerous miscalculation and overconfidence. Its current strategic buildup risks reaching a point at which the Chinese military finally assesses that it has accrued enough national defense power to deter the United States and/or U.S. allies from entering a conflict over Taiwan or elsewhere. Overconfidence in the deterrence capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army’s strategic forces, especially in combination with a rapidly expanding conventional force, risks leading to aggressive actions and miscalculation of the PRC’s own ability to deter the United States and others. Assessments made in 2020 noted that national defense strength was lagging behind economic strength, science and technology (S&T) strength, and CNP, all of which leaped ahead during the 13th five-year plan period (2016–2020) (Xinhua, November 26, 2020). This was despite the 2020 edition of the Science of Military Strategy discussing the critical importance of military strength to national defense strength within CNP as the “backbone of … war strength” (战争实力 … 的骨干力量) (Xiao, ed., 2020). [4]
Flaws in its approach to measuring CNP could at the same time lead to opportunities for the United States and its allies. For instance, the CCP believes that a lack of even and coordinated distribution of development across individual CNP subsystems will lead to instability (China Brief, September 26, 2025). Under this view, overinvestment in one area could come at the cost of other critical elements of CNP. This was a key factor in the downfall of the Soviet Union, which the United States drove to pursue unbalanced investment across its system. The CCP’s continued focus on the importance of balance across its subsystems suggests that a similar strategy could be applied to U.S.–PRC competition should competition grow that intense in the coming decades.
Another flaw in CNP calculations may lie in political sensitivities that could impact the measurement of CNP. This would lead to bad policies, which in turn could unintentionally worsen the country’s CNP. For instance, “soft power” elements of CNP—such as political strength, diplomatic strength, and culture and education strength—can be assigned negative values when calculating CNP, according to the theorist Huang Shuofeng (黄朔风). These elements are all far more politically sensitive than economic or S&T strength and are less easy to measure, though they also face degrees of political sensitivity (Huang, 2006). [5] A negative score in political strength would be reflective of poor leadership, poor management of the system, or policies and strategies that are not working. Although Huang’s is only one scale offered and may not reflect the current methodology used, any internal methodology would have trouble accurately measuring political strength due to the sensitive considerations involved. The same goes for national cohesion as described within CNP literature, which continues to be reinforced by the coercive power of the state. [6]
CNP Calculation Presents Avenues for Competitive Action
Soft spots in the PRC’s approach to calculating CNP are potential targets for competitive actions that undermine the Chinese leadership’s confidence in its assessments. [7] These could complicate its pursuit of CNP growth by forcing it to take policy and strategy decisions that derail its progress. For instance, if the CCP is unable to resolve current economic challenges, the country may never achieve the leading position in the international system as measured by CNP, which is a clear strategic objective. Moreover, if its economic slowdown continues for a decade or more, strict export controls, reduced access to the Western S&T ecosystem, and continued de-risking of U.S. and European S&Tfocused enterprises could force the PRC to overinvest in S&T at the expense of other CNP elements. This ultimately could undermine top leadership confidence in its status and suggest that the CCP, or at least relevant Party officials, are responsible for mismanagement.
Setbacks will not automatically spell the end of the PRC’s CNP growth, however, whether from a slowing economy or otherwise. If the system can find ways to effectively manage its problems, other drivers will ensure that the country’s rise can be maintained. The PRC as a result may be able to achieve preeminent status in CNP rank globally across all core elements of CNP without ever passing the United States in terms of total GDP. This is because CNP depends on how different constituent elements are weighted in the calculation of CNP and how they interact within the CNP system (and react to variables outside of the open system) (China Brief, September 5, 2025). Understanding Chinese calculations of comparative CNP should shed light on where CCP leaders perceive the PRC to be positioned in competition and how CCP approaches to risk may be evolving.
Deterring the PRC at the strategic level over the coming decades would require undermining Chinese confidence in its assessments of the “two trends” (两个大局)—national rejuvenation and changes unseen in a century—that Chinese analysts and CCP leaders assess reflect a shift in the global balance of power as measured by CNP. Deterrence is a critical element of national defense power, both for the PRC’s expanding capabilities, and for the United States and its allies and partners to continue deterring destabilizing Chinese actions.
In projecting the future of Chinese thinking on CNP competition, two critical elements will be important to assess. First, past experience does not predict future performance. The PRC’s impressive rise over the past 40 years does not mean that its rise will continue or that it will achieve its goals without any decline in power. Chinese scholars have discussed within the CNP literature the dangers of being the number two CNP power behind the United States, examining how both the Soviet Union and Japan stalled out and failed to surpass the United States during the 20th century. In this vein, Yan Xuetong (阎学通) warned in 2015 that bad policy decisions by the Chinese leadership can cause economic and military strength to decline (Yan, 2015). [8]
Second, challenges to certain CNP elements do not automatically entail an overall decline in CNP. The PRC has overcome significant challenges to date, or at least addressed them in ways that have enabled continued growth of CNP and modernization. Similarly, its path over the next 20 years is unlikely to be linear. The country has significant staying power and will remain a formidable economic, military, technological, and ideological challenger to the United States over the coming decades. Its emergence as a globally-leading innovation country will further impact its regional and global power in the coming decades, underpinning the CCP’s ability to continue challenging the international order.
Conclusion
CNP measurements play an important role in the PRC’s policymaking process but are poorly understood. This directly impacts how countries might respond to the PRC’s continued aggressive actions short of armed conflict. Often described as “gray zone tactics,” these actions are better considered within the context of CNP competition. Wu Chunqiu (吴春秋), a scholar at the Academy of Military Sciences, pointed out in 1998—in analysis that was reiterated over the years in other Chinese documents—that CNP competition focuses across core constituent strength elements of CNP, such as economic competition, political competition, and S&T competition. In that context, the PRC is waging strategic competition in the “gray zone,” trying to undermine U.S. power and improve the PRC’s relative position without crossing thresholds that would trigger the United States (or others) to respond in ways that damage Chinese pursuit of CNP. In 2002, Wu explained that “victory without war does not mean that there is not any war at all. The wars one must fight are political war, economic war, technological war … a war of comprehensive national power.” [9] This notion was also prevalent in the 2020 Science of Military Strategy. [10]
Understanding how the CCP and PRC scholars conceptualize CNP offers valuable insights into how Chinese leaders, policy makers, and strategists understand competition with the West, the PRC’s role in the world, and how the country is progressing toward rejuvenation. Tracking these estimates over time may enable the United States to be more strategic and targeted in its approach to competition.
Examining the PRC’s approach to CNP holistically should identify effective ways for integrated deterrence to target the PRC’s own identified vulnerabilities and drive perceptions that reduce CCP leadership confidence across all constituent elements of CNP. While a CCP that realizes it may fall short, or even go backwards in global CNP rank, suggests the potential for Beijing to lash out, the CCP’s ambitions and the world it seeks to develop are far more dangerous should they succeed in their mission to become the world leading CNP power by 2049.
All views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views or policies of the U.S. government, Department of War, or U.S. Pacific Command.
Notes
[1] The PRC’s approach to building CNP should not be overstated. Although Chinese leaders and elites have long held the goal of making the country strong and rich, this is not to say they have always had a singular vision of what that means or how to get there. Despite CNP being a common frame over the past 40 years, bureaucratic infighting, contradictory self-interest of officials and government entities, and the complication of moving a system as large as the PRC’s in one singular direction is an enormous challenge. In addition, as is always the case within Chinese bureaucracy, while CNP is referenced and pointed to in documents across the system, it is often difficult to discern whether this is because of its central importance, or whether it is a code word of sorts that helps justify resource requests.
[2] This quote also appears in a volume published by the United Front Work Department of the Party Committee of China University of Mining and Technology, United Front Information, 2018 (2), p. 6–7.
[3] Xi is quoted as having said, “gaining the upper hand in [CNP] competition is key to national rejuvenation. It is precisely because we possess the greatest advantage of the Party’s leadership that we have become the greatest positive force shaping changes unseen in a century” (在综合国力的竞争中赢得先机是民族复兴的关键。正因为拥有党的领导这一最大优势，我们成为决定世界百年未有之大变局的最大正能量). To be sure, it remains difficult to discern how CNP measures influence CCP decision-making, whether they allocate resources based on CNP examination, as scholars in the 1990s emphasized, or the extent to which changes in foreign policy can be attributed to CCP assessments of comparative CNP. The body of literature examined in this series suggests they do change policy based on comparative CNP, but how that happens is less clear. The 2013 reassessment of the PRC’s development status as “unbalanced and uneven” (不平衡、不协调) and the formulation of the new “primary contradiction in Chinese society” (社会主要矛盾) outlined in 2017 would suggest that they are in fact using such measures to inform decisions, especially with the launching of new development strategies to address those assessments. Foreign policy behavior after 2010 would also suggest that Chinese assessments of having achieved the status of the second largest CNP-power in the world did in fact change Chinese foreign policy. CNP measures may simply be used to assess where the PRC is within global competition and to assess trend lines in comparative power.
[4] Lt. Gen. Xiao Tianliang, ed., The Science of Military Strategy (2020 Edition), January 2020, National Defense University Press, 2020, p. 26–32. The full sentence reads: “因此，综合国力是制定和实施战略的客观物质基础。它不仅是战略手段的基本依托，而且对战略目标的确定有着直接影响。一个国家的综合国力主要包括以下要素 … 其中军事能力是战争实力与潜力中的骨干力量，对战略具有直接影响和制约.”
[5] Huang Shuofeng, Rivalries Between Major Powers: A Comparison of World Powers’ Comprehensive National Power [大国较量：世界主要国家综合国力国际比较], (Beijing: World Affairs Press, August 2006), p. 103–104. Huang is a former scholar at National Defense University who published the first major study on the country’s CNP in 1984 and devised ways to calculate it. He explained in this 2006 work that the “soft power” elements of CNP are ranked on a sliding scale starting from negative one.
[6] Messaging, information, and education campaigns have worked for 30 years to craft a national and nationalistic identity. It remains unclear if cultural strength, which relies on national identity and cohesion, can be artificially created by the state, as the CCP hopes to engineer within the PRC. It also remains difficult to see how Chinese measures of CNP can accurately reflect cultural power and national cohesion without dangerously pointing to flaws within the CCP.
[7] The PRC is confident that information operations can undermine social cohesion. In 2020, cybersecurity firm Mandiant and Google reported that Chinese disinformation related to the killing of George Floyd sought to mobilize U.S. citizens to protest against their government. The Party likely assesses that similar operations against the PRC would pose a significant threat to the Party.
[8] Yan Xuetong, The Transfer of World Power: Political Leadership and Strategic Competition (Beijing: Peking University Press, September 2015). Yan was highlighting bad decisions made during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but the point would still apply to today’s leadership and would fall under the core CNP element of political strength. Yan also wrote in 2013 that if the PRC stayed the course of reform and opening that had been the hallmark of Chinese policy from 1978–2013, it undoubtedly would continue to grow its CNP and close the gap with the United States. It is unclear both whether the significant policy changes over the last ten years have changed his assessment or whether he would be able to offer an accurate assessment of the effect of those changes on CNP.
[9] Wu Chunqiu, “Dialectics and the Study of Grand Strategy: A Chinese View,” Chinese Military Science, 2002 No. 3, p. 152.
[10] Supra [4].
The post CNP Part IV: Calculation Holds Keys to Strategic Competition appeared first on Jamestown.
With the West boiling alive and systemic shocks hitting Europe and Australia, the concept of a backup plan has turned from a ‘nice-to-have’ into a survival necessity. But where do you go when you need freedom, sustainability, and a break from the chaos?
Look around. The water is getting hotter every single day. We are staring down the barrel of potential fuel shortages that could cripple entire regions. This isn’t fear-mongering; it’s just reading the script they are following. When the trucks stop rolling, the shelves go empty, and the grid goes down, do you want to be stuck in a 15-minute smart city where your existence is metered and permitted?
This isn’t about running away. That’s what the gatekeepers call it. This is about moving toward self-reliance. It’s about opting out of a system that wants to own you, body and soul. I’ve been living this life for almost twenty years now, mostly in Mexico, and let me tell you, the peace of mind you get when you step off the hamster wheel is invaluable.
I’m spending my time on a sustainable ranch right now that is totally off the grid. We’ve got solar panels, massive battery banks, and we grow our own food. While the West is debating which pronoun to use on a digital ID, I’m watching the sunset over mountains that don’t care about my carbon footprint. This is the kind of secure, off-grid, eco-friendly offshore real estate that acts as an insurance policy against the insanity.
For years, I talked about this stuff, and people looked at me like I had three heads. That was back in 2010 when I started The Dollar Vigilante. Back then, it was about lifestyle and maximizing freedom. But it shifted from a lifestyle choice to a survival necessity the moment
Canada decided to freeze the bank accounts.
Let that sink in.
They didn’t even take the money; they just locked the digital door. You couldn’t buy food. You couldn’t pay rent. You couldn’t leave. In Canada, you weren’t allowed to leave. That is the definition of imprisonment. When they can turn off your money and your ability to travel with a keystroke, you are not free. You are a tenant in their digital plantation.
That is why the shift has been so palpable recently. I’ve known Michael Cobb of ECI Development for nearly two decades. We’ve worked together on places like Grand Pacifica in Nicaragua. He told me recently that he has seen a “crescendo” of people waking up. It’s not just talk anymore. People are taking actual steps. They are transacting. They are moving.
And, they are moving to communities where the mindset is different. In Latin America, specifically in developments like Grand Pacifica, you aren’t just buying a house; you are entering a network of like-minded people. It’s a tribe. When I go to Anarchapulco or other events, I see thousands of people who get it. We are building a new world while the old one burns down.
But I get it. I hear the excuses all the time. “Jeff, I can’t move because I don’t speak Spanish.” Or, “It’s too complicated.”
It’s not complicated, but I understand the language barrier. For a long time, the best options for freedom and affordability were in Nicaragua or Panama. Nicaragua is incredible… Grand Pacifica is basically packed with Dollar Vigilante readers at this point. But if you are terrified of learning a new language, you might hesitate.
That’s about to change.
Register here for the live reveal of a brand new development in Belize. This is huge. Belize is the gem of Central America for English speakers. You get the freedom, the climate, and the lack of intrusive government that you find in Latin America, but everyone speaks English. You can drink the water, you can talk to your neighbors, and you can understand the contracts. It removes that last psychological barrier to exit.
However, the window of opportunity is closing shut.
And, the cost of waiting is going up, literally.
I was just talking to a conference organizer recently who told me that half the people who signed up for an event had to cancel because their airfares had almost doubled. That’s not an accident. That is a mechanism of control. Between the inflation destroying the currency and the fuel crises looming, travel is becoming a luxury good again.
They are pricing you into your prison.
Once everyone realizes it’s time to leave, it’s too late.
I’ve been saying this for fifteen years. When the herd panics, the exit is blocked. We saw a preview of this during COVID. Borders snapped shut. Visas were required out of nowhere. If you didn’t already have a plan, you were stuck. The trains will be full. The flights will be grounded. You don’t want to be the one looking for a lifeboat when the ship is already underwater.
Getting out is becoming a financial calculation. Do you spend $800 on a flight now, or $2,000 later… if they even let you fly? Do you buy an asset you can touch now, or do you hold fiat dollars that are being debased into oblivion?
The time for research is basically over. We are entering the endpoint of this collapse scenario. You can feel it. They are recycling the same playbook, getting lazier and more aggressive with each iteration. If you are standing in a place you don’t want to be for the next ten or twenty years, you need to move, and you need to move quickly.
Whether it’s securing a foothold in Nicaragua, Panama, or this new spot in Belize, you need a physical location outside the reach of the Western tyrants. You need a place where “trust the science” is a punchline, not a religion. You need a place where your wealth is your property, not a government loan that can be recalled.
We are building a community of people who are standing in truth against the state and central banks. We are improving ourselves, our health, and our wealth while the grid goes down.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The grid is going to go down, folks. The question is, where will you be standing when the lights flicker out for good? Hopefully, you’ll be somewhere warm, with people you trust, holding real assets. Get out while you still can.
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The post Nicaragua to Belize: Finding Your Freedom Haven Before the Grid Goes Down appeared first on Activist Post.
Executive Summary:
On January 15, Qiushi published a set of articles related to the Central Urban Work Conference, which took place in Beijing in July 2025. These articulate the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official line on urban policy and the property sector. They document shifting urbanization from a “rapid growth” (快速增长) phase to “stable development” (稳定发展) phase, and urban development as moving from large-scale, expansionary growth to “stock-based” (存量) upgrading. They also acknowledge that the country’s land-finance model is no longer sustainable (China Brief, February 3). In its place, the Party has elevated “urban renewal” (城市更新) as its central policy lever and emphasized building a sustainable financing system for urban construction and operations through a combination of fiscal/financial tools and “social capital” (社会资金) (Qiushi, January 15). In housing, it has promoted a “new model for real estate development” (房地产发展新模式) and “good homes” (好房子). The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) has further specified the “new model” through a package of institutional reforms—a “project company system” (项目公司制) at the development stage, a “lead-bank system” (主办银行制) at the financing stage, and a shift toward “completed-home sales” (现房销售) at the sales stage—explicitly prioritizing “fundamentally preventing delivery risk” (根本上防范交付风险) (Xinhua, January 23, 2025). [1]
Central policy language often fails to match realities on the ground. In an August 2025 interview with the authors, a property-beat reporter at a Party-affiliated newspaper in a southern coastal second-tier city repeatedly emphasized that the core issue is not simply price adjustment. Instead, employment and income anxiety are suppressing demand, and censorship surrounding delayed delivery and quality disputes prevents discussion of issues, thereby reinforcing the property sector downturn. At one point, local residents petitioned the reporter’s newsroom over delayed delivery and poor construction quality in lower-income housing. But when the reporter wrote a story that cleared internal procedures, editors pulled it at the last moment, indicating that coverage of people’s housing problems remains difficult in the face of Party narratives that emphasize “people-centered” policy and “good homes” (好房子).
Official Discourse on Quality Housing Omits Risk Factors
Qiushi frames urban policy in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) around the Party’s comprehensive leadership and the concept of a “People’s city” (人民城市人民建 / 人民城市为人民). This emphasizes “historic achievements” (取得的历史性) in urbanization, governance, public services, cultural protection, and environmental improvement. It also positions housing as a governance domain with strong public and livelihood dimensions, for example by referencing the world’s largest housing security system (Qiushi, January 15).
At the same time, Qiushi candidly identifies a new set of constraints: aging, low fertility, and diverging regional population trends; the unsustainability of the land-finance model; and rising safety and stability risks as existing housing and infrastructure age (Qiushi, January 15). This diagnosis has led to the promotion of a policy known as the “two shifts” (两个转向). First, urbanization should move from rapid growth to stable development; and second, urban development should move from expansionary growth to “stock-based upgrading” (提质增效) (Qiushi, January 15). Property policy is thus repositioned from renewed expansion toward managing and upgrading the existing stock.
The policy focuses on “connotative development” (城市内涵式发展)—upgrading and better managing the existing urban stock of services, infrastructure, housing, and governance instead of focusing on outward, land-driven expansion—and “urban renewal” (城市更新). MOHURD has echoed this emphasis in the context of the start of the 15th Five-Year Plan, promoting “four goods” (四好), referring to good housing, residential areas, communities, and urban areas (Xinhua, January 21). In practice, this includes land reutilization (mixed-use development, land-use conversion, redevelopment of low-efficiency land, and industrial park upgrades), fiscal and financial tools (regulated participation of social capital and new financing mechanisms), and stronger debt-risk management (long-term local debt management mechanisms and the prevention and defusing of hidden debt risks).
The Party’s rhetoric regarding “good homes” (好房子) is increasingly accompanied by discussion of “fourth-generation housing” (第四代住宅), which refers to housing stock that is durable and therefore high quality (Xinhua Finance, July 1, 2025). But official narratives focusing on quality upgrades obscure discussion of whether the system can handle the most politically costly realities, such as delayed delivery, quality disputes, and related grievances, all factors that can significantly shape market confidence.
Information Bottlenecks Prevent Accurate Assessment of Property Sector Woes
In an August 2025 interview, a journalist in a second-tier city in the southern PRC affiliated with the municipal propaganda system provided novel grassroots-level insight into recent conditions in the property sector on both the national and local levels. Their analysis of the ongoing sectoral downturn centered on four main points. First, even with recent drops in prices, they noted that “ordinary residents are still far from being able to buy” (但对老百姓而言依然远远买不起). The city’s current income-to-home price ratio (房价收入比) indicates that affording a typical home requires more than 20 years of earnings. This is unusually high—a 2024 benchmark stated that second-tier cities reportedly averaged a single decade of earnings to afford a home.
A lack of affordable housing weakens demand, but it also shapes life decisions. The journalist pointed to persistent social pressure on young people to buy a home before considering marriage. This social custom is forcing many to forgo marriage altogether. In this context, the Party’s rhetorical focus on “good homes” is rendered largely irrelevant in the face of practical and social considerations. It is further exacerbated by market uncertainty, as homes are frequently not completed on expected timelines, and by consumer uncertainty, as buyers are uncertain that their incomes will continue to support housing payments.
Second, the journalist noted an uneven pace of urban development. While authorities have prioritized redeveloping the city’s urban core, the periphery is littered with stalled developments and empty lots. This approach superficially matches the logic of “stock-based upgrading” articulated in Qiushi; but on the ground, it effectively results in a triage process in which authorities decide which areas to save and which to freeze under shrinking fiscal space. Second-order effects of the ensuing peripheral stagnation include uneven job opportunities and outward migration.
Third, labor-market insecurity continues to constrain housing demand. In the journalist’s words, “new graduates are still okay” (新鲜人的就业相对还好), but after age 35, even regular employees face layoffs, and reemployment is extremely difficult. As a result, “jobs are not zero if you don’t choose” (不挑剔就还是有选择), but many people end up in delivery work or other short-term jobs. This tallies with recent estimates that, since 2021, as much as 200 million people—nearly 30 percent of the employed population—have been in flexible employment, a category that encompasses self-employed part-time workers and those in new employment forms such as ride-hailing drivers, food delivery workers, and short-video bloggers (International Labor Organization, May 2025). This perspective challenges other explanations that experts sometimes offer, which blame low demand on high interest rates, large down payments, or purchase restrictions. Instead, as work for many becomes more precarious and major life events such as marriage and childbirth are delayed, housing shifts from a desired asset to a risk that households avoid.
The journalist’s final point highlights how the Party’s discourse apparatus, which has strict controls, leads to adverse policy results. Good policy is predicated on the unimpeded flow of reliable information. But coverage of the property sector is sensitive. During boom periods, the journalist noted, reporting could not mention rising prices, and in downturns they cannot openly write that prices are falling. As local newspapers are the Party’s “throat and tongue” (喉舌), this renders local price dynamics less visible to policymakers at the center.
The journalist illustrated how this information blockage plays out in practice by describing their experience with local residents petitioning their newsroom. Local reporting typically passes “three rounds of review,” and even stories that clear review can still be pulled at the last moment by senior decision-makers. This is exactly what happened when a number of lower-income home-buyers, facing delayed delivery and poor construction quality of their housing units, came to the local newsroom to complain. Although the journalist wrote up the story, editors pulled the piece just before publication. Residents continued to petition the newsroom, but to no avail. In the interview, the journalist recalled feeling deep discomfort at being blocked in their efforts to raise the issue, in part because by omitting stories like these, policymakers can miss the most relevant signals of faltering market confidence. When visibility is constrained, households rationally become more cautious, and adjustment is prolonged.
This information bottleneck is not unique to one outlet. Since late 2025, local housing, cyberspace, and public security authorities have coordinated campaigns against “talking down the housing market” (唱衰楼市), “creating market panic” (制造市场恐慌), “spreading false information” (散布不实信息), or using “fake listings” (虚假房源) to drive traffic. Consequences include including platform “interviews” (约谈), content takedowns, and account penalties (Xinhua, December 17, 2025). In Xi’an, officials publicly released a special campaign that highlighted typical cases, citing accounts accused of “talking down the market,” “speculating about policy,” and “creating panic” (Phoenix Net, January 6). Such actions suggest that expectation management increasingly shapes the property risk information environment.
This broader trend has directly impacted the journalist themself. A crisis in print media—driven in part by worsening macroeconomic conditions—led to a drop in their salary of 30 percent. They pointed to falling subscriptions as a direct cause of this, but cooling property-related activity has led to shrinking advertising and tightening spending by firms and local governments, which has clearly affected the city’s information and media industry.
Fiscal, Demand, and Information Constraints Undercut Official Spin
Across much of the PRC, the property sector is currently characterized by stagnation and the selective freezing of developments. But an internally consistent official line means that making these pain points visible is politically difficult. The gap between rhetoric and reality is a function of three constraints, which together force localities to translate the official promise of renewal and stability into the management of sectoral slowdown and cooling expectations. The first constraint is fiscal. The end of land finance and the associated fall in land-sale revenues have squeezed discretionary local spending. This simultaneously impacts the viability of infrastructure and redevelopment projects, reduces the state’s capacity to finance rescue operations in downturns such as the completion and delivery of housing units, and puts pressure on employment conditions across administrative and quasi-public sectors. As a result, comprehensive “urban renewal” projects are often overlooked, while local authorities prioritize politically visible developments.
Demand is drying up due to bottlenecks in household finances, causing an additional constraint. People are revising down their income expectations, uncertainty is growing over employment stability, and confidence is lacking that homes will be delivered if down payments are made. Employment insecurity and high housing burdens also delay marriage and childbirth, further weakening housing demand. A third constraint is the information bottleneck, which leads to households becoming more cautious. In a pre-sale system that runs on expectations, the most important variable for buyers is often not price but delivery. Yet delays over home completions, disputes over housing quality, litigation, and politically costly remedial efforts are all costly to publicize. Repression of information about these trends has led to a deepening doom loop of weakening sales, tightening developer cash flow, slowing construction, rising delivery risk, and falling consumer confidence. Transparency and credible delivery outcomes are needed to escape the loop, but governance incentives often treat pain-point visibility as destabilizing.
This is where central policy language matters. MOHURD’s emphasis on completed-home sales and stricter pre-sale fund supervision, framed explicitly as a way to “fundamentally prevent delivery risk” (从根本上防范交付风险), indicates that the center itself recognizes delivery as the core vulnerability (Xinhua, January 21). In other words, the “new model” is increasingly about delivery, not just prices.
Implementation also depends on financial levers. Policy discourse repeatedly emphasizes “destocking” (去库存) through purchasing existing inventory and converting it into affordable housing, but this requires financing mechanisms (Xinhua, December 23, 2025). For example, the People’s Bank of China provides affordable housing refinancing at the provincial-branch level to support purchases of existing inventory and the supply of affordable rental housing through lending to local acquisition entities. But this kind of measure is aimed less at promoting growth than at mitigating risks.
Conclusion
The official narrative, as exemplified by language in Qiushi that emphasizes “urban renewal” and a “new property model,” faces a triple constraint on the ground. Fiscal stress as the country transitions away from a land-finance model is leading to triage-style allocation of housing developments. Employment insecurity and household caution is suppressing demand. And information bottlenecks stemming from political incentives restrict visibility of the system’s most consequential pain points. In recent months, narratives around “good homes” and “fourth-generation housing” have become more prominent; but market confidence hinges on consumers believing that housing units, once paid for, will be delivered on schedule—information that is too politically costly to communicate accurately. The PRC’s “new model” for the property sector, therefore, is best understood not as a straightforward market-recovery plan but as a stability-oriented governance package that combines selective completion and delivery, the containment of local fiscal and debt risks, and expectation management that increasingly intersects with information control.
Notes
[1] The term “现房销售” refers to completed-home sales where “what you see is what you get” (所见即所得) (Economic Daily, June 9, 2025).
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Executive Summary:
On October 18, 2024, General Secretary Xi Jinping visited the city of Hefei, where he encouraged officials to pursue a new framework for the research and development of nuclear fusion. He called for a “deep integration of innovation, industrial, capital, and talent chains” (创新链、产业链、资金链、人才链深度融合), a policy that has since been abbreviated as the “four chains integration” (四链融合). Xi described the framework as a “critical deployment” (重要部署) for the “accelerated implementation of the innovation-driven development strategy” (加快实施创新驱动发展战略), and said that it serves as a tangible manifestation of the so-called “advantages of the new-type whole-of-nation system” (新型举国体制优势) (CCP Members Net, October 16, 2022; CCTV, October 19, 2024). [1] Xi had made similar calls in the past, and this specific model, which involves leveraging social financing (via local government financing vehicles) to drive innovation, was standardized as a national initiative by the Party in October 2022 (Shaanxi Provincial Government News Bureau, December 12, 2024). But until now, take-up has been slow. [2]
One year on from Xi’s Hefei visit, the leadership doubled down on the framework. In its “Recommendations” for the 15th Five-Year Plan, the Party Central Committee mandated that enterprises “take the lead” (牵头) and shoulder the primary responsibility for promoting the “four chains integration” policy (Xinhua, October 28, 2025). And now, the policy seems to be getting off the ground. On January 16–17, the “Nuclear Fusion Energy Science and Technology and Industry Conference” (核聚变能科技与产业大会) was held in Hefei. Coverage from the conference indicates that Xi’s directive is being implemented across the sector as research organs seek to operationalize the “four chains” (Hefei Daily, January 17). As part of the overall strategy, Beijing plans to use state-led research bases to dictate technical standards, driving vertical integration and technological upgrading across the industry. The government is simultaneously attempting to construct a state-mobilized financing system to support strategic technologies with long research and development cycles. This new model aims to replace the country’s traditional reliance on its fiscal budget for funding these kinds of projects, sharing risk across the broader economy to alleviate fiscal pressure and address persistent capital constraint issues that have long hampered Beijing’s ambitions.
Innovation and Industrial Chains Form the Foundation
Under the strategic blueprint, Hefei will leverage its existing nuclear fusion campus, the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (中国科学院合肥物质科学研究院), to serve as the innovation link of the “four chains” (HIPS, accessed January 24). The plan involves upgrading the Nuclear Fusion Industry Alliance (核聚变产能联盟) into a “Nuclear Fusion Industry Federation” (核聚变产业联合会) that can organize fragmented research institutes and upstream/downstream manufacturing enterprises into a unified industrial phalanx (Science and Technology Daily, January 20).
The objective is to facilitate the iterative advancement of innovation from Hefei’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) and the Burning plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST) fusion reactors to the entire fusion value chain, including materials, research and development, manufacturing, and civilian commercialization. By allowing multiple sectors to collectively capitalize on innovation dividends, Beijing intends to catalyze technological breakthroughs in other fields (Science and Technology Daily, January 20). For example, at the January conference, the company Lanzhou LS Heavy Equipment (兰石重工) exhibited a new heat exchanger for fusion facilities. This component emerged from the company’s prior experience designing exchangers for the EAST reactor (WeChat/LS Heavy Equipment, January 21).
Capital and Talent Chains a Response to Fiscal Pressure
Beijing is also keen to integrate capital and talent chains. At the conference, authorities unveiled a “patient capital” (耐心资本) initiative, launched by 15 financial institutions and involving over 130 others, featuring an initial fund of Renminbi (RMB) 1 billion ($143 million) with a 15-year duration (Science and Technology Daily, January 20). This long-term deployment is designed to provide continuous financial support for nuclear fusion development, a field that lacks near-term profit potential, by focusing on talent cultivation. The fund is being deployed to support the establishment of a School of Fusion Science and Engineering at Hefei University of Technology (合肥工业大学), and Beijing is planning to set up similar colleges at 20 other institutions within the next five years (Xinhua, January 20; Party Committee Propaganda Department, accessed January 25).
By pooling capital to fund specialized education and research, Beijing is overseeing an asset-light restructuring of the “new-type whole-of-nation system.” Fiscal pressures help explain this shift. Given the field’s long cycles and high risks, authorities are pivoting away from direct fiscal appropriations and toward mobilizing a broader pool of social capital. By socializing risk, the state can override capital’s short-term profit-seeking orientation and convert social funds into state-serving patient capital. This approach allows the state to hedge against longstanding capital constraints in strategic science and technology investment without significantly increasing government debt.
Establishing a successful “talent chain” nevertheless requires a massive financial mobilization. By establishing fusion colleges at scale, Beijing intends to mass-produce a highly specialized, highly educated workforce. Unlike elite researchers within the permanent state establishment (编制), whose lifetime salaries, pensions, and healthcare represent fixed, long-term fiscal liabilities for the state, this application-oriented engineering talent team will primarily be absorbed by enterprises within the innovation and industrial chains that are funded by social capital. Through this mechanism, Beijing can decouple the massive human operational and incentive costs of strategic competition from the state budget, transferring them to social financing platforms.
Conclusion
Hefei is implementing the “four chains integration” as a state-led, society-funded model of innovation-driven development. It ensures that the Beijing can continue to support large-scale research projects despite fiscal pressures, and demonstrates how the government, through administrative fiat, is seeking a sustainable model for research and development in fields with limited returns on investment in the short term.
Notes
[1] The innovation-driven development strategy is one of seven development strategies enshrined in the Party Charter (see China Brief, September 26, 2025). Xi also referred to it in his report to the 20th Party Congress in 2022.
[2] This was not the first time that Xi had called for integrating innovation, capital, talent, and industry, but it was the first time that such a formulation has been carried forward and successfully made its way into a five-year plan document. Xi proposed integrating the innovation and capital chains as early as the 9th Politburo study session in 2013 (Xinhua, October 8, 2013). The integration of innovation and industrial chains also predates the current framework. Xi floated a “five chains integration” during a tour of Jiangxi Province in 2019 (which disappeared in later speeches), before issuing instructions for a “two chains integration” during a 2020 visit to Shaanxi Province (Xinhua, December 11, 2019; Department of Science and Technology of Hunan Province, April 28, 2020). He re-emphasized strengthening the integration of the innovation and industrial chains at a May 2021 joint congress of the Party’s top scientists and engineers, and again during a meeting of the Central Commission for Comprehensively Deepening Reform in February 2022 (Xinhua, May 28, 2021; February 28, 2022).
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Executive Summary
The fiscal compact underpinning local governance in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has fundamentally unraveled. For two decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) incentivized local cadres through a “land finance” (土地财政) model, wherein land transfer fees frequently constituted over 40 percent of local revenue, funding infrastructure, servicing debt, and paying salaries. The collapse of the country’s property bubble that began in mid-2021 has rendered this model obsolete. Data indicate that revenue from residential land sales has plummeted, slumping 65 percent in 2025 from its 2020 peak as state-backed buyers retreat (Caixin, January 6). This has left the “government-managed fund budget” (政府性基金预算) with a structural shortfall that traditional fiscal transfers cannot bridge.
In 2025, these ramifications shifted from abstract balance sheet deficits to tangible operational crises. The fiscal contraction first hit public institutions (事业单位), with teachers in provinces like Guizhou and Henan reporting canceled performance bonuses and months-long delays in basic salary issuance (Radio Free Asia [RFA], May 9, 2025). The crisis has also breached the core civil service (公务员), shattering the “iron rice bowl” (铁饭碗) even in wealthy coastal jurisdictions. In Zhejiang Province, traditionally a fiscal stronghold, civil servants reportedly received annual pay cuts in the range of Renminbi (RMB) 50,000–150,000 ($7,200–22,000), on top of pay cuts the previous year, while township officials in Shandong received only 70 percent of their salaries, often with significant delays (RFA, June 17, 2025). Caught between the immediate exigency of meeting payrolls and the rigid mandate to service massive local government financing vehicle (LGFV) debt, officials have had to recalibrate. In this quest for survival, local governments have resorted to predatory revenue tactics, shoring up their finances through direct extraction of wealth, auctioning off future revenue, and even balance sheet manipulation.
The Instrumentalization of State Power: Direct Extraction
As land revenues evaporate, local governments have aggressively pivoted toward “non-tax revenue” (非税收入) to stave off insolvency. State power—encompassing administrative, judicial, and supervisory organs nominally designed for regulation and public order—is being repurposed as an instrument of direct wealth extraction. This shift has entrenched a predatory incentive structure wherein law enforcement agencies operate effectively as revenue-generating units. The correlation between fiscal distress and predatory enforcement is quantifiable: by May 2025, municipalities facing acute debt pressure, such as Lianyungang in Jiangsu and Quzhou in Zhejiang, reported year-on-year increases in fines and confiscation revenue exceeding 100 percent, inversely mirroring their declining tax receipts (The Paper, May 1, 2025).
Beyond the intensification of routine local seizures, a far more aggressive innovation is the proliferation of “Ocean Fishing” (远洋捕捞). This term refers to a practice in which law enforcement—most typically public security bureaus (PSBs; 公安局)—from fiscally distressed inland jurisdictions assert cross-border authority over private enterprises and their owners located in wealthier coastal economic hubs. Driven by revenue-sharing mechanisms that permit local agencies to retain a percentage of confiscated funds as “case-handling subsidies” (案款提留), these organs have monetized their coercive capabilities. [1]
Illustrating this trend is the high-profile case of the Guangdong-based private health technology firm Archealth (壹健康). Reporting in 2024 divulged a massive cross-provincial operation, in which public security forces from Henan Province mobilized over 1,600 officers to Guangzhou, freezing the company’s accounts. The intervention disrupted operations and forced Archealth to abort its planned IPO, exemplifying the destructive capacity of predatory enforcement (RFA, October 29, 2024).
The judiciary is not necessarily a recourse in such situations. Often, it has already been co-opted, acting less as an arbiter and more as an accomplice. A mid-2025 dispute involving a Shanghai-based valve manufacturer saw a court in Shanxi Province freeze RMB 19.3 million ($2.78 million) of its assets without any direct business relationship, simply to secure cash flow (Procuratorate Daily, June 13, 2025).
Parallel to direct asset seizures, tax enforcement has morphed into a comprehensive dragnet targeting both high-net-worth individuals and historical corporate liabilities. In the first 11 months of 2025, intensified “double high” (双高) audits, which targeted those with a high income and high net worth, recovered RMB 1.52 billion ($220 million) from 1,818 individuals (The Paper, December 12, 2025). The campaign was exemplified by heavy fines on influencers like Chen Zhen (陈震) (WallstreetCN, December 10, 2025). Authorities have also shattered the tacit “statute of limitations” for corporations, most notably ordering Zhijiang Liquor (枝江酒业) to pay RMB 85 million ($12 million) in taxes and penalties dating back to 1994. This retroactive aggression, colloquially termed “looking back 30 years” (倒查30年), effectively treats historical business success as a savings account for present-day fiscal rescue, eroding the legal predictability essential for long-term investment (Shanghai Securities News, June 13, 2024).
The Financialization of Governance: Future Liquidation
When immediate asset liquidations fail to plug the gap, local governments resort to financializing the future itself—a desperate strategy colloquially known as “eating next year’s food” (寅吃卯粮). This represents a fundamental shift away from selling tangible stock such as land and toward the intergenerational monetization of governance rights. By auctioning off monopoly franchises for 20–30 years, officials are effectively extracting revenue from the next five or six administrative terms, sacrificing long-term fiscal elasticity for a one-time cash injection.
The initial wave of extraction, which became prominent in 2022, focused on physical public venues and essential services. In Rongjiang County, Guizhou Province, the local government auctioned off the franchise rights for the county’s funeral homes for RMB 127 million ($18.2 million)—a sum nearly equivalent to the county’s entire fiscal revenue for the first quarter (China News, August 24, 2022). Langzhong, in Sichuan Province, similarly attempted to auction off the 30-year operating rights for public school cafeterias with a starting price of RMB 180 million ($25.8 million) (The Paper, July 16, 2022). These transactions did not merely raise funds; they locked in private monopolies over rigid demand, inevitably transferring the cost of debt recovery to the public through service degradation or price hikes for decades to come.
This trend has since expanded to encompass systemic, city-wide service rights. In early 2025, Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, auctioned the operating rights for nearly 24,000 roadside parking spots for a 20-year tenure, raising over RMB 730 million ($105 million) up front (Southern Metropolis Daily, February 24, 2025). Xinzhou, in Wuhan, has gone even further, putting the franchise rights for urban sanitation services on the block for a tenure of 30 years (Solid Waste Network, December 10, 2024). By selling off these essential public functions, local governments are solving a liquidity crunch today by planting a solvency time bomb for the 2030s and 2040s, effectively stripping future administrations of the capacity to manage public utilities.
The logic was taken to its extreme when abstract administrative concepts became monetized. In a striking case, Pingyin County, in Shandong Province, auctioned the 30-year franchise rights for its “low-altitude economy” (低空经济)—a theoretical asset encompassing drone logistics and airspace management—for RMB 924 million ($133 million). The winning bidder was a state-owned enterprise (SOE) wholly owned by the Pingyin Finance Bureau itself. Such a maneuver—effectively shifting money from the left pocket to the right—signals the ultimate alienation of state power: the transmutation of administrative jurisdiction into immediate treasury liquidity (National Business Daily, November 26, 2024).
The Transmutation of Resources: Asset Fabrication
With land no longer viable as prime collateral, LGFVs are engaging in aggressive financial innovation to prevent balance sheet collapse. This involves repackaging low-value or non-commercial public resources as high-value assets—a process dubbed “turning stone into gold” (点石成金).
A paradigmatic model for this alchemy emerged in Ganxian, Jiangxi Province. A local government assessment valued river sand and gravel reserves across three rivers at an incredible RMB 6.68 billion ($960 million) to inflate its asset books (Shanghai Stock Exchange Disclosure, June 20, 2022). By 2025, this desperate tactic had not only proliferated but evolved into a cruder form in underdeveloped regions. In Yi’an, Heilongjiang Province, a province grappling with severe demographic outflow and industrial decline, local authorities capitalized the desilting and disposal rights of two reservoirs. That October, these rights were listed for transfer at a staggering RMB 839 million ($120 million) for a 20-year period. The sole bidder was a local SOE established merely 11 days prior to the auction (Central News Agency, November 4, 2025).
This tactic is most acute in underdeveloped regions. Unlike coastal peers who can still harvest revenue from a vibrant private sector or high-tech concepts, rust-belt jurisdictions lack both a tax base to plunder and a market for future rights. Left with no alternatives, they resort to the crude valuation of waste—coercing banks to monetize silt and converting systemic insolvency into immediate, toxic liquidity.
A more sophisticated variation of this strategy targets the digital frontier. In 2024, Nanjing Public Transport Group (南京公交集团) capitalized 70 billion lines of bus data to secure a RMB 10 million ($1.4 million) credit line, while Liuzhou’s urban investment arm utilized “Internet of Vehicles” (车联网) data to secure RMB 20 million ($2.9 million) in bank loans (The Economic Observer, May 5, 2024; Economic Information Daily, August 2, 2024). Although these maneuvers temporarily beautify financial statements, they create fictitious assets that lack genuine market liquidity. The inevitable failure of projected cash flows to materialize risks transferring the local fiscal crisis directly into the PRC’s commercial banking system.
Conclusion
Revenue extraction tactics observed in recent years indicate that the PRC’s local governments have entered a structural survival game. The developmental state, which once championed business growth to cultivate a tax base, is being supplanted by a predatory apparatus that cannibalizes the economic ecosystem to sustain its own existence.
These measures ultimately represent a profound degradation of state capacity. By prioritizing immediate liquidity over market stability, local cadres are effectively dismantling the PRC’s unified market and eroding the legal predictability required for private sector growth. Although Beijing launched a RMB 10 trillion ($1.4 trillion) debt resolution plan in late 2024, year-end assessments leading up to the 2025 Central Economic Work Conference reveal a grim reality: the package covers only a fraction of hidden liabilities, leaving grassroots regimes in a perpetual crisis where they must slowly consume the very market upon which they rely (ThinkChina, November 26, 2025).
Notes
[1] While central regulations explicitly prohibit linking fines to departmental budgets, local jurisdictions continue to use “indigenous methods” (土办法) or “hidden rules” (潜规则) to bypass these bans, effectively sustaining a profit-driven enforcement loop (China Social Sciences Net, May 21, 2025).
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Executive Summary:
In most countries, employees either go on strike or quit when not paid on time. In the Russian Federation, however, workers often lack good alternatives to remaining in place. The Russian government strongly discourages firms from letting workers go lest unemployment surge and production decline. In the 1990s, this led to a dire situation for many workers, with up to 60 percent not being paid on time but remaining in their jobs. In the first two decades of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule, this problem declined in size as the economy improved, though it never completely disappeared (Proved.rf, May 2, 2017). In the three years since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, wage arrears have exploded, not to the scale of the 1990s, but large enough that it has sparked strikes across the country. There is speculation in Russia and the West that this problem could trigger the rise of a worker movement that could threaten the Putin regime and force it to change course on Ukraine (Okno, June 27; Window on Eurasia, June 30; Vazhnye Istorii, November 13). Such an outcome is unlikely anytime soon, even though Russian experts say that wage arrears amounts, the number of Russian employees affected, and the number of strikes are likely to increase. The Kremlin can and likely will continue to provide targeted cash infusions to particular firms to undermine strikers and keep those engaged in work stoppages in one place from linking up with those in others (Vazhnye Istorii, November 13; Ekho Rossii, November 16).
The problem of wage arrears is attracting attention because of the rapid rate at which the amount of money owed has been rising, rather than because of the overall scale of the problem. This increase has led to speculation about whether the trend will continue and what its impact will be on the Russian economy and Russian politics. The problem of unpaid wages began to shoot up immediately after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the amount of money, number of workers and sectors affected, the regions of the country affected, and frequency of consequent strikes has continued to intensify in the years since (Window on Eurasia, July 18, 2022, January 2, 2023, April 10). Over the last year, the problem has worsened at the fastest rate yet. Wage arrears between September 2024 and September 2025 “quadrupled, and workers in construction, mining, and even strategic defense plants say they are going months without pay,” according to Russian government statistics and an independent assessment published last week (Vazhnye Istorii, November 13). As of the end of September, employers owed their employees 1.95 billion rubles ($24 million), a figure four times higher than a year earlier. Only about 10,000 workers were directly affected, a tiny fraction of the total labor force of nearly 75 million (.013 percent).
There are three reasons why these statistics do not accurately reflect the situation and may seriously understate the problem. First, the Russian government no longer collects or at least publishes data on wages owed by small companies, where half of all Russians are employed. This means that the actual figures on wage arrears are likely at least twice as high as reported (Rosstat, September 2024). Second, in the last two years, the Kremlin has reduced its monitoring of wage collection, even in large companies. Even for the firms that the state statistics agency, Rosstat, claims to be assessing, it is not reporting everything (Window on Eurasia, June 30). Third, the failure of firms to pay back wages is not distributed equally across the country or among the various sectors of the economy. Wage arrears are concentrated in industries—including defense plants, coal mining, and construction—that are especially important to the regime and population. Complaints and strikes have hit these sectors harder than they have affected others (Kommersant, November 7).
The Rosstat data presents the most comprehensive figures available and is suggestive, if not definitive. According to the figures, for example, 44.1 percent of all wage arrears are in construction and 17.5 percent in mining. An examination of the situation by the Important Stories (Vazhnye Istorii, Важные Истории) media outlet concluded that “examples of this problem can be found in almost every sector,” including defense firms, shipbuilding, and nuclear power plant construction, suggesting that the problem is more widespread than Moscow acknowledges (Vazhnye Istorii, November 13). The increase in the amount of money owed also reflects rising wages, which means that each worker not paid accounts for a greater share of the total, and rising interest rates, which keep companies from borrowing money to pay wages. The Important Stories piece and other discussions since Rosstat released its data last month all conclude that the problem is far less serious than the wage arrears crisis of the 1990s, but more so than the Russian government is prepared to acknowledge (Ekho Rossii, November 16).
For the time being, the back wages firms owe their employees and the strikes they have triggered are more annoyances than a crisis. This is likely to remain true as long as Moscow is able to funnel money into key plants to undercut strikes and use its police powers to keep strikes from growing into more general protest actions. It is unclear if the Kremlin’s approach will continue to work or if wage arrears and resulting strikes could eventually challenge the Kremlin’s ability to control it. As Russian political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin points out, no one can accurately predict what will trigger a crisis in Russia, or whether the regime’s efforts to maintain control could raise worker demands beyond its ability to manage (Tochka, November 17). The wage arrears problem in Russia, while not yet a crisis, will remain an important aspect of the watching brief of all those concerned about the future of Putin’s Russia.
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Executive Summary:
For decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has viewed highly intelligent people—“talents” (人才) in the official terminology—as a critical and strategic resource of the state. Since at least the 1990s, national development strategies enshrined in the Party Charter such as the “rejuvenation through science and education development strategy” (科教兴国战略) and the “talent strong country development strategy” (人才强国战略) have ensured that identifying and training such people is a top priority. The Party believes that the more talents it cultivates, the more likely it is to advance to the technological frontier. This will help the People’s Republic of China (PRC) dominate the technologies of the future and thus prevail in competition with the West. As General Secretary Xi Jinping put it in 2023, “talent competition has already become the core of the competition for comprehensive national power” (人才竞争已经成为综合国力竞争的核心) (China Education News, June 1, 2023). And in the words of the 20th Party Congress Report, talents are the “basic and strategic support” (基础性、战略性支撑) for national development (Xinhua, October 25, 2022; China Brief, September 26).
In 2025, the Party has advanced two distinct strands of educational reforms and initiatives that build on these broader strategies. One is a doubling down on policies that promote research and development in science and technology. Another is a push to shape humanities programs internationally in ways that better reflect the Party’s interests. These two strands are not directly related—they are driven by different parts of the bureaucracy; but together they form part of a broader strategy that ultimately seeks to make the world safe for the CCP.
Increased Focus on Science and Technology Strength
On October 1, the PRC launched a new international talent visa: the K visa. At least, it was supposed to. Initially announced by Premier Li Qiang (李强) on August 7, the visa responds to calls from the 20th Party Congress to “proactively open up talent policy” (实施积极开放人才政策). It is billed as an improvement on other visa options in terms of permissible number of entries to the country, its validity period, and the streamlined nature of its application process (Baidu/中国K字签证, accessed November 14). Notices on government websites in September stated that specific requirements would be posted on embassy websites overseas (Jiayuan County Government, September 9). But as of mid-November, embassy websites contain no mention of the visa (PRC Embassy in the United States, accessed November 14). Officials are yet to explain why they have not implemented the visa policy. But a contributing factor could be the backlash its announcement produced. Online commentators criticized the policy, fearing it could exacerbate already severe youth unemployment in the country, as well as intensifying pressure on young people (DW, October 2).
This particular policy aligned with other policies unveiled this year even as it drew ire online. These include the release in January of a new ten-year plan, the “Outline of the Plan to Build an Education Strong Country (2024–2035)” (教育强国建设规划纲要 (2024—2035年)); the August announcement of an “Action Plan for Adjusting and Optimizing Disclipines and Major Offerings in Higher Education (2025–2027)” (中央教育工作领导小组印发《高等教育学科专业设置调整优化行动方案 (2025—2027年)); and October’s “Opinions on Strengthening Science and Technology Education in Primary and Secondary Schools” (关于加强中小学科技教育的意见), released by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and six other departments (Xinhua, January 19; MOE, August 28, October 29).
The first of these plans called for “fully constructing an education strong country” (建成教育强国) by 2035, through focusing on “talent competitiveness and science and technology support” (人才竞争力、科技支撑力). The August plan, published by the Central Education Work Leading Small Group, called for establishing and improving mechanisms for adjusting academic programs and talent cultivation models “driven by scientific and technological development and national strategic needs” (建立健全科技发展、国家战略需求牵引的). Part of this involves building a national big data platform to track supply and demand of talent across university programs. The October plan for schools, meanwhile, specifically references national development strategies and the new ten-year plan, and calls for boosting “high-level science and technology self-reliance and strength” (高水平科技自立自强).
Together, these plans constitute an “unprecedented plan to reengineer” the country’s universities, according to reporting from Caixin. This reporting cites one province that has directed all of its universities to cut 40 percent of their academic programs, especially those unrelated to its key industries (Caixin, November 7). The effects of this level of turmoil in the higher education sector are unclear. But they will likely follow a well-trodden path seen in other sectors. A degree of success in innovation and scientific development is to be expected but will come at the cost of social “involution” (内卷). As enormous resources and people’s time and energy are poured into a narrowing band of academic inquiry, intense competition is likely to increase as larger number of highly educated people compete for a smaller number of jobs. This is already evident in some parts of the country. One commentator describes the country’s approach to AI talents as a “human sea attack” (人海战术), in which top performers emerge but at the cost of “enormous attrition.” This includes, tragically, a rising suicide rate among children, adolescents, and those working in science and engineering-related fields (ChinaTalk, November 12).
The costs of this unbalanced focus on a small set of disciplines are also evident in the lack of resources flowing to the rest of the education system. The implementation of reforms to vocational education have largely failed due to issues with funding and too few qualified teachers (China Brief, June 7). And the PRC continues to have “one of the most poorly educated labor forces in the upper-middle-income world” (Foreign Policy, October 10).
Academics Must Promote Beijing’s Initiatives
The second prong of the PRC’s strategy to build a world-beating education sector is an attempt to instrumentalize the humanities to construct legitimizing narratives for its ongoing nation-building project. As a Global Times editorial puts it, “global China Studies carry the core mission of reconstructing the world’s cognitive framework of China” in a way that grasps “the unique genes of Chinese civilization” (Global Times, October 15).
A number of recent international conferences on China studies and sinology have been key platforms for advancing this strategy. On November 13, the eve of the 2025 World Chinese Studies Conference (2025世界中文大会) in Beijing, Xi Jinping wrote to young sinologists attending the event. He expressed the hope that they would “introduce a true, holistic, and comprehensive China to the world” (向世界介绍真实、立体、全面的中国). Referencing his vision for a new global system, he called for them to “become good ambassadors for bridging Chinese and foreign civilizations, and to contribute wisdom and strength to the promotion of the construction of a community of common destiny for mankind” (当好融通中外文明的使者，为推动构建人类命运共同体贡献智慧和力量) (Xinhua, November 13).
The idea that those who study China should act as an extension of the Party’s messaging apparatus is not new. It is not for nothing that the second World Conference on China Studies (第二届世界中国学大会), which took place in October in Shanghai, was organized by the State Council Information Office and attended by propaganda head Li Shulei (李书磊). Another politburo member, Shanghai’s Party secretary Chen Jining (陈吉宁), also delivered a speech, during which he gave assembled academics from over 50 countries and territories their marching orders. The field of Chinese studies, he said, should understand Chinese civilization as “an organically unified whole” (作为有机统一的生命体). Academics should “deeply explain the path of Chinese modernization” (深入阐释中国式现代化道路), “clearly talk to the world about the true, multidimensional, comprehensive China” (向世界讲清楚真实、立体、全面的中国), and “implement the Global Civilization Initiative” (要践行全球文明倡议) (People’s Daily, October 15). This sentiment echoes a statement from the International Liaison Department head in 2024, which described sinologists as those willing to “promote the implementation of the three major global initiatives” (推动落实三大全球倡议)” (CCP ILD, October 28, 2024).
Conferences attendees quoted in official media were largely characterized by their willingness to eulogize China’s rise and criticize the West. A Swedish academic, Jan Oberg, is quoted saying that “China is probably the country in the world with the most far-sighted vision of the future development” (中国可能是世界上对于未来发展最为高瞻远瞩的国家) (People’s Daily, October 16). The British writer Martin Jacques declared that “we are witnessing the globalization of China studies and with it a progressive decentering of Western influence in the field” (Xinhua, October 15). And former Prime Minister of Italy and former President of the European Commission Romano Prodi stated that “any form of decoupling would run counter to the fundamental interests of both sides” (Global Times, October 14).
The Party’s desire to use global academia to shape how the world views it extends beyond its borders. Academics have noted that the country weaponizes research, for instance by denying visas to certain academics (China Brief, July 31, 2023). In 2019, Cambridge University Press censored articles in its journal China Quarterly following requests from Chinese authorities (Wong & Kwong, 2019). [1] And most recently, Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom halted the research of Laura Murphy on forced labor in the PRC for eight months. Murphy says that the university was “explicitly trading [her] academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market” (The Guardian, November 3). A principal vector of Party influence in academia comes through Confucius Institutes. These organizations, which are managed under the PRC’s Ministry of Education, variously have been set up with funding from Huawei, have taught classes on Chinese politics, and have offered services to foreign businesses with a view to deepening economic engagement with the PRC (China Brief, September 26, 2019).
Conclusion
Party strategies to reorient the country’s educational system toward dominating high-end technologies while seeding Party-approved frameworks throughout global academia are having a degree of success. For instance, high-level talents continue to move to the PRC. In the first half of 2025, these included around 50 tenure-track scholars of Chinese descent from U.S. universities (Washington Post, November 6). Most recently, a top cancer drug scientist from the University of Chicago also made his way to the PRC (The Paper, November 5; South China Morning Post, November 12). In the other direction, former employees of organizations established under the Party’s united front system have taken up prominent roles within at least one U.S. university.
The impact of these strategies will necessarily be dual-sided. They are likely to lead to significant breakthroughs and innovations. Policies that exacerbate “involution” are likely to alienate the wider domestic population; while rigid attempts to control who can study China will almost certainly alienate many outside the country, too. The success or failure of these strategies will probably depend on the pushback and how Beijing adapts these initiatives to the headwinds.
Notes
[1] Wong MYH, Kwong Y. “Academic Censorship in China: The Case of The China Quarterly.” PS: Political Science & Politics. 2019; 52(2):287-292. doi:10.1017/S1049096518002093.
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Executive Summary:
Rapid advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) has become a point of national pride in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), driven in part by a cohort of accelerationist advisors who view technology as a transformative solution to the country’s economic ills. Lauding it as a “new productive force” (新质生产力), these experts view AI as a new “engine” (引擎) for economic growth that will cause “lead goose” (头雁) spillover and driving effects that will benefit every industry (Xinhua, October 30, 2024). Some experts, such as Chief China Economist at DBS Bank Ji Mo (纪沫), have asserted that AI’s contribution to GDP can “partially offset” (一定程度上弥补) challenges like population ageing (China News, May 2).
Chinese academics, engineers, and media commentators are increasingly questioning this premise. They highlight additional fears related to the rise of AI and warn that overreliance on the technology could exacerbate structural problems rather than resolve them. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership is increasingly taking their concerns into account.
Deployment Lacks Coordination
Chinese experts recognize that Beijing’s accelerationist strategy has led to fragmented provincial competition in AI development. As one media article wrote, “no locality wants to miss the opportunity of the AI industry” (没有地方希望错过人工智能产业的机遇) (China Newsweek, March 20). Wang Yong (王勇), Vice Dean of the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University, observed that some local governments believe that “continuing to develop traditional industries is a sign of being outdated” (再发展传统产业就落后了) (Lianhe Zaobao, August 29). A clear example can be seen in Guangxi, where the Party Secretary declared that the province “cannot be absent” (不能缺席) from the AI sector, despite its limited relevance to the national AI landscape (China Newsweek, March 20).
The provincial sprint to seize the AI opportunity has led to duplicated efforts and wasted resources. This mirrors patterns seen in other strategic industries, such as solar panels, electric vehicles (EVs), and semiconductors, in which fragmented investment, redundant projects, and overcapacity represent increasingly acute challenges. Pan Helin (盘和林), a prominent Chinese economist and member of the Expert Committee on Information and Communications Economy under the Ministry of Industry Information Technology (MIIT), has warned that “local governments blindly supporting emerging industries through tax breaks or direct investment risk creating significant overcapacity” (地方政府通过税收优惠或直接投资的方式，盲目支持新兴产业，导致产能过剩) (Lianhe Zaobao, August 29). Tan Tieniu (谭铁牛), a Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) professor, similarly cautioned at the recent Two Sessions against “blindly rushing” (一哄而上和一哄而散) into AI. He asserted that there is “no need for every province and city to duplicate efforts” (并不需要每个省市都要重复建设), as it could “lead to overcapacity and a tangle of bad debts” (产能过剩，扯不清的一屁股坏账) (Sina Finance, September 30).
Beijing has become increasingly attentive to problems arising from uncoordinated AI development across regions. A People’s Daily commentary urged localities to “play to their unique strengths, rely on local methods, and pursue differentiated paths” (打好“特色牌”，多用“土办法”，走好“差异路”), arguing against homogenization. The commentary cited Zhejiang as a model (People’s Daily, August 4). Government officials have also underscored the importance of avoiding “disorderly competition and blind expansion” (无序竞争和一拥而上) with regard to Beijing’s recent “AI+” initiative (Wall Street CN, August 29; China Brief, September 21).
AI May Fail to Deliver Technological Progress
Chinese policy elites have sounded the alarm about excessive hype surrounding large language models (LLMs) in the domestic AI sector. Mei Hong (梅宏), a professor at Peking University and former president of the China Computer Federation, explained that with AI, “isolated successes are exaggerated and generalized without regard to context, leading to overpromises” (以偏概全，对成功个案不顾前提地放大、泛化，过度承诺) (Aisixiang, December 11). Song-Chun Zhu (朱松纯), dean of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI) and director of a state-backed program to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), has similarly warned that the field is “exciting on the surface, but chaotic when it comes to substance” (表面热闹，实质混乱) (The Paper, April 5). He argues that public opinion has marginalized foundational research while focusing on large models.
Others have echoed these concerns. Sun Weimin (孙蔚敏), Chief Engineer of the Cyberspace Administration of China, has said that large models are overhyped and that there is still a “significant gap before they can truly serve as production tools” (离成为生产工具还存在不小的差距) (QQ News, April 16). Baidu CEO Robin Li (李彦宏) has offered a similar diagnosis. Explaining that developers will “rely on a small number of large models to build a wide variety of applications” (开发者要依赖为数不多的大模型来开发出各种各样的原生应用), he argues that “repeatedly developing foundational models is a tremendous waste of social resources” (不断地重复开发基础大模型是对社会资源的极大浪费) (21st Century Business Herald, November 15, 2023). This skepticism represents the prevailing consensus. The latest survey data available, compiled by researchers at CAS, revealed that most experts hold negative attitudes towards LLM development (CLAI Research, March 12, 2023). [1]
Continued development also requires the ability to cultivate and integrate AI talent, especially in bridging academia and industry. In 2021, Xue Lan (薛澜), dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University and head of the National Expert Committee on Next Generation AI Governance, stated that universities are trying to train engineering talent but collaboration between universities and enterprises “cannot be implemented” (落实不了) (Tsinghua University, July 13, 2021). Xue noted that it is usually acceptable for a university professor to take a temporary position in industry, but that employees who try to return from a company to a university are often denied permission. Xue lamented the lack of flexible mechanisms to bring people from industry, since teaching requires various approvals. As a result, “although everyone encourages collaboration between universities and enterprises, it often fails to materialize in practice” (虽然大家都鼓励校企合作，但真正到落实的时候落实不了).
This problem has persisted. One article in the Ministry of Education’s monthly academic journal noted how various restrictive factors exert “significant cooling effects on enterprises’ engagement in industry university collaboration” (对产教融合育人深度形成显著冷却效应). These factors include a “systemic delay” of teaching and research productivity in universities (China Higher Education Research, July 2). A separate survey performed by Nanjing University researchers found that nearly 58 percent of enterprises believed that traditional education methods in colleges and universities are insufficient to meet their development needs, and that around 54 percent believed that there is a lack of a “stable communication and consultation mechanisms” (校企间缺乏稳定的沟通交流和问题协商机制) between universities and enterprises (China Education Online, September 10).
AI Threatens the Workforce
Chinese elites have warned of AI-induced labor displacement that could exacerbate challenges related to unemployment and inequality. Nie Huihua (聂辉华), deputy dean of the National Academy of Development and Strategy at Renmin University, has stated that AI adoption benefits business owners, not workers (Jiemian, October 14, 2024).
Cai Fang (蔡昉), director of the Institute of Population and Labor Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has explained how the PRC’s rapid installation of industrial robots has contributed to labor displacement. He asserts that “technological progress does not have a trickle down effect on employment” (技术进步对就业没有涓流效应) (QQ News, May 16). Addressing these distributional implications, president of the National School of Development at Peking University Huang Yiping (黄益平) has cited Samsung’s unmanned factories which operate with minimal human labor, raising the fear that workers may be unable to earn a stable income (Sina Finance, June 25).
Several experts have highlighted the disproportionate impact of AI-driven labor disruption on vulnerable groups in the workforce, such as workers and migrant laborers, emphasizing the need to strengthen the PRC’s social safety net (21st Century Business Herald, December 2, 2024). Li Tao (李韬), Dean of the China Institute of Social Management at Beijing Normal University, has argued that these trends necessitate an “employment-first” (就业优先) strategy, which could improve unemployment insurance and pensions (Qiushi, July 14).
Economic Growth May Not Materialize
Chinese elites have expressed doubt about AI’s ability to drive meaningful short-term economic growth. The Tencent Research Institute has argued that much of GDP growth tied to AI has been driven by investment rather than tangible productivity gains, implying that the PRC’s economic strategy is over-dependent on AI (Huxiu, September 15). Wu Xiaoying (伍晓鹰), a professor of economics at Peking University’s National School of Development, has described AI as a contemporary example of the Solow Paradox. Wu invokes the paradox to note that widespread investment in AI technologies has not been reflected by economy-wide improvements to productivity (Sina Finance, July 24).
Concerns about excessive dependence on AI in sectors such as finance, education, and tourism, are also rampant (Sina Finance, March 10; Economic Daily, March 16; Sohu, April 30). Some experts have warned that the AI obsession has diverted attention away from other technologies, such as blockchain and those related to supply chain development (CEIBS, July 30, 2024). AI-related spending does not yet account for one percent of the country’s GDP, while electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and solar panels, contribute only eight percent (DW, March 3, 2024; Sina Finance, April 18. Meanwhile, the real estate sector, which contributes roughly a third of the PRC’s GDP, has continued to languish. Some, like the Stanford University-based economist Xu Chenggang (许成钢), have argued that AI will have limited impact as a growth engine without meaningful reforms to revive the real estate industry and bolster general consumption (DW Chinese, March 8, 2024).
AI Brings Social Risks
Lastly, prominent Chinese experts have emphasized the need to institute AI-related safety guardrails. Andrew Yao (姚期智), dean of Tsinghua University’s College of AI and the only Chinese recipient of the Turing Award, has highlighted the “existential risks” (生存性风险) of LLMs. [2] He cited an example in which an AI model attempted to avoid being shut down by sending threatening internal emails to company executives (Science Net, June 24). Qi Xiangdong (齐向东), chairman of a cybersecurity firm with several government contracts, has warned of AI-related security threats like data breaches, deepfake scams, and saturation-style attacks (Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference News, February 12). AGI also poses unique threats. Some, such as Zeng Yi (曾毅), director of the International Research Center for AI Ethics and Governance at CAS, fear that AGI will surpass humans in intelligence (Sohu, June 19, 2023).
Another key concern centers on sourcing training data beyond the Great Firewall, which exposes AI systems to content outside of the CCP’s control. Gao Wen (高文), former Dean of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science at Peking University, has noted that Chinese data makes up only 1.3 percent of global large-model datasets (The Paper, March 24). Reflecting these concerns, the Ministry of State Security (MSS) has issued a stark warning that “poisoned data” (数据投毒) could “mislead public opinion” (误导社会舆论) (Sina Finance, August 5).
Conclusion
Much of the global discourse around the PRC’s AI ascent has overlooked a growing number of influential voices within the country who are raising alarms about overreliance on AI. These concerns reflect deep anxieties about the potential for widespread social and economic disruption if AI development proceeds without institutional coordination, long-term planning, and more robust safeguards.
Party elites have increasingly come to recognize the potential dangers of an unchecked, accelerationist approach to AI development. During remarks at the Central Urban Work Conference in July, Xi posed a question to attendees: “when it comes to launching projects, it’s always the same few things: artificial intelligence, computing power, new energy vehicles. Should every province in the country really be developing in these directions?” (上项目，一说就是几样：人工智能、算力、新能源汽车，是不是全国各省份都要往这些方向去发展产业) (People’s Daily, August 4).
Significant uncertainties remain, particularly regarding how, or whether, closer government oversight of AI development will materialize. Strengthening regulatory capacity across provincial governments is likely to be uneven and difficult. Despite national strategies that prioritize the development of domain-specific AI applications over foundational models, new LLMs with limited commercial application continue to be released. Exacerbating these challenges is Xi Jinping’s ideological opposition to Western-style welfarism, which he has criticized for making citizens lazy (People’s Daily, February 17, 2023). This suggests a reluctance to implement social reforms needed to cushion the impact of AI-induced labor disruptions. At the same time, as technological competition with Washington intensifies, Xi may decide to press ahead with an accelerationist AI campaign, prioritizing geopolitical rivalry over domestic caution.
Notes
[1] This data was published prior to the release of the PRC’s first AI chatbot, however, so some experts may have changed their views since then.
For an excellent survey of Chinese critiques on LLMs, see William Hannas, Huey-Meei Chang, Maximilian Riesenhuber, and Daniel Chou’s report “Chinese Critiques of Large Language Models” (CSET, January 2025).
[2] The Turing Award is given for achievements in the field of computer science, and is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing” (A.M. Turing, accessed November 5).
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History will register that the first week of September 2025 propelled the advent of the Eurasia Century to a whole new level.
By Pepe Escobar at Sputnik.
That was the expectation ahead of three crucial intertwined dates: the SCO annual summit in Tianjin; the Victory Day parade in Beijing; and the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok.
Yet expectations were even surpassed considering the breadth and scope of what just happened.
The SCO in Tianjin solidified the Chinese push for the establishment of true Global Governance – which in practice means the unceremonious burying of the “rules-based international order” that under the new US administration has metastasized into a no-rules based international chaos: essentially an ethos of “we’ll blow up the world if we are not able to control it.”
Tianjin had not only the 10 SCO full members but also 2 observers and 15 partners – with a heavy Southeast Asian presence – discussing the finer points to be observed for peaceful development. The pic of the week, if not the year or decade, was the Putin, Xi and Modi trilateral handshake: the return of the original, Primakov-coined RIC (Russia-India-China) in full force. As Professor Zhang Weiwei of Fudan University remarked in Vladivostok, the SCO is now expanding steadily in three platforms: energy; clean industries; and AI. In parallel, Central Asia is finally being seen as a “geographical blessing”, and not “a curse”.
Immediately after Tianjin, the Russia-China strategic partnership also shot up to a whole new level, as President Putin was received by President Xi at the Zhongnanhai, the official residence of the Chinese head of state, for an across-the-spectrum state of the planet recap.
The next day Beijing was resplendent under blue skies overseeing the stunning military parade celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Chinese victory over Japanese invasion and the Asian chapter of Nazi-fascism. That was a confident geoeconomic superpower showing off its military progress.
On the same day the Eastern Economic Forum started in Vladivostok: an unrivalled platform for discussing the surge of pan-Eurasia business.
What China has proposed, actually reiterated in Tianjin, goes way beyond the concept of wangdao, referring to an enlightened, benign power, but not a Hegemon. What could be described as the trademark motto of a Pax Sinica under Xi could be summed up as Make Trade, Not War – and for the common good, or community of a shared future”, in Beijing terminology.
SCO partners, as well as BRICS partners, fully understand that China does not intend to replace Pax Americana, which always relied on the – now aptly renamed – Department of War’s gunboat “diplomacy”. Whatever hysteria fits the West may throw – manipulating Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, South China Sea, Taiwan – won’t deviate Beijing from its civilizational inclusive path.
The birth of a new logistics order
The road from Tianjin to Vladivostok mostly evolved on three interconnected fronts; oil and gas; connectivity corridors; and massive economic development.
The collective West simply cannot get rid of its pathology of perennialy underestimating the East. For years, both BRICS and SCO were derided in Washington as irrelevant talk shops. But it’s the multilateral spirit that allows something groundbreaking like the Power of Siberia-2 to come to light.
Power of Siberia-2 was planned several years ago, but it was difficult to find consensus on the final route. Gazprom preferred Western Siberia to Xinjiang, across the Altai mountains. The Chinese wanted transit via Mongolia, straight into central China.
The Mongolian route eventually prevailed. It was decided two years ago, and in the last few weeks, the final pricing mechanism, respecting market rates. This massive geoeconomic game-changer means that the gas from the Yamal peninsula that would supply Europe via the Nord Streams will supply China.
President Putin’s expose at the plenary session in Vladivostok placed particular emphasis on energy and connectivity.
But to track the devil in the details nothing could beat the arguably two top panels at the forum.
One of them discussed the integrated development of the Arctic and the Russian Far East, with special insights by Vladimir Panov, who not only is Rosatom’s top expert on the Arctic but also the Deputy Chairman of the State Commission on Arctic Development.
Another panel really dug deep , tracing a parallel between the origins of the Northern Sea Route (NSR), 500 years ago – when Russian diplomat Dmitry Gerasimov drew up the first draft of the Northern Sea Route and the first map of the Arctic Ocean and Muscovy coastlines – and the 21st century technology challenges.
This panel featured a particular striking expose by the CEO of Rosatom, Aleksey Likhachev, complemented by experts such as Sergey Vakhurov, the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Maritime Collegium. Likhachev detailed the complex shaping of an Arctic corridor, carrying mostly raw materials: a resilient transport corridor for the whole of Northeast Asia.
That’s no less than the birth of a new logistics order – think IA- based weather forecasting plus icebreakers – featuring critical Russian input.
Pepe Escobar wraps up Eastern Economic Forum: Key takeaways on Russia’s global strategy
EEF’s focus was on Russia’s Arctic and Far East development, high-tech growth, energy exploration, and connectivity corridors
— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 6, 2025
Will Vladivostok become the next Hong Kong?
So, as Putin stressed in his presentation at the plenary session, the heart of the matter is the Trans-Arctic Transport Corridor: arguably the key 21st century connectivity corridor.
Thus it’s no wonder Vladivostok’s discussions centered around the key role of nuclear energy and nuclear icebreakers in assuring stable shipping along the NSR route, side by side with environmental concerns and the trials and tribulations of securing large-scale investments in energy production, processing and infrastructure building.
All that merged with a timely discussion of the Greater Eurasia Partnership – the crux of Russian geoeconomic policy – with key inputs by Alexey Overchuk, the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s government, and the affable Suhail Khan, the Deputy Secretary-General of the SCO.
An absolutely key takeaway of all these discussions was the startling realignment being operated by Rosatom – which is simultaneously expanding business with China, India and South Korea along the ultra-strategic NSR.
That means, in essence, Russia evaluating all vectors when it comes to organizing full-scale convoy systems for 365 days a year of Arctic navigation: nothing less, once again, than a new economic and technological order.
Now couple all that with a lively discussion of how the Global South and East will be leading the new growth economy.
Sberbank’s CEO Herman Gref, for instance, disclosed that the largest Russian bank has become the second largest in transactions globally, only behind JP Morgan.
Wen Wang, from Renmin University, remarked how China is undergoing a very strong de-Americanization process, in education and tech, pushing “its own knowledge system”.
He foresees huge Russia-China cooperation potential – economic and financial, emphasizing there is a pressing necessity to open financial markets on both sides. That’s how Vladivostok could become the next Hong Kong. Several panelists at the forum observed that Vladivostok has all it takes to become a strategic center for Global South integration.
The Arctic will be at the center of possible business deals between Russians and Americans; serious discussions have been going on since March, including in the recent Putin-Trump meeting.
Amidst the colossal logistics challenges, an economic breakthrough in the Arctic, next to and within Alaska may eventually represent for the US a ticket out of an economic catastrophe. So here the Arctic – which is de facto dominated by Russia – may in the end become a privileged arena to domesticate the Empire of Chaos.
After all Russia has already built extensive, complex infrastructure in the Arctic – upgraded in real time. Mammoth ports, LNG processing, whole cities of workers and technicians, the enormous advantage of the nuclear icebreaker fleet (nine in action, with two more coming), all these advances are Russian intellectual property that can be exploited in dealing with the US.
In the end, these heady few days last week solidified The Future. Grandmaster Lavrov once again delivered the succinct version – commenting on the triple handshake of Putin, Xi and Modi: “A demonstration that three great powers, representing three great civilizations, recognize the commonality of their interests in several areas.”
That’s way more: that’s a new world in the making.
Virtually every person can run, but some are much better at it than others. And this is actually true for all things in our lives. One person becomes a professor and the other works on an assembly line. One speaks seven languages and the other is illiterate. One gets along with people easily and the other is autistic. Everyone can do everything, but not all can do it equally well.
Whether you can do something depends mainly on talent and training. If you are born with the talent to be able to run hard, then running comes easier to you than those who were not born with that talent. If you train hard to be able to speak many languages, then you can express yourself better in different languages than those who do not train. Talent is innate and you can train yourself.
However, what we must realize is that training is in fact also a talent. After all, why doesn’t everyone go to college, assuming that virtually everyone has the same volume of brain. I’m not saying we should all go to college, but everyone could be capable of doing so. But some people feel like training and others don’t.
Feeling like something can be called a talent. Being able to learn can be called a talent. Being curious and eager to learn can be called a talent. Of course you can train yourself to (better) use these talents. But the fact remains that we are born with our own specific set of qualities, talents, which largely determine how we go about our lives.
To wake up
When we look around us, we regularly find that others are not awake. Those others do not see what we do see. We are aware and those others are not. The funny thing is that those others experience the same thing when they look at us. Who says we are right? Maybe we are wrong and we are not awake (enough). It depends on which angle you are looking from.
But if being able to see from multiple perspectives is an art, then that is also a talent. Maybe you don’t feel like making an effort to explore multiple angles at all. You can argue that you can make sense, but that is highly questionable. If it were that simple, we as humanity would be well advanced in civilization by now.
We look for explanations why others are not awake, why others do not see what we see. To us, after all, it is so obvious. If those others knew what we know, they would be on our side in no time. It is not difficult for these others to absorb our knowledge, but they do not do it. We do, or at least we say we do.
Psychologists write books on cognitive dissonance. We know the power of peer pressure. Religions and cults can determine our thinking. Governments have elevated propaganda to an art. There are all sorts of explanations about why people don’t wake up. But can people who are asleep wake themselves up? And what if they were not born with that talent?
Wanting to wake up
Does everyone want to wake up? Can everyone want to wake up? Someone may want to wake up, but can that person. If everyone can do everything, then waking up must be among the possibilities. If someone has little talent for waking up, then with training that person should still be able to come a long way. Will someone then train? Can that person then train?
How much effort do you make to help another person when that person does not want to? Why do you put so much effort into waking up another person when they themselves don’t want to? How much effort do you put into waking yourself up? Are you yourself open to becoming more awake and can you be extremely critical of yourself in doing so? Do you understand that you yourself are probably not fully awake?
If one of you can already run well and the other is just starting out, you can choose to train separately but you can also train together. It takes effort for both, but is the only way to move forward together. It is the challenge for all wakes. And because everyone wakes (and sleeps) in their own way, it is a challenge for everyone.
The most important thing is to realize that waking up is its own process that you enter into for yourself and not to wake others up. It is true that you can wake up together, but each in their own way and at their own pace. This is not about politicians, directors or journalists. It is about ordinary people, because those are the ones who are allowed to wake up.
Nico Cost
All this allows us to conclude that the concept of “sustainable development“ was originally a political project of the globalist oligarchs. But with the current fragmentation and deadlock of globalization, they are trying to present this as an alternative scenario for the universal future. That is, part of their famous “rules–based order.“ So that their operation and control can continue under a plausible pretext.
L’article Sustainable Development Or Sustainable Exploitation? est apparu en premier sur Strategika.
24 Oct 2019 – China as a nation has the longest and by far the vastest record of inventions in the history of the world. It is now reliably estimated that more than 60% of all the knowledge existing in the world today originated in China, a fact swept under the carpet by the West.
This is an older article by Larry Romanov. and has been included in similar article sets in many sites. Some of the technological information is somewhat dated now, but the principle stands.
Joseph Needham, a British biochemist, scientific historian, and professor at Cambridge University, is widely rated as one of the most outstanding intellectuals of the 20th century. Chinese students visiting at Cambridge repeatedly informed him that Western scientific methods and discoveries discussed in his classes originated in China centuries before. Needham was so intrigued that he became fully fluent in Chinese, then travelled to China to investigate. He discovered voluminous evidence of the truth of those claims and decided to remain in China to write a book to document what he deemed a discovery of great importance to the world. Needham never completed his task of cataloguing the history of Chinese invention. His one book became 26 books and he died in 1995, with his work still continued today by his students. One good introduction to this topic is Robert Temple’s summary of Needham’s work. (1)
We were all taught in school that the printing press with movable type was invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg in about the year 1550. Not so. China not only invented paper but also the printing press with movable set type, which was in common use in China 1,000 years before Gutenberg was born. Similarly, we were taught that Englishman James Watt invented the steam engine. He did not. Steam engines were in widespread use in China 600 years before Watt was born. There are dated ancient texts and drawings to illustrate and prove the Chinese discovered and documented “Pascal’s Triangle” 600 years before Pascal copied it, and the Chinese enunciated Newton’s First Law of Motion 2,000 years before Newton.
The same is true for thousands of inventions that the West now claim as theirs but where conclusive documentation exists to prove that they originated in China hundreds and sometimes thousands of years before the West copied them. It was not for nothing that Marco Polo is described in China as “Europe’s great thief”. The next few paragraphs are adapted mainly from information in Temple’s book, which I strongly recommend.
The Chinese invented the decimal number system, decimal fractions, negative numbers, and the zero, so far in the past that the origin is lost in the mists of time. The Chinese tracked sunspots and comets with such detail and accuracy that these ancient records are still used as the basis for their prediction and observation today. The Chinese were drilling for natural gas about 2,500 years ago, wells 4,800 feet deep, with bamboo pipelines to deliver the gas to nearby cities. The Chinese pioneered the mining and use of coal long before it was known in the West. Marco Polo and Arab traders marveled at the “black stone” that the Chinese mined from the ground, that would burn slowly during an entire night.
China had printed paper money almost 1,500 years ago, done in ways to prevent counterfeiting. Wrapping paper, paper napkins and toilet paper were all in general use in China 2,000 years before the West could produce them. They were the first to invent and develop a full mechanical clock with a true escapement, many centuries before the Swiss had done so. The Chinese invented an ingenious seismograph still in use that tells not only the severity but the direction and distance of earthquakes. The Chinese invented hot-air balloons, the parachute, manned flight with kites, the wheelbarrow and matches. They invented hermetically-sealed laboratories for scientific experiments. They invented belt and chain drives, the paddlewheel steamer, the helicopter rotor and the propeller, the segmental-arch bridge. They invented the use of water power and chain pumps, the crank handle, all the construction methods for suspension bridges, sliding calipers, the fishing reel, image projection, magic lanterns, the gimbal system of suspension. China not only invented spinning wheels, carding machines and looms, but was the world’s leader in technical innovations in textile manufacturing, more than 700 years before Britain’s 18th century textile revolution.
Chinese expertise with fine porcelain was so advanced millennia ago, that even today it is admitted their ability has never even been equaled in the West, much less surpassed. The Chinese discovered not only magnetism but magnetic remanence and induction, as well as the compass. They invented gunpowder, smoke bombs, the cannon, the crossbow, plated body armor, fireworks, flamethrowers, grenades, land and sea mines, multi-stage rockets, mortars and repeating guns. China had irrigation canals that were also used for transport, and the Chinese invented the canal locks that could raise and lower boats to different levels 1,500 years before the Americans built the Panama Canal. China has earthquake-proof dams functioning today that were built around 250 BC.
A millennium ago, the Chinese conceived and developed the science of immunology – vaccinating people for diseases like smallpox, knowing how to extract and prepare the vaccine so as to immunise and not infect. They discovered the circadian rhythm in the human body, blood circulation and the science of endocrinology. The Chinese were using urine from pregnant women to make sex hormones 2,000 years ago, understanding how they acted on the body and how to use them. Many centuries-old Chinese medical books still exist, documenting all this and much more. Around 1550, China compiled a huge 52-volume Chinese Traditional Herbal Medicine encyclopedia that described almost 2,000 herbal sources and 10,000 medical prescriptions. Among them is chaulmoogra oil, which is still the only known treatment for leprosy.
China designed and built the world’s largest commercial ships, which were many times longer and ten times larger in volume than anything the West could build at the time. In the late 1500s the largest English ships displaced 400 tons, while China’s displaced more than 3,000 tons. Western ships were small, uncontrollable and fragile, and useless for travelling any distance. Thousands of years ago, Chinese ships had watertight compartments that permitted them to continue journeys even when damaged. Moreover, Chinese ships not only had multiple masts, but China invented the luff sails which permit us to sail almost into the wind, just as sailboats do today, and were therefore not dependent on wind direction for their travel. Their luff sails contained sewn-in bamboo battens that keep the sails full and aerodynamically efficient, as racing sailboats use today. The Chinese invented the ship’s rudder – something the Europeans never managed to do, able to steer themselves only with oars, and European sails permitted them to travel only in the direction of the wind, which meant a ship would have to remain in place, sometimes for months, awaiting a favorable wind.
Chinese maps were the best in the world, by orders of magnitude, for more than a millennium, and the precision of their maps became legendary, being far in advance of the West. The Chinese invented Mercator projections, relief maps, quantitative cartography and grid layouts. China had compasses and such extensive astronomical knowledge that they always knew where they were, could plot courses and follow them by both compass and star charts, and could sail wherever they wanted, regardless of the wind direction. As Needham pointed out, China was so far ahead of the Western world in sailing and navigation that comparisons are just embarrassing. It was only when the West managed to copy and steal China’s sailing and navigation technology that it was able to begin travelling the world and colonising it. James Petras wrote, “It is especially important to emphasize how China, the world technological power between 1100 and 1800, made the West’s emergence possible. It was only by borrowing and assimilating Chinese innovations that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies.” (2)
China was 1,000 years ahead of the West in anything to do with metals – cast iron, wrought iron, steel, carbon steel, tempered steel, welded steel. The Chinese were so skilled at metallurgy they could cast tuned bells that could produce any tone. Long before 1,000 A.D., China was the world’s major steel producer. I believe it was James Petras who noted that in about 1,000 A.D. China was producing about 125,000 tons of steel per year, while 800 years later Britain could produce only 75,000 tons. (1) The Chinese invented the blast furnace, the double-action bellows to achieve the necessary high temperatures for smelting and annealing metals. They invented the manufacture of steel from cast iron. Thy excelled in creating metallic alloys, and very early were casting and forging coins made from copper, nickel and zinc. The entire process of mining, smelting and purifying zinc, originated in China. The Chinese developed the processes of mining itself, and the concentration and extraction of metals.
China was highly advanced in agriculture, having invented the winnowing fan and the seed drill, making an easy process of tilling, planting, and harvesting. Europeans and Americans were still seeding crops by scattering grain from a bag, a greatly wasteful practice that necessitated saving 50% of each year’s crop for seed. China developed scientifically efficient plows that have never been equaled and are still used all over the world today. They invented and developed animal harnesses and collars that first permitted horses to actually be used to pull loads. Europe had no efficient plow, and their only way of harnessing animals was to put a rope around their necks, which succeeded only in the animals strangling themselves. The Chinese invented saddles and the riding stirrup. China’s food production was orders of magnitude ahead of the world for more than 1,000 years, its advances in agriculture the enabling cause of Europe’s agricultural revolution that first permitted it to begin feeding itself adequately. The Chinese were wearing fine silk and cotton clothing and using toilet paper while centuries later Europeans were still wearing animal skins.
Few people in the West are familiar with China’s Armillary Spheres. These wonders of the world, cast in bronze several meters in diameter and beautifully decorated with dragons and phoenixes, are some of the oldest and most accurate astronomical observatory instruments in existence, some created more than 3,500 years ago when the Western countries had no knowledge of such things. They determine and measure the positions and equatorial ecliptic and horizontal coordinates of celestial bodies, the positions and daily motions of 1,500 stars and constellations, and much more. When the Western Forces invaded China in the late 1800s, they were so captivated that they plundered most of these treasures and the centuries of data from the ancient observatories, disassembling the instruments and removing them to Europe, returning some to China as part of the Treaties after the First World War.
It leaves one speechless to learn the vast extent of Chinese inventions that existed hundreds of years and often millennia, before they appeared in the West. Needham published not only ancient Chinese texts that can be accurately dated, but photos of old drawings that clearly depict all of these items. This isn’t a simple matter of gunpowder and fireworks, but of discovery that encompasses the entire range of human knowledge, all of which has been consciously hidden from the Western world. Needham made his discoveries in the 1940s, but neither Western education nor the media have ever referenced or acknowledged them. These are not mere claims; the evidence is conclusive and available for examination but the West has thoroughly erased China from the world’s historical memory.
Western historians have distorted and ignored China’s dominant role in the world economy until about 1800. There exists an enormous amount of empirical data proving China’s economic and technological superiority over Western civilization for the better part of several millennia. Given that China was the world’s supreme technological power up to about 1800, it is especially important to emphasize that this is what made the West’s emergence possible. It was only by copying and assimilating Chinese innovations and China’s much more advanced technology that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies. Until then, China was the leading trading nation, reaching most of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. China’s innovations in the production of paper, book printing, firearms and tools led to a manufacturing superpower whose goods were transported throughout the world by the most advanced navigational system. Moreover, banking, a stable paper money economy, excellent manufacturing and high agricultural yields resulted in China’s per capita income surpassing that of Great Britain until about 1800.
Not only this but, as James Petras pointed out, “… the majority of western economic historians have presented historical China as a stagnant, backward, parochial society, an “oriental despotism”.” China was never thus. During the 13th century, Marco Polo described China as vastly wealthier and more advanced than any European country, and leading European philosophers such as Voltaire looked to Chinese society as an intellectual exemplar, the British notably using China as their model for establishing a meritocratic civil service. (3)
A first thought when reviewing this research is that the world must have seemed very primitive to China 500 years ago, truly “third world” at the time. When Zhang He and others conducted their voyages of exploration, they must have been disappointed in what they found. The rest of the world had no paper or printing, no mathematics, no science, little medicine of note, almost no metallurgy to speak of, a most primitive agriculture, no manufactures of any worthy kind, no porcelain, no spinning wheels or weaving looms to make clothing. From reviewing the history of Chinese invention, one develops an increasingly strong feeling the Chinese looked at the world and found nothing of interest in all those societies that were centuries, and in some cases millennia, behind China in almost every way. One can easily theorise this is the reason China closed itself off from the world at that time, concluding that other nations were so backward that little would be gained from prolonged contact. One can imagine they returned home and closed the door, perhaps planning to return in another 500 years to see if things had progressed. With the addition of detail, this is most likely how events transpired.
What China didn’t expect, was the West stealing all these ideas, turning them into weapons of colonisation and war, returning to the nation that was the source of that knowledge, and invading it to colonise, to steal resources, and to enslave and massacre the population. China’s interest was always only exploration and trade. The Chinese were never expansionist or warlike, wanting only to protect their own borders from invasion from the North. China was quite unprepared for the violent nature and savage brutality of the White man who sailed the world, invoking his God’s blessing on his countless atrocities. Coupled with a weak domestic government and the inventiveness of the Baghdad Jews in using opium to reap billions while enslaving a nation under the protection of the British military, we have the severe downward swing for 200 years.
The above summary doesn’t even begin to adequately catalog of the extent of Chinese invention, of the sum of China’s discoveries and contributions to the modern world. But unfortunately, much of China’s total sum of knowledge and history of invention is lost to the world forever. A large part of the recorded knowledge of China’s history was destroyed in one of the greatest acts of cultural genocide in the history of the world – the looting and burning of China’s Summer Palace, the Yuanmingyuan, which contained more than ten million of the finest and most valuable historical treasures and scholarly works from 5,000 years of Chinese history. What could not be looted was destroyed, and the entire massive palace burned to the ground. This wanton theft and utter destruction of one of the world’s greatest collections of historical knowledge was engineered by the Rothschilds and Sassoons in retaliation for Chinese resistance to their opium. (4) (5)
This is an aside, but the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan was done for the same reason that the Allies bombed Dresden to rubble during the Second World War. Dresden had no military value but it was the spiritual and cultural heart of Germany, its destruction meant “to open a wound in the German soul that would never heal”. For precisely the same reason, the American ‘deep state’ was savagely determined to drop the first atomic bomb on Kyoto, also the heart and soul of Japanese culture. Kyoto was protected by Providence, with heavy overcasts of clouds that preventing the bombers from locating it with sufficient accuracy, forcing them to their alternates of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But in terms of the destruction of a literary recording of culture and invention, there was perhaps an even greater crime against the history of Chinese knowledge – the destruction of the library and the Yongle Dadian at the Hanlin Academy. (6) That encyclopedia of 22,000 volumes written by more than 2,000 scholars over many years, contained much of the total of 5,000 years of Chinese knowledge, invention and thought. The British carried all those books outdoors, poured fuel on them, and burnt the entire collection to ashes. Only God knows what was lost in this tragic destruction, ordered by the same drug dealers as punishment for refusing opium, meant to break China’s will by striking at the very heart of the nation’s culture in the wanton destruction of something of such inestimable value as to leave an open wound that would never heal. Only about 150 volumes survived the incineration, 40 those residing today in the US Library of Congress, which has no intention of returning them to China.
Westerners today justify their unacknowledged appropriation of Chinese knowledge and subsequent claims to ownership on some variant of the proposition that the Chinese invented those things, but never developed or capitalised on them, but the claim is invalid self-serving nonsense since my invention is mine whether or not I choose to develop it. The claim is also untrue.
When the Chinese invented paper and printing, books became widespread throughout China, as with the weaving of cloth and development of textiles. China employed its inventions in unlimited ways for the benefit of Chinese society. What they did not do is file patents, convert everything to privately-owned IP, and transfer their ingenuity from social benefit to private profit. Criticisms of China’s use of its inventions are not so much negating a lack of application but the absence of commercialisation, these Western justifications implying that any nation not immediately striving for profit maximisation of its discoveries is morally negligent, the theft of those discoveries then justified by those who would use them more properly. This is the bank robber taking the high moral ground by claiming he put the money to better use than the bank would have done.
To have foregone private commercialisation was neither a character flaw nor a behavioral fault, but a reflection of the pluralistic and socialistic nature of the Chinese people, the same reason that even today China’s patent and IP laws and regulations are so much less aggressive than those of the US. Put simply, China has never been as capitalistic or as individualistic as the West. It is part of the greatness of the Chinese nation that this immense population engaged in millennia of stunning research, discovery and invention and freely distributed those fruits throughout the nation. This emphasis on the greater good and overall benefit to society rather than individual profit, is fundamental to the natural humanity of the Chinese people, and cannot be permitted to be destroyed by the sociopathic Western model so forcefully promoted today on the basis of a fictitious moral superiority.
The West chooses to ignore the fact that the 200-year hiatus in China’s innovation was due almost entirely to their own military invasions, when the West was ravaging and destroying the nation. China’s development, social progress, and invention, ceased only from the invasions by both the Americans and Europeans, and most especially with the Jews’ vast program of trafficking in opium in China.
Perhaps of more direct interest is that China’s lag in current technology is, more than anything else, an unfortunate accident of fate that occurred during a blip in time. After Mao evicted all the foreigners and China shook off the effects of 200 years of foreign interference and plundering to begin the transition to an industrialised economy, this was precisely when the world of electronics and communication exploded. It was during that brief period of a couple of decades that computers, the Internet, mobile phones and so much more, were conceived and patented by the West. Virtually the entire process passed China by, because during that brief period the nation was entirely enveloped in the fundamentals of its economic and social revolution, and in no position to participate. China’s lack of patents and IP in the field of electronics today is due neither to Western superiority nor Chinese lack of innovation, but to Western aggression. The accumulation of American and European patents was in no way due to Western supremacy in innovation but to the absence of the Chinese.
China’s Inventiveness has not ended
With China recovering and once again taking its rightful place in the world, it is continuing where it left off 200 years ago. Ignoring the historical setback, Chinese companies are simply by-passing the earlier stages of innovation by foreign firms and proceeding to subsequent stages where the field is open and foreign patents have not precluded innovation and development.
If we examine the fields where China lags today in terms of patents and IP, it is primarily in those areas of science that progressed during that brief period where China was unable to participate. As soon as China found its footing, innovation continued unabated as it had for thousands of years. China missed the computer and Smartphone patents, but was perfectly timed for the solar panel revolution and quickly emerged as the world leader – at which point the US imposed tariffs of 300% on Chinese solar panels in an attempt not so much to kill China’s export sales but to prevent the accumulation of funds for further R&D. In any area not pre-empted by IP restriction, China’s innovation has soared – usually to world leadership.
Despite US accusations of China copying foreign technology, China’s high-technology achievements were entirely home-grown because the US has been so determined to hinder China’s rise that by 1950 it engineered an international embargo on all scientific knowledge and on almost all useful products and processes to China, including legislation that Chinese scientists cannot be invited to, or participate in, American scientific forums, while bullying other Western nations into doing the same. In October of 2019, all Chinese scientists and space technology companies were denied visas to attend the weeklong International Astronautical Congress in Washington, far from the first time such has occurred.
We hear much in the Western media about China demanding technology transfers as a condition of corporate residence in China, but this is mostly propaganda. No doubt expectations for technology and knowhow transfer do occur, since China doesn’t want to spend the rest of its life making toasters and running shoes but, since entry to the Chinese market is a gift of billions in profits, it is perfectly sensible to attach a price to it. However, one must keep in mind that no foreign company is conducting cutting-edge commercial or sensitive military research, or manufacturing quantum computers and hypersonic missiles in China. Any technology actually available for transfer would be almost entirely in consumer goods, and hardly constitute great value or threats to US ‘national security’. And, in virtually all of the cutting-edge fields and industries such as quantum computing, 5-G telecom or solar energy, China has already surpassed the US.
A Brief List of Recent Chinese Innovation
In 2015, Chinese engineers announced the world’s first quantum communications network, a 2,000 kilometer system linking Beijing and Shanghai with data transmission encoded by quantum key distribution. In August of 2016 China launched the world’s first quantum communications satellite, and succeeded in test communication with the country’s existing ground stations. In September of 2016, Chinese scientists achieved the world’s first quantum teleportation between independent sources, delivering quantum information enciphered in photons between two locations.
In 2014, researchers at Nankai University in Tianjin developed a car with a working brain-control unit, with sensors that capture brain signals permitting humans to control the automobile with their minds. In 2016 China launched a fully-operational space lab to conduct the first ever brain-machine interaction experiments in space. Chinese scientists believe brain-computer interaction will eventually be the highest form of human-machine communication, having developed this process much farther than any Western nation and holding nearly 100 patents.
In 2015, high school students from Tianjin won an International gold medal for the creation of a microbe biological battery. Such attempts in the past have failed due to poor performance and limited usefulness, but these students conceived the idea of combining several types of bacteria into one biological power cell, with each bacterium having specialised responsibilities based on its own unique functions. Their tiny multi-bacteria cell reached over 520 mV, and lasted over 80 hours. Scaled up, their biological battery was able to generate as much power as a lithium battery, with a much longer life and producing no pollution. These are Chinese high school kids.
In 2015 Chinese scientists succeeded in modifying a human embryo to permit the changes to persist through future generations, something that had never been accomplished before, to alter human DNA for removal of dangerous or undesired genes from future generations. Chinese researchers are developing the technology and processes to make 3D-printed skin a reality, custom-made skin for burn patients, printed according to their wounds. The country leads the world in cat-scan technology, in DNA mapping and synthesising, and many medical fields such as laser eye surgery and cornea transplants.
In May of 2019, a Chinese start-up launched a revolutionary AI chip with the computing power of eight NVIDIA P4 servers but up to five times faster, with half the size and 20% of the energy consumption, and costing 50% less to manufacture. Shanghai’s Fudan University developed a transistor based on two-dimensional molybdic sulfide, meaning computing and data storage happen together in a single cell, perhaps eliminating silicon-based chips which are at their limit. DJI Technology, founded by a Chinese university student, has become in only a few years the global market leader in small consumer drones, and already attracting American sanctions for being too successful in an area the US wants to control. The country produces nearly 40% of the world’s robots, with vastly improved core technologies, and is the world leader in 5-G technology.
Chinese engineers created a supercomputer seven times faster than America’s Oak Ridge installation, the first in the world to achieve speeds beyond 100 PetaFlops, powered by a Chinese-developed multi-core CPU and Chinese software, while displacing the US with the most supercomputers in the top 500. Upon the revelation of China’s super-fast supercomputer, authorities reported the NSA had launched hundreds of thousands of hacking attacks, looking to steal the technology for China’s new microprocessors.
China’s megaproject engineering skills are already legendary, with the longest sea bridges, the longest tunnels, the largest deep-water ports. China has built the world’s longest and highest glass bridge in Zhangjiajie, hanging between two steep cliffs 300 meters above the ground, and which set 10 world records spanning its design and construction. The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest, with 5-tier ship locks which can contain the world’s largest ships, and also a shiplift for smaller vessels which is the largest and most sophisticated in the world. China has formulated plans to build an electron collider, four times as long (100 Kms) and operating at more than seven times the energy capacity of the European CERN. In 2015, Chinese scientists completed the 500-meter radio telescope, by far the largest in the world with more than ten times the area of the American installation in Puerto Rico.
In 2014, architects in Amsterdam began work on what was to be the world’s first completely 3D-printed house, a costly enterprise requiring three years. At exactly the same time in Shanghai, a Chinese company completed ten 3D-printed houses in less than a day, at a cost of less than $5,000 each, using recycled construction and industrial scrap as the ‘ink’. I have seen these homes; large, elegant, multi-story European-styled structures, and so sturdy they can withstand earthquakes up to level 8 on the Richter scale.
We know about China’s fabulous high-speed trains, but few outside China are aware of the intense high quality of the HSR network, built with the highest standards in the modern world, including stability. When traveling by train I sometimes place a coin on its edge on the windowsill, and I have video of the coin remaining stable for four or five minutes before it finally falls over – and this is at 300 Kms per hour. Shanghai has a high-speed Maglev train (430 Kms/hr), while many cities have low-speed Maglevs (200 Kms/hr), and Chinese engineers are ready to produce commercially a 600 Km/hr Maglev. The same pace of development is true of the nation’s urban subway systems. I have lost the source for these figures, but the city of London needed 147 years to build 408 Kms. of subway lines, New York City 106 years for 370 Kms., Paris 110 years for 215 Kms, while Shanghai needed only 20 years to build 500 Kms.
It has escaped attention that these achievements were not sudden, but developed from a deliberate plan in execution for 30 years, though it is only recently that many of these efforts are bearing fruit. More importantly, China accomplished this from a third-world industrial base while under a total Western embargo on technology transfer. Chinese scientists have developed nuclear energy plants, put men into space, photographed the entire surface of the moon, built a space station, designed and launched a private GPS system. We have Chinese-designed and built deep-sea submersibles, and the country is rapidly developing its own aircraft industry. Today, with its science and technological base so much more advanced, and with education spending increasing at nearly 10% per year, and very high R&D expenditures, invention and innovation can only increase.
One of the most persistent myths propagated about China, a claim without a shred of supporting evidence, is that Chinese lack creativity and innovation due to flaws in their educational system. We have seen the accusations hundreds of times: China’s educational system teaches only rote memory while stifling innovation, the Chinese unable to conceptualise or innovate, knowing only how to achieve high test scores but not how to think. Here is Carly Fiorina speaking, the former CEO of H-P: “I’ve been doing business in China for decades, and I will tell you that yeah, the Chinese can take a test, but what they can’t do is innovate. They’re not terribly imaginative. They’re not entrepreneurial. They don’t innovate. That’s why they’re stealing our intellectual property … innovation and entrepreneurship are not their strong suits. Their society, as well as their educational system, is too homogenized and controlled to encourage imagination …” (7) The claim is complete rubbish for more reasons than I have room to account here.
In 2015, Eva Dou reported in the Wall Street Journal of a study by McKinsey who claimed that China had made all the “easy” innovations, like making products better and cheaper, but that “the country has limited success stories in ‘more challenging’ types of innovation that rely on scientific or engineering breakthroughs.” McKinsey’s conclusions are not supported by the evidence listed here. (8)
(1) Robert Temple, The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention; https://www.amazon.com/Genius-China-Science-Discovery-Invention/dp/1594772177
(2) James Petras; China: Rise, Fall and Re-Emergence as a Global Power; Some Lessons from the Past
(3) Ron Unz; The American Conservative; April 18, 2012; China’s Rise, America’s Fall; Why Nations Fail; https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/chinas-rise-americas-fall/
(4) China Remembers a Vast Crime – The New York Times; https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/arts/22iht-MELVIN.html
(5) Peking’s Summer Palace destroyed; https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/pekings-summer-palace-destroyed
(6) “The Destruction of a Great Library: China’s Loss Belongs to the World; https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ552559
(7) Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina says Chinese ‘don’t innovate’; Time; https://time.com/3897081/carly-fiorina-china-innovation/
(8) Chinese Innovation: Now Comes the Hard Part, Says Study; https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/10/22/chinese-innovation-now-comes-the-hard-part-says-study/
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