Before scolding WAPO’s spurious description of Xi’s world, in which none of the charges are backed with proof, permit the presentation of one of the most serious errors in journalism history. Doubtful the WaPo staff will ever recover from this faux pas.  The editorial states:

China recorded a respectable 5.2 percent economic growth rate last year, but the real rate is lower when adjusted for falling prices. Rather than being an economic juggernaut, China seems likely to be entering a period of deflation, the sorts of conditions that led to Japan’s “lost decade.”

Having the real rate of growth to go down with deflation is equivalent to having an auto slow down when the gas pedal is more heavily pressed. How many hands, eyeballs, and minds at WAPO did not know that “inflation occurs when nominal GDP is higher than real GDP and deflation happens when real GDP is higher than nominal GDP.”

Real GDP= Nominal GDP/R
where: GDP=Gross domestic product
R=GDP deflator (R<1 during deflation and >1 during inflation)

​Examine the opening paragraph:

For the past decade, Americans have worried increasingly about China, not least because Chinese President Xi Jinping has centralized power, silenced critics, stalled private-sector reforms and taken an increasingly combative posture toward the rest of the world

Saying that Xi Jinping silenced critics, without specifying who and how is meaningless. To gain office, all politicians try to overcome critics. A good politician silences critics. China is different; the government runs on consensus, and when a decision is made, including who will be president, there are no remaining critics.

Again, without specifying the nature of Xi’s “increasingly combative posture toward the rest of the world?” how can his nature be evaluated? Have the Africans, Latinos, Europeans, Eskimos, and most of Asia found Xi combative or does the WaPo editorial board think Washington is the world?

Instead, Mr. Xi’s China is less free, less prosperous and less competently governed than it would have been had he taken a different course — one not inspired by rivalry with the West or fear of his own people.

“Mr. Xi’s China is less free.”

The intentional insult of replacing President Xi with Mr. XI demeans WaPo.
Western media always considered China devoid of freedom. How can a country be less free when it has always been considered not free? Consider who is setting the criteria and doing the evaluation. If Chinese authorities set the criteria and evaluated freedom in the United States how would they consider freedom of thought in the U.S. after the rise of Trumpism and his cohorts?

“Less prosperous.”

GDP is up 60 percent since Xi’s time in office; how could Xi have made China “less prosperous?”

China GDP (Trillions of US Dollars)

From Trading Economics

“and less competently governed than it would have been had he taken a different course.”

How does anyone know what will happen and what is the different course?” This is speculative speculation, a ridiculous assumption that does not pass the smell test.

Despite Mr. Xi lifting the world’s most draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, construction in China has slowed, manufacturing prices have declined and consumer spending has flattened. China’s stock market has lost $6 trillion in value in three years.

Reciting a decline in manufacturing prices and a flattening of consumer spending, as if they are always negatives, is not clever thinking. If a recession occurred, then they might be a result of an economic decline. No recession has occurred and their relation is due to consumer prices having dropped, maybe due to increased efficiency and productivity. Consumer transactions have increased and the total sales remained static, or did they? Beijing reports contradictory information and data does not indicate a flattening of consumer spending.

BEIJING, Jan. 21:

Robust consumption has been thriving and helping to underpin China’s economic recovery, while the country is energetically spurring consumer spending to strengthen one of the pillars needed to support high-quality growth. China’s total retail sales of consumer goods, a major indicator of the country’s consumption strength, climbed 7.2 percent year on year to reach 47.15 trillion yuan (about 6.63 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2023, an obvious sign of the Chinese people’s growing readiness to purchase.

China Consumer-spending in CNY hundred million

The last of many spurious remarks

To reduce the falling birthrate, he prefers exhorting young women to stay home and have more babies as their patriotic duty.

Another insulting remark to a nation’s president. Falling birthrate is a problem in all advanced nations, and no country seems to have a solution. A mendacious and callous WaPo distorted Xi’s words. At a recent All-China Women’s Federation meeting, President Xi Jinping told the cadres:

…to “guide women to play their roles in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation” and “in establishing good family traditions.” They should “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and child-bearing” among women, so they can “respond to the aging of the population.”

Big difference between WaPo’s interpretation and the actual spoken words.

The experts on Xi Jinping China follow up the bashing with tools for him to use, and advice on how Xi can extricate himself and his nation from the damage he caused. Imagined failures solicit imagination of how to cure a patient who is not sick. Noting that, since 1978, except for one year during the COVID-19 epidemic, China had no recessions, while the U.S. suffered a recession every ten years, I doubt the Chinese government needs lectures on how to run their economy. China has a major housing crisis, not much different in scope than the 2008 mortgage crisis in the United States. The latter crisis provoked a huge banking crisis and sent the U.S. into a major recession. China’s housing crisis is now several years old and has not provoked a banking or economic crisis.

Describing people in a totally negative manner and not reciting known positive characteristics is biased editorializing. Xi has guided China to become the leading world power outdistancing the U.S. in the more important GDP/PPP.

Gross Domestic Product at Purchasing Power parity ($Trillions)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Xi probably was not personally involved and criticizing him for “the world’s most draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of 2022,” is a subjective appraisal. An objective appraisal mentions his administration’s holding the number of Covid cases to 503,302 and deaths to 5,272 compared to U.S. cases of 111,426,318 and deaths of 1,199,436. Use per capita figures of 90,273 cases/1 million population and 896 deaths/1 million population for China and 333,802 cases/1 million population and 3,582 deaths/1 million population for the United States, and a bright light shines on China’s president.

The WaPo editorial, “Mr. Xi is tanking China’s economy,” is informative. It informs us that WaPo cannot be trusted. It has an agenda and will distort, lie, do somersaults, and deceive its audience to pursue the agenda.

When will we be free from China bashing?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Late last year, a colleague sent me a letter decrying some of my writings about China, notably the last newsletter of 2023. This newsletter is my response to him.

**

The situation in China is the cause of a great deal of consternation amongst the left. I am glad you have raised the issue of Chinese socialism with me directly.

We are living in very dangerous times, as you know. The United States’ accelerating tension with other powerful nations threatens the planet more now than perhaps any period since 1991. The war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are illustrative of the dangers before us. In the interim, I worry about the US trying to draw Iran into the conflict, with Israel threatening to escalate tensions with Hezbollah in Lebanon and then draw Tehran into making a step that would allow the US to bomb Iran. The New Cold War against China will take these conflicts to another level. Taiwan is already the lever. I hope that sober minds will prevail.

All socialist projects, as you well know, are formed in the process of the class struggle and through the development of the productive forces. Not the least China. You recall Bill Hinton’s book The Great Reversal: The Privatisation of China, 1978–1989, published in 1990. I was with Bill in Concord, Massachusetts a year or so before he died in 2004 and had several discussions with him about China. No one in the US knew China as well as Bill, his entire family (including his sister Joan and her husband Sid Engst, who modernised dairy farming in China), and, of course, their friends Isabel Crook, Edgar Snow, Helen Foster Snow, and, later, the translator Joan Pinkham, the daughter of Harry Dexter White.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was great trepidation about China. When I visited the country decades earlier, I was confounded by the poverty in rural areas. But at the same time, I was taken by the dignity of a people inspired by the great history of the struggles that created the Chinese Revolution of 1949 who knew that they were building a socialist project. Bill held fast to Maoism, clear about the contradictions of the socialist project, as he wrote in Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution.

Inequality had risen to high levels during the Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) and Hu Jintao (2003–2013) years. In Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013), I wrote about the Chinese Revolution with some of that pessimism, despite understanding the difficulties of building socialism in a poor country (the only place, after Russia, to try and do so since revolutions failed in the West). A few years after that, I read Ezra Vogel’s terrific assessment of Deng, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), which placed Deng’s decisions in 1978 in the context of the entire revolutionary process. That book gave me a better understanding of the Deng reforms. One of the key lessons I took away was that Deng had to confront the stagnation of the economy, allowing the market to advance the productive forces. Without that, it was clear that China – a poor, backward country – would slip into a socialism of despair. It had to pioneer a new approach. Of course, the Deng reforms turned toward market forces and opened the door to a very dangerous situation. Bill’s pessimism was a response to that reality.

Sheyang Farmers Painting Institute (Jiangsu, China), part of the ‘farmers painting’ project, 2017.

By the late 1990s, discussions began – including in the journals of the Communist Party of China (CPC) – to tackle rising rates of inequality and poverty through mass action. At the fifth plenum of the 16th CPC congress in October 2005, the party announced a ‘great historic mission’ to ‘construc[t] a new socialist countryside’, using the new phrase the ‘three rurals’ to refer to agriculture, farmers, and rural areas. This mission sought to improve rural infrastructure through state investment, provide free and compulsory education, and develop cooperative medical services while retreating from the market reforms in the medical sector, the latter of which became a nationwide policy across China from 2009. It interested me that the campaign was run with a mass character and not bureaucratically, with thousands of CPC cadre involved in carrying out this mission. This was a forerunner of the poverty eradication campaign that would come a decade later.

As this mission unfolded, I was very interested in the fact that places with ‘red resources’ were highlighted for action (such as Hailufeng in Guangdong Province, which was the heart of China’s first rural Soviet). It is telling that scholars in the West did not focus on these new shifts, fixated as they were on the country’s Pacific coastline rather than studying the conditions in China’s rural interior. Among the few exceptions are sincere people such as Professor Elizabeth Perry and Professor Minzi Su (the author of China’s Rural Development Policy: Exploring the ‘New Socialist Countryside’, 2009), who are ignored by most commentators on China.

This push for a new socialist countryside enlivened the CPC and a tacit movement to counter pure free-market forces, which created the dynamic that led to Xi Jinping’s election as party leader in late 2012. Xi’s concern for the country’s rural areas comes from spending part of his youth in China’s underdeveloped northwest and from his time as the party secretary of the Ningde Prefecture in the late 1980s, which was then one of the poorest regions in Fujian Province. A widely acknowledged element of Xi’s leadership during this period is that he helped decrease poverty in that area and improve social indicators, making youth less prone to migrate to cities.

Did China’s growth need to come at the expense of nature? In 2005, while in Huzhou (Zhejiang Province), Xi laid out the ‘Two Mountains’ theory, which suggested that economic and ecological development must go hand in hand. This is evidenced by the fact that, from 2013 to 2020, particulate pollution in China decreased by 39.6%, increasing average life expectancy by two years. In 2023, Xi announced a new ecological strategy to build a ‘beautiful China’, which includes an environmental plan for rural areas.

I was struck by some of your claims, in particular that ‘forcible return to the countryside is now state policy’, which I think bears special reflection due to it being part of the broader ‘new socialist countryside’ policy. It is true that President Xi has been talking about the need for rural revitalisation since 2017, and it is also true that various provinces (for instance, Guangdong) have action plans for college graduates to go to the countryside and participate in making the rural as attractive as the urban. However, this is not done by force, but by innovative programmes.

Zhang Hailong (China), Horses and Herdsmen Series 3, 2022.

At the frontlines of these programmes are youth, many of whom were among the three million cadres who went to villages as part of the policy to abolish extreme poverty (it is worth noting that 1,800 cadres died while carrying out this task). Xi is very sensitive, as Mao Zedong was, to the importance of party members experiencing the reality in rural China, given China’s vast rural landscape, and was himself sent to China’s rural northwest during the Cultural Revolution. Reflecting on this experience, Xi wrote in 2002: ‘At the age of 15, I came to Liangjiahe village perplexed and lost. At the age of 22, I left with a clear life goal and was filled with confidence’. There is something of this attitude in China’s policy. Is it bad for party members, many of whom might have jobs in the state apparatus, to spend time in the countryside? Not if you want them to better understand China’s reality.

I have been to China many times over the past ten years and have travelled extensively in both rural and urban areas. The dual circulation strategy that Xi has pursued (driven by this ‘new socialist countryside’ policy) is of interest, and I have been working with a range of scholars to build up a detailed, empirical understanding of the Chinese project from within and through their own categories. That is the basis of the work we have been doing, some of it published in Wenhua Zongheng and some of it in the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s study on the eradication of extreme poverty in China. Is it propaganda? I hope not. I hope that we are getting closer and closer to being able to offer a theoretical assessment of the Chinese Revolution as it proceeds forward. Is the revolution perfect? Not at all. But it requires understanding rather than clichés, which abound in the West when it comes to China.

Abdurkerim Nasirdin (China), Young Painter, 1995.

Take, for instance, the allegations of the oppression of Chinese Muslims (25 million or 1.8% of the total population). I remember being in Central Asia in the 2000s when al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a serious impact on the region, including through the offices of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU formulated a policy to take over the entire Xinjiang region, which is why some Uygurs moved to the leadership of Juma Namangani.

The Turkistan Islamic Party, led by people close to al-Qaeda (such as Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, who was a member of al-Qaeda’s shura), was born out of those sorts of contacts. Bombings of public places became commonplace, including in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Abdul Shakoor al-Turkistani, who in 2010 took over leadership from Abdul Haq (the engineer of the 2008 bombings in Beijing during the Olympics), was responsible for the Kashgar attacks in 2008 and 2011 and the Hotan attack in 2011. In 2013, this group moved to Syria, where I met a few of them on the Turkish-Syrian border. They are now based in Idlib and are a key part of the al-Qaeda formation there. This is their characteristic feature: not mere Turkic nationalism, but Islamic fundamentalism of the al-Qaeda variety.

At the time, several approaches could have been taken to the insurgency. The one that the US and its allies in the region favoured was to use violence, including by attacking areas suspected of being run by these insurgents and arresting them en masse, with some of them ending up in US-run black sites. Many of the members of this group, including Abdul Haq and Abdul Shakoor, were killed by US drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Interestingly, China did not follow this approach. Some years ago, I interviewed former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who had turned away from violence and the ideology of al-Qaeda. Their group, the controversial Quilliam Foundation (based in London), was led by people such as Noman Benotman who followed the approach of the Egyptian ‘repentance’ and the Algerian ‘reconciliation’ projects. These programmes essentially tried to adopt both cognitive and behavioural approaches to deradicalisation (changing the ideology and stopping the violence, respectively). The former Libyan jihadis were eager to bring this approach to play both in Libya (which failed) and in the West (where many of them resettled), rather than the alternative of targeted violence and mass arrests. They were rebuffed (except in Germany, where the Hayat Programme was established in 2012). The problem with the violent approach that the West opted for instead was that it demonised all Muslims rather than merely trying to deradicalise those drawn into a toxic politics.

In the case of China, rather than waging a frontal war against the radical groups in Xinjiang and then the society in which they lived and demonising all Muslims, the government sought to conduct forms of deradicalisation. It is useful to recall the meeting between the Chinese Islamic Association and the CPC in Beijing in 2019 that built on the Five-Year Planning Outline for Persisting in the Sinification of Islam and sought to make Islam compatible with socialism. This is an interesting project, although it suffers from a lack of clarity. Making Islam Chinese is one part of the project; the other is to make the practice of Islam consonant with the socialist project. The latter is a sensible sociological approach for the modern world: to make religion – in a broader sense – compatible with modern values, and, in the case of China, with ‘core socialist values’ (such as combating gender discrimination).

Liu Xiaodong (China), Belief, 2012.

The former is harder to understand, and I have not truly grasped it. When it comes to the idea that religion must be aligned with modern values, especially socialist values, I am fully on board. How should this happen? Does one, say, ban certain practices (such as headscarves in France), or should one begin a process of debate and discussion with the leaders of religious communities (who are often the most conservative)? What does one do when confronted by an insurgency that has its roots outside the country, such as in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and even Syria, rather than inside the country, such as the contradictions in Xinjiang? These are all pressing dilemmas, but the ludicrous statements about genocide and so on pushed by US State Department and its cronies – including by dodgy people who work for dodgier ‘think tanks’ near the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia – cannot be allowed to define our discussion within the left. We need a greater understanding of the matters at hand so as not to fall into the Biden-Netanyahu line of questioning, which boils down to the ‘do you condemn Hamas’ sort of debate.

Tang Xiaohe and Cheng Li (China), Mother on the Construction Site, 1984.

In your email, you write that ‘there is no question that the living standards of ordinary Chinese people, especially city-dwellers, have improved dramatically over the last decades’. In fact, all the data – and my own travels – shows that this is not only the case ‘especially’ for city-dwellers but across the country and increasingly in the areas of the far west and far north. International Labour Organisation data, for instance, shows that China’s annual real wage growth was 4.7%, far and away above that of other countries in the Global South, and certainly higher than in India (1.3%) and the US (0.3%) In just eight years, from 2013 to 2021, the disposable per capita income of China’s 498 million rural residents increased by more than 72.6% while that of the 914 million residents of urban areas increased by 53.5%. Meanwhile, the gap of disposable income between rural and urban areas declined by 5% during this period, and the growth rate of disposable income of rural residents has outpaced that of urban residents for twelve consecutive years (2009–2021).

Between 2012 and 2020, targeted poverty alleviation lifted 98.99 million people in rural areas out of extreme poverty and enabled every single family suffering from extreme poverty to receive assistance. As part of this innovative process, the CPC combined the training and development of grassroots cadres with digital technology, thus enhancing modern governance capabilities at the local level and enabling party members and cadres to serve the people more accurately and efficiently.

For comparison, using the Gini index, which does not cover public services (ignoring items like subsidised rentals for rural homes), income inequality in India is 24% higher than in China.

Those who look at the data on inequality in China often focus on China’s billionaires. That was clear in your email, which noted that China ‘is awash with state-subsidised millionaires and even billionaires. Indeed, a mounting class of super-bourgeoise, many of whom “invest abroad”’. Certainly, the reform era produced the social conditions for some people to get rich. However, that number is in decline: in 2023, of the 2,640 billionaires in the world, about 562 were in China, down from 607 in the previous year, and the last few CPC congresses have made it a priority to reverse the engine of this billionaire-production process. Of the 2,296 delegates to the 20th National Congress, only 18 were private sector executives, most of whom are from small and medium-sized enterprises, down from 34 who participated in 18th National Congress in 2012.

As you might know, in 2021 Xi called for a policy of ‘common prosperity’ (a term first used by the CPC in 1953), which alarmed many of these billionaires. They have since sought to run for the hills (‘invest abroad’, as you say). However, China has very strong capital controls, allowing only $50,000 to be remitted overseas. A range of illegal operations have opened up in the past few years to assist the rich in exiting their cash, including through the more porous region of Hong Kong. But the state has been cracking down on this, as it has cracked down on corruption. In August 2023, the police arrested the leaders of an immigration firm in Shanghai that facilitated illegal foreign exchange transfers. The pressure on Jack Ma (fintech company Ant Group), Hui Ka Yan (property developer Evergrande), and Bao Fan (investment bank Renaissance Holdings) is indicative of the CPC’s current position regarding billionaires.

You write that while living standards have improved in China, ‘socialism is not on the agenda in that country’. If not for the socialist agenda pursued by the CPC, how has China been able to abolish extreme poverty and bring down inequality rates, especially in times of rising global inequality when the social democratic agenda in the capitalist Global North and in large parts of the Global South has failed to come anywhere close to these achievements? It helps that large banks in China are under the control of the state so that large-scale capital can be managed efficiently to solve social problems, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. The class struggle continues in China, of course, and that class struggle impacts the CPC (with its extraordinary membership of 98 million).

Wang Zihua (China), When the Wind Blows Through the Summer, 2022.

I have tried not only to provide some facts to guide our discussion but also to thread them into the theory of socialism that I believe is most attractive. According to that theory, socialism is not an event but a process, and this process – rooted in the class struggle – goes in zigs and zags, a back-and-forth tension that is often accentuated by the urgent need to increase the productive forces in poor countries. It is important to accompany such processes rather than taking an omniscient standpoint.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

Joe Biden: “We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision.”

In the latest salvo preparing the US for confrontation with China, Nicholas Burns flat out said, “I don’t feel optimistic about the future of US-China relations.” Burns should know. He is Washington’s ambassador to Beijing.

The US stance on bilateral relations with China, according to Burns, is one of “strategic competition in the coming decades… vying for global power as well as regional power.” Indeed, the US is preparing for war with China. High-ranking US Airforce General Mike Minihan foresees war as early as 2025.

This contrasts with the Chinese approach of cooperation for mutual benefit to solve the most pressing global problems. In short, each country’s leadership presents different paradigms of relations. The Chinese strategy is compatible with a socialist mode of collaboration and community. The US construct reflects a capitalist fundamentalism of competitive social relas.

Which paradigm may prevail is discussed below based on observations made in China on a recent US Peace Council delegation where we met with our counterpart, the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament.

 View from Beijing

The Chinese view, based on what they call “Xi Jinping Thought,” is that the US-China association as the most important bilateral relationship in the world. As Chinese President Xi Jinping has explained: “How China and the US get along will determine the future of humanity.”  This view is predicated on the acceptance of a high degree of integration between the two countries’ economies. They see this “entwining” as something to be promoted because both countries stand to benefit from each other’s development.

Overarching the bilateral relationship from the Chinese perspective is a stance of friendly cooperative relations. A “common prosperity,” they believe, can be built on three principles. First is mutual respect. A critical aspect of that pillar of mutual relations is not crossing the red lines of either of the two global powers. Second is peaceful coexistence. This entails a commitment to manage disagreements through communications and dialogue. And third is win-win cooperation. For example, increased trade with China boosted the annual purchasing power for US households.

That the US and China occupy such dominant positions in the world entails concomitant responsibilities. According to the Chinese, major countries have major responsibilities to humanity. They point out that global problems, such as climate change, cannot be solved without US-China cooperation. Indeed, the US and China together contribute to 40% of the planet’s current greenhouse gas emissions.

Beijing contrasts their posture with what they explicitly criticize as the Biden administration’s “zero-sum mentality.” In a zero-sum game, one player’s gain is equivalent to the other’s loss. This differs from the Chinese vision of “win-win” relations based on cooperation for mutual benefit. The Chinese take exception to the US definition of bilateral relations as one of antagonistic “strategic” competition.

Biden-Xi faceoff

The opposing paradigms were displayed at the APEC summit in San Francisco on November 15, where the two world leaders met face-to-face for the first time in two years. We do not know what was discussed in the closed-door meeting. But in a press conference afterwards, US President Joe Biden said of the person he had just spent four hours: “Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours.”

Even neo-con US Secretary of State Antony Blinken winced at the press conference. His grimace was captured in a video that went viral.

Later that day, Chinese President Xi calmly instructed, as if responding to Biden’s indiscretion, “It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other.” Peaceful coexistence for the Chinese necessitates a tolerance and acceptance of different social systems and modes of being. Xi further commented, “the planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed.”

Fortune acknowledged that Xi offered a vision different from what it characterized as Biden’s “winner-take-all” mentality. The business magazine noted that Biden has continued Trump’s tariffs on some Chinese products while tightening export controls and investments in high-tech areas such as advanced chips.

Thinking through the unthinkable

It is not an accident of geography that China is surrounded by a ring of some 400 US military bases. Biden has strengthened (1) the Quad military alliance with India, Australia, and Japan originally initiated in 2007, (2) the AUKUS security pact with the UK and Australia founded in 2021, and (3) the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing with UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada dating back to the beginning of the first Cold War, while forging (4) a new mini NATO alliance with Japan and South Korea last August.

Although the Chinese have no bases in North America, a Chinese “spy balloon” that strayed over “American skies” a year ago posed an “unprecedented challenge,” according to the Pentagon. A study by the semi-governmental RAND Corporation provides further insight into the official US posture. Commissioned by the US Army, the title of the study says it all: “War with China – thinking through the unthinkable.” The best minds that money can buy were paid by the US taxpayers to game Armageddon.

Starting from the official US national security doctrine of “full spectrum dominance,” the analysts at RAND played out various US war scenarios with China. The outcome, they predicted, would be disastrous to both sides. However, based on the morality expressed on a bumper sticker I saw in my neighborhood, “he who ends up with the most toys wins,” the US would come out ahead.

Yes, the US would prevail according to RAND. But the report also contained a caveat…if such a war is contained. That is, if other countries do not join the melee and if it does not go nuclear, the conflict might be contained.

The military strategists warn that the chances of containment, however, become progressively fleeting as a conflict progresses. Once initiated, such a conflict is increasingly subject to unintended consequences for the protagonists. Further, they note that there is a tremendous military advantage for one side or the other to strike first.

Contest for the future of our world

In his official National Security Strategy, Joe Biden described “the contest for the future of our world.” According to the US president, “our world is at an inflection point.” He continued, “my administration will seize this decisive decade to…outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors,” meaning foremost China.

Biden admonished: “We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision.” It’s either my way or the highway, for the imperial POTUS.

Biden then promised to impose “American leadership” – meaning domination, because no one voted him planetary potentate – “around the world.” US world leadership is already manifest in the most mass shootings, the highest national debt, and the largest incarcerated population. The US currently leads the world in the sale of military equipment, military expenditures, and foreign military bases.

Whistling in the dark, Biden concluded, “our economy is dynamic.” In fact, the US economy is dominated by the non-productive FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sectors, while China has become the “workshop of the world.”  Statista estimates that China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by 2030.

In contrast, China’s belt and road initiative (BRI) is a global infrastructure development program which has invested in over 150 countries. No wonder Biden fears that the Chinese alternative in his own words “tilts the global playing field to its benefit.”

The alternative posed by China

Unlike the West, whose wealth is based on colonial relations, China elevated 800 million out of poverty without resorting to imperial wars. But is China, guided by Xi Jinping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” indeed socialist? A range of opinions exist within the self-identified socialist left depending on the litmus test applied.

For some, socialism does not exist in China or for that matter anywhere else, past or present. For them, socialism is an ideal that has yet to be realized. Others uphold China under Mao Zedong but not under the subsequent Deng Xiaoping revision. At the other end of the spectrum are proponents of China having already achieved socialism. In between, reflecting China’s mixed economy with state-owned and private enterprises, are various shades seeing China in transition between socialism and capitalism. For some, the transition is advancing; for others, it is regressing.

The Chinese leadership’s view is that the material conditions necessary for the full realization of socialism are still in the process of being developed.

This modest paper will not resolve the question of whether China is socialist, which ultimately will be one for history to decide. It is clear, however, that the Chinese paradigm of global cooperation is counterposed to the US’s zero-sum competition. If not precisely socialist, China at least offers a paradigm that does not preclude a socialist future. Importantly, in this contentious geopolitical climate, China and by extension the Global South pose a countervailing space from US imperial hegemony.

The Chinese appear cognizant of the Yankee’s “make war, not peace” attitude, but the 4000-year-young civilization seems self-assured that the rationality of “win-win” peaceful development will prevail. From what I saw on my visit, they confidently exude the patience of maturity and the solid vitality of youth.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

This week’s News on China. Sources:

• Xi Jinping in the US

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplo…

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic…

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Inte…

• BYD catches up with Tesla

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The…

https://es-us.finanzas.yahoo.com/noti…

• Xizang Autonomous Region improves living standards

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…

• Women’s boxing gains popularity in China

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1013914

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-03-26…

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

This week’s News on China. Sources:

• Xi Jinping in the US

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplo…

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/artic…

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Inte…

• BYD catches up with Tesla

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The…

https://es-us.finanzas.yahoo.com/noti…

• Xizang Autonomous Region improves living standards

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/20231…

• Women’s boxing gains popularity in China

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1013914

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2023-03-26…

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping met in California this week in their first meeting in person in over a year. The two countries released a joint climate statement this week and committed to work together more closely to fight climate change.

World leaders are also gathering this week in Nairobi, Kenya, at the United Nation’s Third Session (INC-3) to craft an ambitious Global Plastics Treaty to end plastic pollution. This is a huge opportunity to show the world what the U.S. and China can do to address climate change, phase out fossil fuels, and end all forms of plastic pollution in every stage of the life cycle.

This week’s statement reaffirmed their commitment to address climate change, and to end plastic pollution and work together and with others to develop an internationally legally binding instrument. On both climate and plastics, it is critical that the U.S. and China work with the rest of the world.

The ongoing negotiations for the plastics treaty are a unique opportunity to show how the ambitious targets for net-zero emissions set by U.S. and China can be translated to an effective international agreement focusing on one of the most emissions-intensive industries.

Scientists, including myself, have demonstrated the connection between unsustainable production and consumption of plastics and the climate crisis. Plastics are a fully integrated link of the fossil fuel value chain—99% of plastics are derived from fossil fuels, primarily oil and gas fractions—as well as a core and growing business of many of the largest fossil fuel firms. This has in recent years led to a deeper fossil fuel lock-in for plastics. Plastics are associated with around 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), and this share is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades if projections for continued growth of plastic production materialize.

Of particular concern is the rapid growth of plastic production in countries and regions with energy systems and plastic feedstocks that use coal, leading to GHG emissions from plastics production growing at a higher rate than production itself. Plastic producers have very limited targets and programs for reducing their GHG emissions such as through renewable energy. And necessary long-term targets for eliminating the use of fossil fuel feedstocks are completely absent. So far international climate policy has largely ignored the need to phase out fossil fuels for both energy and plastic feedstocks.

It is clear that one of the most effective ways of mitigating climate change impacts as well as all other forms of pollution associated with plastics is to restrict future production. This has been identified by scientists as a central goal for the Global Plastics Treaty and is one of the key requirements for the treaty emphasized by the global Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty.

Civil society organizations and business leaders from around the world agree, and have rallied around a call for a treaty that prioritizes production reduction. And they have pointed out that the treaty is too focused on downstream measures which will be inadequate for meeting the challenge.

With China and the U.S. taking steps towards a more internationally harmonized agenda on climate change mitigation, we would expect these leading plastic producer countries to also show leadership in relation to plastics. The ongoing negotiations for the plastics treaty are a unique opportunity to show how the ambitious targets for net-zero emissions set by U.S. and China can be translated to an effective international agreement focusing on one of the most emissions-intensive industries.

It is imperative, for the climate as well as both terrestrial and marine ecosystems, that the plastics treaty addresses the full life cycle of plastics through measures and interventions in production, consumption, and end-of-life management.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Fredric Bauer.

Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.

First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.

Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.

Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.

It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.

Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.

Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin. Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.

There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.

Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.

That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.

Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.

Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.

Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.

Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.

Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to no high-tech surveillance access, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”

The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.

It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”

The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”

Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians

Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.

Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:

“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”

After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.

Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.

Which brings us to Iran.

Geopolitical plausible deniability

The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.

Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.

In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.

Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”

Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.

The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.

Elsewhere in the region, the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.

Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.

Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor

The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.

A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.

What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.

China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.

Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.

The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.

Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Pepe Escobar.

Hamas’ Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was meticulously planned. The launch date was conditioned by two triggering factors.

First was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flaunting his ‘New Middle East’ map at the UN General Assembly in September, in which he completely erased Palestine and made a mockery of every single UN resolution on the subject.

Second are the serial provocations at the holy Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, including the straw that broke the camel’s back: two days before Al-Aqsa Flood, on 5 October, at least 800 Israeli settlers launched an assault around the mosque, beating pilgrims, destroying Palestinian shops, all under the observation of Israeli security forces.

Everyone with a functioning brain knows Al-Aqsa is a definitive red line, not just for Palestinians, but for the entire Arab and Muslim worlds.

It gets worse. The Israelis have now invoked the rhetoric of a “Pearl Harbor.” This is as threatening as it gets. The original Pearl Harbor was the American excuse to enter a world war and nuke Japan, and this “Pearl Harbor” may be Tel Aviv’s justification to launch a Gaza genocide.

Sections of the west applauding the upcoming ethnic cleansing – including Zionists posing as “analysts” saying out loud that the “population transfers” that began in 1948 “must be completed” – believe that with massive weaponry and massive media coverage, they can turn things around in short shrift, annihilate the Palestinian resistance, and leave Hamas allies like Hezbollah and Iran weakened.

Their Ukraine Project has sputtered, leaving not just egg on powerful faces, but entire European economies in ruin. Yet as one door closes, another one opens: Jump from ally Ukraine to ally Israel, and hone your sights on adversary Iran instead of adversary Russia.

There are other good reasons to go all guns blazing. A peaceful West Asia means Syria reconstruction – in which China is now officially involved; active redevelopment for Iraq and Lebanon; Iran and Saudi Arabia as part of BRICS 11; the Russia-China strategic partnership fully respected and interacting with all regional players, including key US allies in the Persian Gulf.

Incompetence. Willful strategy. Or both.

That brings us to the cost of launching this new “war on terror.” The propaganda is in full swing. For Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Hamas is ISIS. For Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev, Hamas is Russia. Over one October weekend, the war in Ukraine was completely forgotten by western mainstream media. Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the Brazilian Senate are all Israeli now.

Egyptian intel claims it warned Tel Aviv about an imminent attack from Hamas. The Israelis chose to ignore it, as they did the Hamas training drills they observed in the weeks prior, smug in their superior knowledge that Palestinians would never have the audacity to launch a liberation operation.

Whatever happens next, Al-Aqsa Flood has already, irretrievably, shattered the hefty pop mythology around the invincibility of Tsahal, Mossad, Shin Bet, Merkava tank, Iron Dome, and the Israel Defense Forces.

Even as it ditched electronic communications, Hamas profited from the glaring collapse of Israel’s multi-billion-dollar electronic systems monitoring the most surveilled border on the planet.

Cheap Palestinian drones hit multiple sensor towers, facilitated the advance of a paragliding infantry, and cleared the way for T-shirted, AK-47-wielding assault teams to inflict breaks in the wall and cross a border that even stray cats dared not.

Israel, inevitably, turned to battering the Gaza Strip, an encircled cage of 365 square kilometers packed with 2.3 million people. The indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, schools, civilian apartment blocks, mosques, and slums has begun. Palestinians have no navy, no air force, no artillery units, no armored fighting vehicles, and no professional army. They have little to no high-tech surveillance access, while Israel can call up NATO data if they want it.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”

The Israelis can merrily engage in collective punishment because, with three guaranteed UNSC vetoes in their back pocket, they know they can get away with it.

It doesn’t matter that Haaretz, Israel’s most respected newspaper, straight out concedes that “actually the Israeli government is solely responsible for what happened (Al-Aqsa Flood) for denying the rights of Palestinians.”

The Israelis are nothing if not consistent. Back in 2007, then-Israeli Defense Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin said, “Israel would be happy if Hamas took over Gaza because IDF could then deal with Gaza as a hostile state.”

Ukraine funnels weapons to Palestinians

Only one year ago, the sweaty sweatshirt comedian in Kiev was talking about turning Ukraine into a “big Israel,” and was duly applauded by a bunch of Atlantic Council bots.

Well, it turned out quite differently. As an old-school Deep State source just informed me:

“Ukraine-earmarked weapons are ending up in the hands of the Palestinians. The question is which country is paying for it. Iran just made a deal with the US for six billion dollars and it is unlikely Iran would jeopardize that. I have a source who gave me the name of the country but I cannot reveal it. The fact is that Ukrainian weapons are going to the Gaza Strip and they are being paid for but not by Iran.”

After its stunning raid last weekend, a savvy Hamas has already secured more negotiating leverage than Palestinians have wielded in decades. Significantly, while peace talks are supported by China, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt – Tel Aviv refuses. Netanyahu is obsessed with razing Gaza to the ground, but if that happens, a wider regional war is nearly inevitable.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah – a staunch Resistance Axis ally of the Palestinian resistance – would rather not be dragged into a war that can be devastating on its side of the border, but that could change if Israel perpetrates a de facto Gaza genocide.

Hezbollah holds at least 100,000 ballistic missiles and rockets, from Katyusha (range: 40 km) to Fajr-5 (75 km), Khaibar-1 (100 km), Zelzal 2 (210 km), Fateh-110 (300 km), and Scud B-C (500 km). Tel Aviv knows what that means, and shudders at the frequent warnings by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah that its next war with Israel will be conducted inside that country.

Which brings us to Iran.

Geopolitical plausible deniability

The key immediate consequence of Al-Aqsa Flood is that the Washington neocon wet dream of “normalization” between Israel and the Arab world will simply vanish if this turns into a Long War.

Large swathes of the Arab world in fact are already normalizing their ties with Tehran – and not only inside the newly expanded BRICS 11.

In the drive towards a multipolar world, represented by BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), among other groundbreaking Eurasian and Global South institutions, there’s simply no place for an ethnocentric Apartheid state fond of collective punishment.

Just this year, Israel found itself disinvited from the African Union summit. An Israeli delegation showed up anyway, and was unceremoniously ejected from the big hall, a visual that went viral. At the UN plenary sessions last month, a lone Israeli diplomat sought to disrupt Iranian President Ibrahim Raisi’s speech. No western ally stood by his side, and he too, was ejected from the premises.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping diplomatically put it in December 2022, Beijing “firmly supports the establishment of an independent state of Palestine that enjoys full sovereignty based on 1967 borders and with East Jerusalem as its capital. China supports Palestine in becoming a full member of the United Nations.”

Tehran’s strategy is way more ambitious – offering strategic advice to West Asian resistance movements from the Levant to the Persian Gulf: Hezbollah, Ansarallah, Hashd al-Shaabi, Kataib Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and countless others. It’s as if they are all part of a new Grand Chessboard de facto supervised by Grandmaster Iran.

The pieces in the chessboard were carefully positioned by none other than the late Quds Force Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qassem Soleimani, a once-in-a-lifetime military genius. He was instrumental in creating the foundations for the cumulative successes of Iranian allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine, as well as creating the conditions for a complex operation such as Al-Aqsa Flood.

Elsewhere in the region, the Atlanticist drive of opening strategic corridors across the Five Seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean – is floundering badly.

Russia and Iran are already smashing US designs in the Caspian – via the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – and the Black Sea, which is on the way to becoming a Russian lake. Tehran is paying very close attention to Moscow’s strategy in Ukraine, even as it refines its own strategy on how to debilitate the Hegemon without direct involvement: call it geopolitical plausible deniability.

Bye bye EU-Israel-Saudi-India corridor

The Russia-China-Iran alliance has been demonized as the new “axis of evil” by western neocons. That infantile rage betrays cosmic impotence. These are Real Sovereigns that can’t be messed with, and if they are, the price to pay is unthinkable.

A key example: if Iran under attack by a US-Israeli axis decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, the global energy crisis would skyrocket, and the collapse of the western economy under the weight of quadrillions of derivatives would be inevitable.

What this means, in the immediate future, is that he American Dream of interfering across the Five Seas does not even qualify as a mirage. Al-Aqsa Flood has also just buried the recently-announced and much-ballyhooed EU-Israel-Saudi Arabia-India transportation corridor.

China is keenly aware of all this incandescence taking place only a week before its 3rd Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. At stake are the BRI connectivity corridors that matter – across the Heartland, across Russia, plus the Maritime Silk Road and the Arctic Silk Road.

Then there’s the INSTC linking Russia, Iran and India – and by ancillary extension, the Gulf monarchies.

The geopolitical repercussions of Al-Aqsa Flood will speed up Russia, China and Iran’s interconnected geoeconomic and logistical connections, bypassing the Hegemon and its Empire of Bases. Increased trade and non-stop cargo movement are all about (good) business. On equal terms, with mutual respect – not exactly the War Party’s scenario for a destabilized West Asia.

Oh, the things that a slow-moving paragliding infantry overflying a wall can accelerate.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Pepe Escobar.

1. Sun Tzu said: In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.

2. Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

— Sunzi, “Chapter 3: Attack by Stratagem,” The Art of War

Chinese wisdom from 6th century BCE explains why China, barring the crossing of a redline by separatists in Taiwan, has no inclination to attack. Why would China want to destroy a part of itself? Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, the country has navigated bumps in the road while pursuing a path of supreme excellence.

In the late 1940s, in the latter stages of the Chinese civil war, after the Communists had defeated the Guomindang (KMT) on the mainland, the KMT escaped across the Taiwan Strait. Because the US 7th fleet was patrolling the waters and protecting the KMT, and because the Communists lacked a formidable navy, an aquatic pursuit was ruled out for the Communists.

The US interjecting itself into a far flung conflict was not unusual. Author William Blum wrote about this, remarking about American untrustworthiness toward erstwhile allies in his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (pdf available online).

The communists in China had worked closely with the American military during the war, providing important intelligence about the Japanese occupiers, rescuing and caring for downed US airmen.¹ But no matter. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek [of the KMT] would be Washington’s man. (p 20)

Fervent anti-communism in Washington and Langley, saw the CIA aiding the KMT against the mainland. But the US would have to address One China:

The Generalissimo, his cohorts and soldiers fled to the offshore island of Taiwan (Formosa). They had prepared their entry two years earlier by terrorizing the islanders into submission—a massacre which took the lives of as many as 28,000 people.¹⁵ Prior to the Nationalists’ escape to the island, the US government entertained no doubts that Taiwan was a part of China. Afterward, uncertainty began to creep into the minds of Washington officials. The crisis was resolved in a remarkably simple manner: the US agreed with Chiang that the proper way to view the situation was not that Taiwan belonged to China, but that Taiwan was China. And so it was called. (p 22)

Thus it was that the anti-Communist US had a dog in this fight, and that dog was (and still is) Taiwan. The US backed Jiang Jieshi (aka Chiang Kai-shek), and the CIA trained, organized, and conducted military incursions across the Taiwan Strait against the mainland. (p 23)

Manifestly, the big fish for the imperialist hegemon to try and fry is the One-China policy, to which the US is a signatory, which acknowledges there being only one China and that Taiwan is a province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Such is the fervor of the diminishing imperial US that it unabashedly is in violation of an agreement it signed by de facto treating Taiwan as a separate country by selling arms to it and sending political representatives and military personnel without seeking the approval of the government in Beijing. How would the US feel if China sent political representatives to meet with the Hawaiian sovereignty movement? If China sold or gave arms to this movement? After all, the Apology Resolution — passed in 1993 by a Joint Resolution of the US Congress 100 years after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy — “acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands.”

Canadian and American media reported on 4 June “that a Chinese warship came within 150 yards of colliding with an American destroyer in the Taiwan Strait during a joint U.S.-Canada exercise.” Of note: the US media report mentions that the US-Canadian warships were “allegedly in international waters.” If not allegedly in international waters, then presumably they were in Chinese waters.

Of concern to US militarists is the realization that China’s navy is larger than the US navy and the gap is widening. More foreboding for any potential attacker are China’s hypersonic anti-ship missiles.

Even if the warships were enforcing freedom of navigation (FON), an analysis, published on 15 May by the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI) at Peking University, questions what exactly FON means for the Taiwan Strait.

SCSPI argues that the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea “ultimately aims to maintain a balance between the interests of maritime powers and coastal states. There has never been an unrestricted right of navigation in the Convention or in general international law.”

Although foreign ships enjoy the right of innocent passage in the territorial sea, Article 25 of the Convention provides that the coastal state may take the necessary steps to prevent passage which is not innocent. That is, the coastal States have the right to decide whether the passage of a foreign ship is consistent with the “right of innocent passage” under Article 19. The Convention also provides that the coastal State may adopt domestic law on innocent passage and may require a foreign warship that disregards any request for compliance with domestic law to leave the territorial sea immediately…. U.S. warships may exercise the right of innocent passage, but at the same time must respect the coastal state’s determination of whether the passage is innocent and comply with the laws and regulations of the coastal State concerning passage through the territorial sea.

If China was a militaristic country, then people ought to consider when would be the most opportunistic time for China to militarily reincorporate Taiwan back into the motherland. How about when the US is on the verge of an embarrassing defeat in Ukraine, having sunk almost $115 billion into losing a proxy war and having depleted much of its weapons stores, having its missile defense batteries destroyed, HIMARS defended against, anti-tank Javelins brushed aside, Bradley tanks rendered nugatory, etc?

What conclusion then can one draw from the fact that militarily powerful China has not launched any attack against Taiwan during this period of time?

The US seeks to keep Taiwan separate from the mainland, as a reincorporated Taiwan would open strategic access to the Pacific for the PRC. Thus, president Joe Biden has doubled down on his pledge to intervene in any fighting between China and its province Taiwan. Two problems with Biden’s tough-guy posturing: 1) words are cheap; and 2) aside from making clear its redlines, the talk of China attacking its province of Taiwan is all from the US side. It is clearly not in the mainland’s interest to kill its own citizens or cause damage to the island. China has pledged itself to peace.

I asked Wei Ling Chua, the author of Democracy: What the West can learn from China and Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence, his analysis of what US interventions hold for the One-China policy.

*****

Kim Petersen: Taiwan became part of the Chinese Qing dynasty in 1683. That is almost a century before European natives destroyed several Indigenous nations and dispossessed them of their land, resources, culture, language — i.e., genocide — and established the ill-begotten United States of America in 1776.

Yet the US encourages the separatist movement in Taiwan led by the Democratic Progressive Party. Importantly, the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan) also claims that there is one China and that the mainland, Tibet, and, until 2002, even outer Mongolia constituted the ROC.

Why is Taiwan outside the direct control of the PRC? This is because despite being aided by the US, Jiang Jieshi and the Guomindang (KMT) were defeated by the Communist forces led by Mao Zedong. The US 7th Fleet, however, protected the escape of the KMT to Taiwan, as China at that time had a minuscule navy. If not for that, the Communists might well have brought Taiwan fully back into the motherland’s fold long ago.

The US and western-aligned media serially warn that the PRC is poised to invade Taiwan. The US says it stands poised to blow up Taiwan’s critical chip producer TSMC in case of a Chinese attack. Why would the PRC militarily attack a valuable part of the motherland, especially given that the vast majority of the planet’s 190 or so countries recognize the one-China policy whereby Taiwan is a province of the PRC?

Wei Ling Chua: To explain clearly a series of essential facts (including not widely noticed facts) about the relations between Taiwan Province, China, and the USA, I need to breakdown the information as follows:

Ignorance of Taiwan Youth about their own Constitution

Recently, a number of street interviews were conducted in Taiwan province asking young Taiwanese “Do you know the relationship between the Republic of China and Taiwan?”, the reply shocked the interviewer as the majority of the youth in Taiwan didn’t even know their political entity’s official name is the Republic of China (ROC), and that the ROC’s constitution regards the mainland of China and Taiwan being parts of the ROC sovereign territory. For example:

• A street interview in June 2023 asked: “What is the relationship between Taiwan and the ROC?” The reply: “…Enemy…”;  The interviewer then asked: “Have you heard of ROC? Do you know where is ROC?” The reply: “The other side of the Taiwan Straits? … I don’t know, I don’t know…” During the interview, almost all interviewees didn’t know the ROC, some later replied: “Taiwan” (with a guessing element after observing the interviewer’s tone);
• A street interview in May 2023 asked: “What is the relationship between Taiwan and the ROC?” The reply: “… looks like the relationship is not too good…”; The interviewer then asked: “According to the ROC constitution, Taiwan sovereignty includes the mainland of China, do you know that?” The reply: “No”.

The above interviews demonstrated the success of the ongoing brainwashing tactics used by the current ruling party (the DPP) in Taiwan province by modifying historical facts in school textbooks in the past 2 decades. One needs just to search under “DDP modify Taiwan history textbook” to learn about the issues. If one uses simplified Chinese or traditional Chinese to search the subject, one will get even more examples and news on the topic of young Taiwanese being heavily brainwashed into believing that they are not a part of the Chinese civilization despite their shared history, culture, tradition, values, food habits, ethnicity, religions, and languages (spoken and written). This reflects the scary effect of what fake news and propaganda could do to divide society and create conflict across the world.

The one-China wording in the ROC Constitution

It is important to note that the content of the ROC Constitution is still the same today as before the Nationalist government lost the internal war to the Communist Party and escaped to Taiwan Province in 1949. It is also important to note that all the incoming Taiwan Presidents and MPs have to be sworn in under the Constitution of The ROC before taking office. So, what does the ROC Constitution say about the relation between the mainland of China and Taiwan island? The full text of the ROC’s Constitution is on the current Taiwan (Province) government’s official website. The following points shown that the ROC Constitution includes the entire mainland of China as it sovereign territory:

• Point 4 of the Constitution: The territory of ROC based on its inherent boundaries, cannot be changed without a resolution of the National Assembly;
• Point 6 refers to the design of the ROC flag used since 1928 (which is still in use today across Taiwan Province by whoever is in power);
• Point 26: Outline the number of Representatives based on the population in an area/region for the National Assembly (with special mention of the Mongolia and Tibet regional representatives);
• Point 64: About the makeup of representatives for law-making: this point also mentioned the minority population representative with special mention of Mongolia and Tibet regions.
• Point 91: About the makeup of representatives in the Government Supervisory Body: again Mongolia and Tibet regions are mentioned.

If we search for a map of the ROC, one will notice that the ROC territory in the map includes the entire People’s Republic of China (PRC) territory. That means the territory outlined in the Constitution of both the PRC and ROC includes Taiwan province and the Mainland of China. Both documents are the legal foundation of one-China. So:

• Any Western media wording that suggests Taiwan province is not a part of China is without any legal foundation under both the ROC and the PRC Constitutions.
• The Western media and politicians’ ongoing warning that “China is going to invade Taiwan” is preposterous because what they are warning is that China is about to invade itself.
• America named the war between the South and the North (12 April 1861 to 26 May 1865) as the American Civil War revealing the double standard regarding the use of the term “invasion” to describe a possible future China reunification process through military action.

Therefore, the dispute between the PRC and ROC is a yet-to-settled historical event. It is purely a domestic issue between the 2 governments. Former Singapore Foreign Minister George Yao is right to point out in a recent interview that “China sees the Taiwan issue as a matter of historical justice”; he warns the Western powers about the danger of interfering in the reunification process.

The territory still under ROC control includes islands only 2 km away from the PRC-governed Mainland

Many people did not notice that the territory under the control of today’s ROC includes not only Taiwan Island itself but a number of islands right next to the mainland of the PRC. See the following screenshot map of the ROC (the purple territory in the bottom right-hand corner below is still under the control of the ROC):

One should note from the above map of the ROC-controlled (purple) territory that there are islands located right next to the mainland of China:

• • Kinmen Islands: The nearest part of the Kinmen group of Islands is just 1.8 km from the PRC (mainland China); it is 210 km from Taiwan Island. Former Chinese World Bank Chief Economist Justin YiFu Lin was a ROC army official stationed in Kinmen Islands. He is the man who in 1979, swam 2130 meters to mainland China to call the PRC home;
  • Matsu Islands: The nearest part of this group of islands is 18.5 km away from the Mainland of China and 203 km away from Taiwan Island;

• As for Taiwan Island itself, the nearest part to the mainland is 126 km away.

The above distance information between the ROC-controlled territory and the PRC-controlled mainland tells us a lot about the intention of the PRC government working towards a peaceful reunification:

• If China (PRC) wanted to take those islands right next to the mainland by force, they would have done it a long time ago. There is no reason to doubt the PRC military capability to do so given their ability to force the US-led military coalition back more than 500 km from the China-DPRK border to the 38th parallel and stop the US-led military coalition’s further aggression in the 1950-1953 Korean War;
• Even Taiwan Island (province) itself is so close to the mainland that a modern short-range missile and artillery are good enough to do the job of crippling the island’s economy and forcing a surrender; some contend that the current military technological capability of the PLA may be more advanced than the USA.
• Therefore, the ongoing Western media articles and news with headings that suggest China’s pending aggression and possible invasion of Taiwan to justify US/Japan/NATO/Australia/Canada militarism on the Chinese doorstep is nothing more than a smear campaign against China.

The History of Taiwan Island’s relation with the Chinese dynasties dates back to 230AD 

The history of Taiwan being a part of China was far earlier than 1683. This site (English) and this site (Chinese) provide a detailed Timeline of Taiwan’s relations with the Chinese dynasties beginning as early as the year 230AD: During the 3 kingdoms era, a written record of （沈莹） Shen Ying under the title 《临海水土志》 (direct transaction word by word: “surrounding seas water lands record”) already mentioned the Island of Taiwan. And that is almost 1800 years ago.

The trouble for many people who haven’t researched much about Chinese history is that they may be susceptible to Western media propaganda that portrays China as historically backward compared to the West, hence the ongoing smear campaign that China steals Western technology. So, it may be hard for some people to believe that in 230 AD, the Chinese already had the shipping technology to explore islands hundreds of km away in the rough sea. So, it is important for one to note the following facts about the Chinese being far more advanced than the West in shipping technology for thousands of year:

• One should note that the compass used by Columbus to “discover” America in 1492 AD was a Chinese-invented compass (invented during the Han Dynasty between 202 BC – 220 AD);
• 2500 years ago, China not only had a great military strategist Sun Zi (The Art of War) for land battles but also had a navy war strategist (伍子胥) Wu Zi Xu for water battles 《水战兵法》 (direct word by word translation “Water war military strategy”).

One should also take note that before Columbus “discovered” America in 1492 (as if the Indigenous peoples on the continent at that time were not regarded as “human beings” and so, the land has to be “discovered” by a “higher being” from Europe), the Ming Dynasty Navy General Zheng He had already led 7 ocean expeditions traveling the world (1405 to 1433), with “hundreds of huge ships and tens of thousands of sailors and other passengers. More than 60 of the 317 ships on the first voyage were enormous Treasure Ships, sailing vessels over 400 hundred feet long, 160 feet wide, with several decks, 9 masts, 12 sails, and luxurious staterooms complete with balconies.”

It is important to note that, despite such a scale of world voyages, China did not do what Columbus and Captain Cook’s voyages did to the Indigenous population in what would become America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Ming Dynasty Imperial Voyages led by General Zheng He (a Chinese Muslim) were peaceful in nature.

There is also a well-researched book 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (including America) by Gavin Menzies (a former British Royal Navy Submarine Commanding Officer) who spent 15 years tracing the astonishing voyages of the Ming Dynasty’s fleet, visited over 900 museums across the world, engaged in conversations and correspondence with Universities professors specialized in Asia Study, and reading hundreds of titles in European country’s libraries that mentioned the Chinese voyages. Despite the fact that Gavin’s compelling narrative pulls together ancient maps, precise navigational knowledge, astronomy, and the surviving accounts of Chinese explorers and the later European navigators, and that Gavin’s research also brings to light the artifacts and inscribed stones left behind by the emperor’s fleet, the evidence of the Ming Dynasty’s sunken junks along its route, and ornate votive offerings left by the Chinese sailors wherever they landed, Gavin’s book still discredited by the Western propaganda machine as “fiction” and “controversy”. As a reader of Kevin’s book to the last word, I am convinced by the incontrovertible evidence presented in regard to the Ming Dynasty Imperial Voyages, however, other readers’ opinions are also important. Please read the thousands of reader comments here, here, and here.

So, for those who are interested to know in detail about the 1800 years of history of Taiwan Island’s relation with the Chinese dynasties, please click here (English) and here (Chinese).

One should note that, in July 1894, Japan launched a war of aggression against China. In April 1895, the defeated Qing Dynasty government was forced to cede Taiwan, etc, to Japan in an unequal treaty  (Treaty of Shimonoseki in Japanese, also known as Treaty of Maguan in Chinese).

International Treaties by US, UK, China, and Japan recognized Taiwan as China’s territory 

1943 Cairo Declaration (Image of the original document): Signed by President Roosevelt (USA), Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek (ROC President), and Prime Minister Churchill (UK) as military allies against the Japanese military aggression. The objective of the Cairo Declaration is to “procure unconditional surrender of Japan,” and that “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa (known as “Taiwan” in Chinese), and … shall be restored to the Republic of China” (The Chinese government at that time).

(Note: It seems that the US government history document website (https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments) has removed the Cairo Declaration document)

1945 INT Potsdam Declaration (image of the original document) Point 8 stated: “The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out and Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, and such minor islands as we determine.” And again, this international treaty was entered into by the US, China, and UK governments, and agreed upon by the Japanese government after the US dropped the 2 atomic bombs on Japan.

Note: the US government history document website shows the full content of this 13-point document including point 8.

So, the above two international documents entered into by the US, China, UK, and Japan recognized Taiwan as a part of China, and Japan’s territory is limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, and Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine.” 

UN Resolution replaced ROC with PRC as the only legitimate government of China

UN Resolution 2758: passed on 25 October 1971: “Recognized the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and removed “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” (referring to the ROC)  from the United Nations.

Since then, as of June 2023, out of the 193 UN member nations, only 12 smaller nations recognize the ROC government, and 181 recognize the PRC government. (Including the US and all other Western governments. This is the condition for establishing diplomatic relations with the PRC.)

As a result, the ROC (in Taiwan) needs the PRC’s approval to get access to any international organizations or institutions such as the Olympics, WHO, etc. The PRC’s sovereignty over Taiwan is officially recognized by the UN document and 181 UN member states.

Blood is Thicker than Water: The Policy of Peaceful Reunification Since Mao’s Era

If one searches on the Internet for “台湾 血比水浓” (Taiwanese Blood is Thicker than Water), one will notice that there are millions of articles and news headlines over the decades describing the feeling of the Chinese people in the PRC towards the Chinese people in the ROC (Taiwan Province). They regard people in Taiwan as their brothers and sisters and hope for peaceful reunification.

Since the founding of the PRC, the Chinese leadership (from Mao to Xi) has been working hard toward a peaceful reunification with Taiwan Province. Just to name a few examples as follows:

Example 1:

During the Chinese Revolution, the then Nationalist Party government led by ROC President Chiang Kai-shek killed 6 of Chairman Mao’s relatives including Mao’s beloved wife (Yang Kaihui). In 1957, Chairman Mao wrote a touching poem in remembrance of his late wife with a description of his grief when he heard the news of her murder by the Nationalist government: “bursting into tears like rainwater” (泪飞顿作倾盆雨). Despite such personal grief in losing his loved one, Chairman Mao put the interest of the people and the Chinese nation first: For example:

After China and DPRK won the Korean War against the US-led 16-nation military coalition, there was a perception of Western nations trying to break Taiwan away from the motherland to create two Chinas, like the two Koreas (North and South Korea), and the two Germanys (East and West Germany). To prevent that, in 1956, Mao wrote a personal letter to Chiang Kai-shek, telling him the importance of Taiwan’s geographical position in accessing the Pacific Ocean for the Chinese nation, and urged him to safeguard the interest of the Chinese civilization to maintain the principle of a one-China policy. That is Taiwan province and the Mainland as integrated parts of one China. He then raised the idea of negotiation toward a peaceful reunification under the following principles:

• Foreign Power should be out of Taiwan;
• Taiwan must recognize the Central People’s Government as the only legitimate government of the PRC.
• Both the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party have to uphold the principle of a one-China policy;
• Chiang Kai-Shek will enjoy a special privileged status once Taiwan is unified with the mainland;
• Once unified, besides Foreign Affairs and Defence, Chiang Kai-Shek will retain the power of administering Taiwan in all other aspects such as the power for the appointment of officials and their removal in Taiwan, the treasury in Taiwan, and Chiang is allowed to keep his arm forces, and the central government will fund the development of Taiwan.
• Once unified, both sides will stop covert operations and propaganda against each other, and will not do anything to damage the relationship of both political parties.
• In the letter, Mao also enclosed a photo of Chiang’s ancestor’s grave in China, telling him that they are well maintained. (Photo below):

Unfortunately, for Chiang, it was a hard decision.

Chiang died in 1975; to this day, his coffin is still not buried. According to his son Chiang Jing-guo’s Diary: Chiang wished to be buried on the mainland: at Nanjing, Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Zijin Mountain, Zhengqi Pavilion. Therefore, they are waiting for the day when the political climate is such that Chiang can be so interred.

Example 2:

In 1981, the PRC spelled out a 9 points policy toward peaceful reunification under a One-China policy (below is a translation from the Chinese text):

• The Communist Party and the Nationalist Party can negotiate on an equal footing;
• The two parties reached an agreement on postal, commercial, air, family visits, tourism, and academic, culture, and sports exchanges;
• After reunification, Taiwan can retain the military and enjoy special autonomy as a special administrative region;
• Taiwan’s society, economic system, way of life, and economic and cultural relations with other foreign countries remain unchanged; private property, houses, land, business ownership, legal inheritance rights, and foreign investment are inviolable;
• Political leaders in Taiwan can serve as leaders of the national political institutions and participate in national management;
• When Taiwan’s local finances are in difficulty, the central government can subsidize them at its discretion;

1. 1. Taiwanese who wish to return to the mainland to live are guaranteed to make proper arrangements, come and go freely, and not be discriminated against;

• Welcome Taiwanese businesses’ investment in the mainland, their legal rights and profits are guaranteed;
• People and organizations from all walks of life in Taiwan are welcome to provide unified suggestions and discuss state affairs together.

One should acknowledge that no other nation in world history ever went to such length, patience, inclusiveness, and generosity in pursuing a nation’s peaceful reunification with an offer like this. The PRC government always believes that given time, they will be able to develop China into a better and better society, and will eventually unify every heart and mind in Taiwan.

Has any other nation in world history ever gone to such lengths, patience, inclusiveness, and generosity in pursuing peaceful reunification with an offer like this? The PRC government has always believed that given time, it would be able to develop China into a better and better society, and would eventually unify with the hearts and minds in Taiwan.

Of course, the Western mass media will never tell the world the above generous 9 points offered to Taiwan for peaceful reunification. They will only tell the world China is bullying Taiwan.

Example 3:

After years of negotiations, in 1992, the PRC Communist Party and the ROC Nationalist Party reached an agreement in Singapore to deepen the exchange of people between both sides. Both Parties agree to the principles of One China, and any other issues can be negotiated with flexibility. The term used for such a historic agreement is “1992 Consensus.”

Example 4:

In order to win the hearts and minds of the brothers and sisters in Taiwan province, the PRC has been very generous to Taiwan’s farmers and businesses and allowed Taiwan to enjoy an enormous trade surplus of up to $104.68 billion a year. About 44% of Taiwan’s exports go to mainland China. Without the PRC’s economic support, Taiwan’s economy would likely have fallen into a negative GDP like most parts of the Western world.

Again, the Western mass media is uninterested in reporting the above trade statistics.

Example 5:

The ROC-controlled Kinmen (Jinmen) Islands with a rising population and water shortage problem. Between 2006 and 2022, the population of the Jinmen Islands increased from 76,000 to 141,500.  To help the brothers and sisters in Jinmen solve their water problem, the PRC government invested heavily over a period of 22 years in infrastructure to lay an underground and undersea pipeline to deliver water from the mainland to the islands. And sell the water to the islands at a subsidized price of 9.89 Taiwan dollars per unit of water, which is cheaper than the charges per unit of water supplied by the local authority on the islands.

Again, the Western media won’t report news like this. They will only keep spreading the message to the world: “China bullies Taiwan” and “China is going to invade Taiwan”.

Example 6:

Like the US, after decades of political infighting, corruption, and incompetency in managing the economy and infrastructure upgrade, Taiwan suffered a series of issues including an electricity shortage that requires rationing from area to area. So, power Rationing Information is made available for residents to check when their area power will be cut off and for how long. Such a situation has been the new normal for a number of years already. It has badly affected business activities and damaged foreign investment. As a result, Taiwan’s youth unemployment rate has been consistently above 10%. And nearly 60% of the Taiwanese working overseas went to China. A report in 2017 by TVBS Taiwan showed that: over a period of 35 years, Taiwan startup wages remained almost the same, 70% of Taiwan youth refused to be trapped by low wages and wished to start their own business in order to make more money. Forbes Magazine reported the issue: “Workers in Taiwan are struggling. They took home an average of $1,510 per month in 2016, according to Taiwan’s National Development Council, which is low for an industrialized Asian economy that has developed a lot like Singapore and South Korea over the decades.”

In response to such low wages and employment problems faced by Taiwanese youth, Chairman Xi canceled the work permit requirement for Taiwanese people to seek employment on the mainland.

In fact, as early as 2016, the China People’s Congress had already set up an RMB40 billion fund, to help facilitate Taiwan Youth intent on setting up their own business in China.

Again, the Western mass media is uninterested in this kind of news. They will keep telling the world that China is bullying Taiwan.

Example 7:

There are too many stories of the PRC government (from Chairman Mao to Chairman Xi) extending goodwill to the Taiwanese people and awaiting eventual peaceful reunification. It is impossible to list them all. So, just to provide a couple more examples below:

• Whenever an overseas emergency happens, such as an outbreak of war, the Chinese embassies and military will immediately evacuate all Chinese citizens, including any Taiwanese who apply to the PRC with a Taiwan Compatriot ID document. Click here for a few dozen short news and videos.
• Any Taiwanese who run into trouble while overseas can easily seek help from any of the Chinese embassies in the respective country. A number of Taiwanese friends I met, while I was working in Eastern Europe based in Hungary in the 1990s, told me that the PRC embassy staff are more helpful than the ROC commercial office representative.

In 2022, China released a White Paper titled “The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era” (Here is the full text in English and Chinese).  It is a bit lengthy but worth reading. The policy document outlines the intention to reintegrate Taiwan by all possible peaceful means, and the many benefits  Taiwan people will enjoy in the process, including all the tax revenue collected in Taiwan will be used solely for the social well-being of the Taiwanese people and the economic development of Taiwan.

China: There is no Taiwan problem, only an American-caused problem.

China is a country with a very long history of peace culture. Examples:

• Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir said: “We always say, we have had China as a neighbor for 2000 years, we were never conquered by them. But the Europeans came in 1509, and in two years, they conquered Malaysia.”
• East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta defended China’s role as a growing strategic and economic power in Asia-Pacific in the National Press Club of Australia (2022), arguing: “China has hardly ever invaded other countries and was unlikely to do so in the future.”
• Indonesia’s Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto said in Singapore (2022) during an interview with Aljazeera: “But China has also helped us. China has also defended us and China is now a very close partner with Indonesia. And actually, China has always been the leading civilization in Asia. Many of our sultans, kings, our princes in those days would marry princesses from China. We have hundreds of years of relationship.”

The above 3 positive comments about China are from leaders of three of China’s neighboring countries in Asia. Their country’s experience with China since ancient times tells a lot about the peaceful nature of China. The question here is: will Latin American countries, African countries, other Asian countries, and Middle Eastern countries say the same about their country’s experience with the US and Europe? Or perhaps, will European countries say the same about their own neighboring countries in Europe?

The reality is that: Western imperialism is not dead after the 2 World Wars; in particular, the USA has always been a troublemaker for the rest of the world. The following examples should provide us with a good picture of how the US is threatening peace in Asia, and its main target since 2008 is China:

• US: Chinese are not allowed to be wealthy

During the 2008 GFC, US Secretary of Finance Henry Paulson visited China almost every month to seek help to stabilize the dollar’s status as a reserve currency. As a result, China bought almost an extra $600b in US Treasury debts in 2008, which accounted for over half the total issued by the US government to bail out the too-big-to-fail banks and the US economy that year.

Once the US economy stabilized, the world stopped dumping the dollar due to China having injected ($600b) confidence in US treasury debts, the only positive thing China received from America in return for its support of the US economy is open praise from Henry Paulson in the New York Times on 22 Oct 2008 “Thanking China’s cooperation in easing the Financial Crisis“.

Since then, in 2010, Obama said in Australia: “If over 1 billion Chinese citizens have the same living patterns as Australians and Americans do right now, then all of us are in for a very miserable time. The planet just can’t sustain it.”

In 2011, an opinion piece in the New York Times suggested that Obama “should enter into closed-door negotiations with Chinese leaders to write off the $1.14 trillion of American debt currently held by China in exchange for a deal to end American military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan and terminate the current United State-Taiwan defense arrangement by 2015.” Years later, a Wikileaks leaked email revealed the then Secretary of States Hillary Clinton wanted to discuss ditching Taiwan in exchange for China to erase US debts.

In 2013, a Jimmy Kimmel Live show on ABC asked some kids what to do about the $1.3 trillion of debts the US owes to China, a very young boy suggested that “The US kill everyone in China instead of repaying its debts.”

In 2021, Joe Biden said in a press conference: “China wants to become the most wealthy, powerful country but it’s ‘not gonna happen on my watch’.”

In 2023, under the excuse of an imaginary “China threat” and to “Protect Taiwan from China invasion”, US politicians proposed a series of bipartisan bills aiming to restrict how China can use its money, restricting China’s rights in International Financial Institutions, and a plan to confiscate China’s sovereign fund and Chinese citizens’ overseas bank accounts and assets like the way the US and Europe did to the Russians in 2022.

Please click the following links for details of their proposed “looting” bills:

• H.R.554, the “Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act of 2023”, sponsored by Rep. French Hill;
• H.R.510, the “Chinese Currency Accountability Act of 2023,” sponsored by Rep. Warren David;
• H.R.839, the “China Exchange Rate Transparency Act of 2023,” sponsored by Rep. Dan Meuser;
• H.R.803, the “Protect Taiwan Act,” sponsored by Rep Frank Lucas;

From the above series of behavior and statements made by two US Presidents, a Secretary of State, a very young boy, the US media, and 4 politicians who sponsored anti-China bills, it is hard not to come to the conclusion about the ungrateful nature of Americans. It would appear to me that the robber DNA is deep in the blood and bone of many people in the US society (I hate to generalize my comment unless someone can convince me that the above-named series of behaviors within the US society are merely coincident!).

• US military threat to China at China’s doorstep

Let’s put aside the various issues from a reported 2012 US plan to deploy 60% of the US Navy fleet to the Asia Pacific by 2020, and the 2011 Obama Pacific Pivot with a secret plan to start a war against China by 2030 with a coalition of nations to militarily control commercial shipment to and from China via the South China seas to limit China freedom to trade with the rest of the world, and should China resist, the US-led military coalition would begin to attack China.

John Pilger is an award-winning journalist who produced a 2 hours documentary with details of US military bases around China and how the US may plan to start a war with China.

In 2017, US Admiral Scott Swift assured everyone he was ready to follow President Trump’s orders to launch a nuclear missile against China.

In 2022, former US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien suggested destroying Taiwan’s semiconductor factories rather than letting them fall into China’s hands.

In 2023, US talk show host Garland Nixon wrote on Twitter that White House insiders said that US President Joe Biden had warned about a plan for “the destruction of Taiwan” when asked if there could be any greater disaster than the Ukraine crisis.

There are endless US military activities and arrangements targeting China in recent years. Just to list a few more examples below:

• While the Western media and politicians keep telling the world that the PLA is increasingly aggressive against Western countries’ (military) freedom of navigation in the South and East China Seas, a recent report by the US Department of Defence revealed that “the US has conducted around 120 military exercises a year with allies and partners in the region.” Ironically, such statistics of US military aggression on China’s doorstep failed to attract the interest of the Western Media.

• In 2017, the US deployed the THAAD missile system in South Korea with total disregard for China’s protest.

• In 2021, Australia reached a deal with the US and UK on a $386b nuclear submarine deal with China as their target.

• In 2022, US Defense Secretary Austin announced that: “The US is at a pivotal point with China and needs military strength to ensure that American values, not Beijing’s, set global norms in the 21st century.” He then talked about the need to align the US budget as never before to the China Challenge. He then mentioned a $1.2 trillion estimated cost as part of a major nuclear triad overhaul underway by the Congressional Budget Office.

One should note that such an additional budget for military expenses is on top of the fact that the US military already spent more than the next 10 countries combined.

• In July 2023, USS Kentucky, a US nuclear submarine (capable of firing nuclear ballistic missiles) suddenly arrived in Busan, South Korea.
• Again, in July 2023, Nato head Jens Stoltenberg pushed to increase ties with Asia with the intention to form an Asia NATO alliance. Former Australia PM Paul Keating labeledStoltenberg a ‘supreme fool’ and ‘an accident on its way to happen’.

To justify NATO’s intention to set up its military presence in Asia, NATO engaged in a series of smear campaigns against  imaginary Chinese threats based on NATO’s own past behavior across the world. The latest smear campaign was in the NATO Vilnius Summit Communique. As a result, China’s Permanent Representative to the UN refuted NATO’s false accusations against China, and challenged NATO if it can make the same claims as China on the following 6 points:

1. China has never invaded other countries;
2. China has never engaged in proxy wars;
3. China has never carried out military operations around the world;
4. China did not threaten other countries with force;
5. China did not export ideology
6. China did not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs

The reality is that the US initiated an all-out hostility against China after China helped the US out of the 2008 GFC [Global Financial Crisis]. Examples:

1. Obama’s Pacific Pivot;
2. Obama’s TPP to Exclude China from International Trade;
3. Trump and Biden all-out trade Wars;
4. Trump and Biden all-out technological wars;
5. US military deployments, and military activities surrounding China. Despite the US already having 313 of its 750 worldwide military bases surrounding China, the US continued to expand by another 4 recently via the Philippines with 3 of them close to Taiwan.

The Ukrainization of Taiwan

Despite the past US administrations (1972, 1979, 1982) entering into 3 Joint Communiques with China over the Taiwan question (The One-China agreements), the US politicians have over the years, through their own acts, brutally violated all the written agreements with China re the One-China Policy. The latest developments are the worst:

In July 2023, US House of Congress passed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to ban Pentagon maps from depicting Taiwan and its major outlying islands, Kinmen, Penghu, Mazudao, Wuchudao, and Ludao (etc) as part of China. (Here is the content of the original amendment bill).

Below is just a quick list of examples of US violating all its signed One-China documents with China to provoke a war over Taiwan:

• In 2021, Taiwan English News reported the news of “Pentagon doubled the number of US troops in Taiwan”,

• In 2022, VOA (Chinese news) reported that the US has again increased the number of its military personnel in Taiwan. The intention is to help coordinate both militaries in a possible future war with China.

• In April 2023, US lawmaker, Chairman of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul pledged to help provide training for Taiwan’s armed forces and to speed up the delivery of weapons.

• In June 2023, Taiwan (ROC) Foreign Affair website issued a press release titled “US government officially notifies Taiwan of latest arms sales.”

• In July 2023, it was widely reported in Taiwan that the U.S. wants Taiwan to set up a P4 Biological Laboratory. Yahoo Chinese News pointed out that Taiwan Chinese newspaper (联合报) is the first to break the detail of the Biological Weapons Lab story. Taiwan CTI TV news reported in detail that the Lab is to test biological weapons using Chinese DNA as “the DNA of the Taiwan population can represent Chinese DNA.” Not surprisingly: the Western media is very much silent on this kind of news despite the fact that the US State Department later denied the Taiwanese report that the US asked Taiwan to develop weaponized biological agents.

• Perhaps to justify a possible preemptive war against China under the Bush Doctrine in the foreseeable future, the US Congress passed a $500m anti-China propaganda bill in February 2022. How much of this $500m goes to brainwashing Taiwanese?

In a recent interview, Jeffrey Sachs describes a series of US actions against China as a “Path to War With China.”

DPP politicians prepare for war and an escape route while Taiwanese people reject war

The trouble with Western forms of so-called democracy is that to win an election, one needs to build an election war chest. That is to seek political donations in return for favors when one is in a position of power. It usually involves an under-the-table deal between politicians and their donors. As a result, corporate donors, billionaires, foreign cash, and foreign powers could easily penetrate domestic politics.

Since the beginning of Taiwan having a Western form of election, dark money, corruption, bribery, and scandals news become a part of the social norm within the Taiwanese political circle. If we search for the name of any DPP senior politicians (especially Ministers and Prime Ministers) with the term “Dark-Money”, “corruption”, or “scandals”, one should notice almost no innocent people in the system. As Western media usually self-censored negative news linked to the Pro-independent party, so, the best way to search for such news is to search in the Chinese language. For examples,

• Search in Chinese for corruption of the Current Taiwan leader Tsai Ing-wen;
• Search her deputy (the coming DPP presidential candidate) Lai Ching-te;

Corruption and democracy often go hand in hand. Here are some hyperlinks to examples of how the US interferes in foreign elections:

• Foreign electoral intervention
• The US is no stranger to interfering in the elections of other countries
• “Stop US interference”: Interview with the Labour Party of Taiwan

Those who follow the Taiwan issue via the Taiwan media should notice that, while those Taiwan politicians ally with the US foreign policy and campaign for independence, most of their family members (including themselves) already have US or other Western countries’ citizenship, bank accounts, and assets. For examples,

• A report in Taiwan media in 2015 revealed half of current Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen family members have foreign citizenship;
• As for the Vice President (the coming DPP presidential candidate) 赖清德 (Lai Ching-te), his son and grandson are American citizens;

The irony is that, while these pro-independence politicians eagerly ally with the US to provoke war with the PRC by promoting Taiwan independence, their family members have on the other hand migrated overseas during this time. This is a bit like President Zelensky acting in the interest of the USA, and allowing the entire Ukraine to be bombed and destroyed, because, according to OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project): “Zelensky and his inner circle have unexplained $ billions overseas.”

In fact, during Taiwan’s military exercises, one of their programs is on how the president could safely escape if a war breaks out. (Of course, whenever the Taiwan media reports such escape details, the Ministry of Defense will deny it.)

The tragedy for the average Taiwanese person is that the island economy is already damaged before such a war would begin. According to a recent Financial Times report: “‘People are nervous’: Taiwan’s wealthy shelter money overseas in fear of China conflict.” The same thing happened to foreign companies in Taiwan with “half of the foreign companies in Taiwan making contingency plans due to evacuations and supply chain disruptions concerns.”  The latest Taiwan GDP is down 3.02%.

The reality in Taiwan is that many young people refuse to join the army, and the DPP government is having a problem recruiting new soldiers. As a result:

• The DPP government decided to extend serving time of the existing soldiers by an additional year;
• In June 2023, Taiwan amend the military recruitment regulation to include recruits from Hong Kong and Macao people working and living in Taiwan;
• Again, in June, the DPP government reportedly worked with the Ministry of Education to impose a 3 + 1 university program. That is 3 years of study plus a year of military training.

In February 2023, Jinmen Island local lawmakers voted to declare Jinmen a non-military zone, and Jinmen governor Li Zhufeng (李炷烽) suggests using Jinmen Island as a pilot program for the One Country Two Systems and expanding gradually thereafter.

Professor John V. Wash in a recent article titled “Arming Taiwan is an Insane Provocation” cited a hyperlink to a 2022 polling that showed that an overwhelming majority (82.1%) of Taiwanese now would like to preserve the status quo with only 5.3% wanting immediate independence.”

How much longer will China tolerate the US’s endless escalating military provocations?

In July 2023, Hungary Prime Minister Orban observed that “Beijing managed to develop as much in 30 years as other countries in 200 years. Therefore, they can claim their “place under the sun”. However, Washington does not accept that quick development, the fact that China preceded them in many sectors… As a result, a clash between the two world powers is inevitable…. War is not inevitable, but the USA does not accept that it has become the world’s second most powerful nation, Orbán added.”

An article on Education Monitor News rightly pointed out that “The Greatest Threat to the USA is not China, but Peace.”

In 2014, the New York Times put up an article titled ‘The Lack of Major Wars may be Hurting Economic Growth.’

One should bear in mind that the USA was created on the foundation of invasion, massacre, looting, and enslavement of others. Not a single thing the US possesses today is through peaceful means including every inch of its current territory.

Since 2008, China has already realized that its kindness towards the US will only be perceived as a weakness. That will only encourage more aggression and greed from the US imperialist rulers. So, the first thing Chairman Xi did after taking office in 2012 is to visit a PLA military base. He openly called upon the PLA to prepare for war and to win the war.

In February 2023, China released a report titled “US Hegemony and Its Perils,” and in May “America’s Coercive Diplomacy and its Harm” outlining the many crimes committed by the US against the world and that China is no longer interested in accommodating the US crimes and behaviors.

In March 2023, a Chinese government website reported that Chairman Xi Jinping told a group of more than 300 high-ranking government officials that: “History has repeatedly proven that if we seek security through resolve, security will prevail; If we seek security through concessions, security will perish; If we seek development through resolve, development will prosper; If we seek development through compromises, our development will suffer.”

In June 2023, China released The Law on Foreign Relations of the People’s Republic of China outlining the country’s attitude toward foreign relations, UN Charters, International Laws, and possible counter-action against any hostile foreign policy and behavior that harms Chinese interest and security.

In July, China called NATO “a trouble-maker”, and issued a warning to NATO: “Beijing doesn’t cause trouble, but is not afraid of trouble”. Days later, the Chinese ambassador to the US issued a direct warning to Washington: “If people violate me, I will hit back.”

So, how long will China continue to tolerate US provocation? How long will China allow the US military to continue to violate its sovereignty in Taiwan? Will China allow the US more time to arm Taiwan like what they did in Ukraine before Putin would no longer tolerate the threats and was forced to take military action?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Western media never stop warning us of China: it menaces Taiwan, threatens its neighbors and shipping lanes in the South China Sea, and sticks military bases on Cuba. China, we are told, spies on us by the most devious means, through TikTok, Huawei 5G, and weather balloons. And China, say our media, ensnares Africa with debt traps. Meanwhile, the US government and its media-echo decry China’s abuses of its own people. China, the US says, has committed “cultural” and literal genocide against Uyghur muslims in Xinjiang. As for the Covid-19 pandemic, the West with whiplash-inducing self-contradiction accuses China of mishandling the crisis by imposing both draconian lockdowns and lockdowns that were too lax, as well as premature reopenings and reopenings that were too-long delayed.

Meanwhile, the liberal and left-liberal West shakes its ideological finger at China, declaring it to practice an idiosyncratic communism-capitalism that sometimes features the worst of both worlds.

In the western imagination, China’s citizens are feared for their abject discipline and uncanny competence. Yet the West pities them too, thinking they are ruled by communist overlords in a dictatorship devoid of individual liberties.

In short, to the western world, China is an iconic picture of tyranny, malevolence, and exploitation. Still, China is not unique in its status as a US bogeyman. Whenever the West targets a country militarily or economically, the press always turns the country into a cartoon, invariably the same cartoon: authoritarian, autocratic, led by an evil/mad dictator; e.g., Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, etc.

Which is why we should be grateful for the picture of China drawn in this elegantly concise and easily read book, The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century, by Carlos Martinez (Praxis Press, 2023, 210 pp.). Of its 210 pages, nearly 60 are taken up with source citations, a 5-page index, reading recommendations, and photographs.

Despite its brevity, the book expertly refutes the West’s blizzard of charges against China. It also sketches China’s 20th century history, its economics and political system, and the ideology that accompanied the Chinese people’s astonishing advance. Martinez analyzes and answers two questions preoccupying many on the political left: Is China socialist? Is it imperialist? (Martinez argues Yes, and No, respectively.)

Life in China Today

First, some bullet points on life in China today, with facts gleaned from the book. (Citations are to the print edition.)

• Life expectancy in China is now 78.2 years and literacy is 97%. For comparison, in the US the figures are 76.4 and 79, respectively. (95)

• Infant mortality is 5.4/1000 in 2020, just under the US figure of 5.69/1000. (95)

• The majority of students in higher education are women, while before the 1949 revolution the vast majority of women received no education at all. (31)

• Since 2000 China has revived universal health insurance, a minimum 9-year free compulsory education, pensions, subsidized housing, and other income support. (67-68)

• 98% of poor villages have optical fiber communications and 4G technology. (99)

• Extreme or “absolute” poverty has been eliminated. (31) This meant lifting over 800 million people (now 10% of humanity) out of poverty in the last 40 years. ¹ (89) However, to say that China has eliminated “absolute poverty” but not “poverty” is technically true but vastly understates the accomplishment. China’s poverty elimination program considers that each and every citizen must have adequate food and clothing, access to medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and at least nine years of free education. To do this, “Three million carefully selected cadres were dispatched to poor villages, forming 255,000 teams that reside there. Living in humble conditions for generally one to three years at a time, the teams worked alongside poor peasants, local officials, and volunteers, until each household was lifted out of poverty.” ² (97)

• China’s response to public health emergencies was very recently tested. After Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China identified and suppressed the virus, sequenced and published the genome, and reopened after a few months. This rapid response was unprecedented, as noted by the World Health Organization and many other authoritative bodies. China literally saved millions of lives through its public health administrative virtuosity, while the West, on the other hand, sacrificed millions. (At the time, this reviewer wrote about China’s initial response to COVID-19, here.) (113)

• China’s per capita incarceration rate is less than 20% that of the US. (122)

• 93% of China’s population are satisfied with their central government, according to a study by the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. (54)

To see how impressive this all is, consider that by global standards China is anything but a rich country. According to the World Bank, in 2022 China’s nominal GDP per capita was about one-sixth of that of the US, but its purchase-price-parity GDP per capita is now comparable to that of the US. ³ This is consistent with China’s status as a peripheral or semi-peripheral country in the global system, ⁴ sending most of the surplus value it produces to the global north. ⁵ But it also tells us that China has created a domestic market that provides a much higher national standard of living than that in many other peripheral and semi-peripheral countries.

History

Martinez’s summary of China’s recent history explains that the current quality of life and popular sovereignty in China are rooted in the first half of the 20th century.

In 1949, year of the revolution, China was among the poorest countries in the world. The US under President Truman then imposed a near total blockade on China. (94) This crushing, existential impediment to China’s development, eventually forced it into the 1979-1980 US-China agreements with the US under President Nixon. China then devised the economic strategy that it now calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

But China’s progress did not begin with the US-China deal and the economic changes of the late 1970s-80s known as “Reform and Opening Up.” From the revolution in 1949 until the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, life expectancy in China rose 31 years, the fastest ever recorded in a major country. In the same period, literacy went from 20% to 93%. (17) China’s unprecedented triumph over poverty simply continued the practice that began before the 1949 revolution, in the Communist-liberated zones, beginning with the Jianxi-Fujian Soviet in 1931. (90) After the 1949 revolution, life expectancy rose from 36 to 67 in the three decades that followed, well-exceeding the global increase. (91-92) Even the World Bank praised China’s successful development over the four decades before 1983. (90)

Development Strategy

China’s economic changes of the later 20th century were not just a development strategy, but a strategy of coping with the existential threat presented by the West. China intended to integrate itself into the global production chain so thoroughly that it would make the cost of Western aggression against it too high. (36-37, 47)

China’s economic system now depends on its popular government’s control of the commanding heights of the economy, including banking and all the leading industries, avoiding the scourge of privatization that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the devastation of its people in the 1990s. In China, even land ownership has not been privatized in the western sense.

Notice that this development strategy abjured the development strategy of the Western bloc, which depends, in the first instance, on centuries of colonialism, imperialism, plunder, and in the second, on the continuing imposition on the Global South of dependent underdevelopment, unequal exchange, violence, coups, sanctions and other malign practices required to enforce the unequal international order.

Global Leadership in Tech, Science, Climate Mitigation

China’s success is not just in its internal development, but in its global leadership. When the US trumpets its own “global leadership,” it looks nothing like what most of us would like the phrase to mean. China, on the other hand, really does lead, not only in world poverty reduction but in technology, scientific research, and climate mitigation efforts.

Some more bullet points, with facts gleaned from the book.

• China leads the world in renewable energy, digital networking, quantum computing, space exploration and nanotechnology. (xv)

• China leads the world in scientific research publication and patent grants. (xv)

• In 2007 over 80% of China’s electricity came from coal. By 2022, this dropped to 56%, about the same as Australia, a country with a per capita GDP (nominal) about five times China’s. (139)

• In 2021, China accounted for 46% of the world’s new solar and wind power capacity. (140)

• International energy analyst Tim Buckley observed that China is the world leader in “wind and solar installation, in wind and solar manufacturing, in electric vehicle production, in batteries, in hydro, in nuclear, in ground heat pumps, in grid transmission and distribution, and in green hydrogen… they literally lead the world in every zero-emissions technology today.” (140)

• China is reforesting, planting forests the size of Ireland in a single year, and doubling forest coverage from 12% in 1980 to 23% in 2020, while the global trend is in the opposite direction. (144-145)

• China also is leading in green foreign direct investment through the Belt and Road Initiative, in Pakistan, Argentina, Zambia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Central African Republic. (149-150)

Imperialism? Debt Traps? ‘Belt and Road’ Bad?

The book offers a detailed analysis of the charge that China is imperialist. For example, as theorized by Lenin, one central imperial criterion is the export of capital. Martinez writes that in the past, “China’s ‘export of capital’ was limited largely to foreign aid projects in Africa, most famously the Tazara Railway linking Tanzania and Zambia, which aside from enabling regional development, broke Zambia’s dependency on apartheid-ruled territories (Rhodesia [now Zimbabwe], South Africa, Mozambique).”

Nor could China be considered imperialist in the 1980s and 1990s: “[R]ather, it was the recipient of enormous volumes of foreign capital, from Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the US and Europe… China opened itself up to exploitation by the imperialist powers so as to develop technological capacity and insert itself into global value chains.” (36-37)

The charge of imperialism overlaps the charge that China ensnares African states in “debt traps.” This is ironic, given that the charge is made by Africa’s historical trapper-in-chief, the West. ⁶

Martinez dispenses with this claim too. He describes the economic relations between Africa and China and how little they resemble imperialist relations.

[T]he structure of the Chinese economy is such that it doesn’t impel the domination of foreign markets, territories, resources and labor in the same way as free market capitalism does. The major banks—which obviously wield a decisive influence over how capital is deployed—are majority-owned by the state, responsible primarily not to shareholders but to the Chinese people,” as are “the key industries,” which are “subjected to heavy regulation by a state that does not have private profit maximization as its primary objective. (38)

Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis notes, “the Chinese are non-interventionist in a way that Westerners have never managed to fathom… they went to Addis Ababa and said to the government, ‘we can see you have some problems with your infrastructure, we would like to build some new airports, upgrade your railway system, create a telephone system, and rebuild your roads.’” (42)

China is now Africa’s largest trading partner: $254 billion in 2021. Compare US-Africa trade, at $64 billion. In addition to trade, China “provides vast low-cost loans for infrastructure projects, with Chinese banks now accounting for around a fifth of all lending to Africa.” Due in part to Chinese finance and expertise, ‘Ethiopia in 2015 celebrated the opening of the first metro train system in sub-Saharan Africa, along with Africa’s first fully electrified cross-border railway line, the Ethiopian-Djibouti electric railway. The African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa was funded by the Chinese government as a gift to the AU.’” China is also building Zimbabwe’s parliament building gratis, and funding construction of Africa’s CDC, just opened in January 2023. (40)

China makes loans differently too. At the time of the book’s writing, the average interest rate on private sector loans was about 5%, but Chinese public and private lenders charged half that. Austerity is never a condition of a Chinese loan, unlike Western loans that are made under IMF and World Bank strictures. (41)

China’s policy on foreign investment and loans is not an accident. China follows explicit rules for African investment, as outlined by President Xi in 2018: “No interference in African countries’ internal affairs; no imposition of our will on African countries; no attachment of political strings to assistance to Africa; and no seeking of selfish political gains in investment and financing cooperation with Africa.” (43-44)

China initiated its famous “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI),” a global infrastructure development strategy, ten years ago. As of last year, 150 countries (the United Nations General Assembly has 193) have signed up with BRI. “Politically, the project fits into China’s longstanding approach of using economic integration to increase the cost (and thereby reduce the likelihood) of confrontation.” (47) “Nearly every country in the Global South has signed up” with BRI, “including 43 out of 46 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.” (48)

Martinez quips, “Surely not all the turkeys are voting for Christmas?” (48)

Xinjiang

Perhaps the most vicious tale the West tells about China concerns Xinjiang and its Uyghur population. The US government and its media echo, joined by other western governments, accuse China of physical, cultural and religious genocide of Uyghurs, imprisoning a million of them, and subjecting them to forced labor.

Martinez debunks the Xinjiang myth point by point. But for this review, lets skip the details of China’s policy and practices in Xinjiang (largely a social work approach to terrorism). Let’s also forget the singular and bizarre source of the Xinjiang tales, one Adrian Zenz, exposed by a number of articles from The Grayzone. (120-122) Even without all that, the fraud is revealed by circumstantial evidence alone, as these bullet points show.

• Between 2010 and 2018 the Uyghur population has increased by 25%, from 10.2 million to 12.7 million; in the same period the majority Han Chinese population increased by only 2%. (117)

• China’s one-child policy implemented in 1978 and ending in 2015 exempted China’s dozens of ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs. (117)

• Life expectancy in the region has increased from 30 years in 1949 to 75 years today. (117)

• No refugee crisis exists or has been reported along the border with Pakistan, Kazakhstan or elsewhere. Indeed, Time magazine reported in 2021 the US had not admitted a single Uyghur refugee in the previous 12 months. (117)

• The total number of deaths caused by Covid-19 in Xinjiang is three. (118)

• All the schools in Xinjiang teach in both Standard Chinese and one minority language, most often Uyghur. (118)

• Chinese banknotes have five languages: Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian, and Zhuang. (118-9)

• There are over 25,000 mosques in Xinjiang, three times the number there were in 1980 and one of the highest rates per capita in the world. (119)

• The Xinjiang Islamic Institute is headquartered in Xinjiang’s capital Urumqi. Thousands of students attend Islamic schools and the religion is practiced freely. (119)

• “During the 50th session of the Human Rights Council in 2022, members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation overwhelmingly co-sponsored the statement supporting China’s position (by 37 to 1).” Elsewhere in the Global South results were similar: Africa (33 to 2); Asia (20 to 2). (119)

In short, the Xinjiang story perpetrated by the West exemplifies the “big lie,” as theorized by an astute Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf:

[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.

Speaking of Hitler, an iconic offense in modern thought and discourse is the factual denial of the Nazi Holocaust. We might register the same disgust for the factual denial of any historically established mass genocidal event (e.g., in Guatemala). Is there any reason not to treat the wilful fabrication of a non-existent genocide with the same revulsion?

The South China Sea

The West accuses China of trying to militarize the South China Sea, including through island-building.

Martinez cites China scholar Jude Woodward: “Woodward observed that China’s island-building was carried out largely in response to the actions taken by other states in the region: ‘In its actions on these disputed islands, China can with justice argue that it has done no more than others… It [is] rarely mentioned that Taiwan has long had an airstrip on Taiping, Malaysia on Swallow Reef, Vietnam on Spratly Island and the Phillipines on Thitu.’” (50)

Moreover, China’s presence in the South China Sea is for economic and military securtity. It is China’s major shipping route, “as central to Asia as the Mediterranean is to Europe,” writes Robert Kaplan. (50) A blockade by the US or other hostile powers would present an existential threat. (50) This is not an imaginary threat, given US naval provocations and exercises in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, and US military and diplomatic relations with China’s separately-governed province of Taiwan. Indeed, it is the US which has sought to militarize and control the region.

Conclusion: The US Menace

The book’s last chapter urges us to work to oppose the West’s new Cold War on China. This war is multifaceted, including the 2012 US “pivot to Asia,” the banning of TikTok and WeChat, the kidnapping of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou, the long-standing US encirclement of China and Russia with perhaps half of its 800 to 1100 overseas military bases, and US military aggression in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.  (167)

US policy is explicit: “Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival…that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union… Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor.” (US Defense Planning Guidance for 1994-1999)  (169)

Again citing China expert Jude Woodward, author of The US vs China: Asia’s new Cold War? (Manchester University Press, 2017), Martinez observes that current US policy toward China shows “a chilling resemblance” to US-USSR relations at the height of the Cold War, when the US sought to isolate the USSR economically, politically, and militarily. (170) Quoting Woodward, “The USSR was variously surrounded by a tightening iron noose of US military alliances, forward bases, border interventions, cruise missiles and naval exercises. Economically it was shut out of international trade organizations, subjected to bans and boycotts and excluded from collaboration on scientific and technological developments. It was diplomatically isolated, excluded from the G7 group of major economies and awarded an international pariah status. It was designated as uniquely undemocratic. Any opponents of this ‘Cold War’ and accompanying nuclear arms race were stigmatized as disloyal apologists, closet ‘reds’ or spies and subjected to McCarthyite witch-hunts.” (170)

“Propaganda wars can also be war propaganda,” writes Martinez. (110) And so it is with western demonization of China.

For those of us overwhelmed and frightened by the West’s prolific fictions about China and who wish to share a more accurate picture of the country with friends, families and fellow activists, in the hope of stopping the war before it starts, we might give them this book.

END NOTES

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger Stoll.

Mirroring meticulous Chinese attention to protocol, they met at Villa 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse – exactly where Kissinger first met in person with Zhou Enlai in 1971, preparing Nixon’s 1972 visit to China. The Mr. Kissinger Goes to Beijing saga was an “unofficial”, individual attempt to try to mend increasingly fractious Sino-American relations. He was not representing the current American administration.

There’s the rub. Everyone involved in geopolitics is aware of the legendary Kissinger formulation: To be the US’s enemy is dangerous, to be the US’s friend is fatal. History abounds in examples, from Japan and South Korea to Germany, France and Ukraine.   As quite a few Chinese scholars privately argued, if reason is to be upheld, and “respecting the wisdom of this 100-years-old diplomat”, Xi and the Politburo should maintain the China-US relation as it is: “icy”.

After all, they reason, being the US’s enemy is dangerous but manageable for a Sovereign Civilizational State like China. So Beijing should keep “the honorable and less perilous status” of being a US enemy.

The World Through Washington’s Eyes

What’s really going on in the back rooms of the current American administration was not reflected by Kissinger’s high-profile peace initiative, but by an extremely combative Edward Luttwak. Luttwak, 80, may not be as visibly influential as Kissinger, but as a behind-the-scenes strategist he’s been advising the Pentagon across the spectrum for over five decades. His book on Byzantine Empire strategy, for instance, heavily drawing on top Italian and British sources, is a classic.

Luttwak, a master of deception, reveals precious nuggets in terms of contextualizing current Washington moves. That starts with his assertion that the US – represented by the Biden combo – is itching to do a deal with Russia.

That explains why CIA head William Burns, actually a capable diplomat, called his counterpart, SVR head Sergey Naryshkin (Russian Foreign Intelligence) to sort of straighten things up “because you have something else to worry about which is more unlimited”. What’s “unlimited”, depicted by Luttwak in a Spenglerian sweep, is Xi Jinping’s drive to “get ready for war”. And if there’s a war, Luttwak claims that “of course” China would lose. That dovetails with the supreme delusion of Straussian neocon psychos across the Beltway.

Luttwak seems not to have understood China’s drive for food self-sufficiency: he qualifies it as a threat. Same for Xi using a “very dangerous” concept, the “rejuvenation of the Chinese people”: that’s “Mussolini stuff”, says Luttwak. “There has to be a war to rejuvenate China”.

The “rejuvenation” concept – actually better translated as “revival” – has been resonating in China circles at least since the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911. It was not coined by Xi. Chinese scholars point out that if you see US troops arriving in Taiwan as “advisors”, you would probably make preparations to fight too.

But Luttwak is on a mission: “This is not America, Europe, Ukraine, Russia. This is about ‘the sole dictator’. There is no China. There is only Xi Jinping,” he insisted. And Luttwak confirms the EU’s Josep “Garden vs. Jungle” Borrell and European Commission dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen fully support his vision. Luttwak, in just a few words, actually gives away the whole game: “The Russian Federation, as it is, is not strong enough to contain China as much as we would wish”. Hence the turn around by the Biden combo to “freeze” the conflict in the Donbass and change the subject. After all, “if that [China] is the threat, you don’t want Russia to fall apart,” Luttwak reasons.

So much for Kissingerian “diplomacy.”

Let’s Declare a “Moral Victory” and Run Away

On Russia, the Kissinger vs. Luttwak confrontation reveals crucial cracks as the Empire faces an existential conflict it never did in the recent past. The gradual, massive U-turn is already in progress – or at least the semblance of a U turn. US mainstream media will be entirely behind the U turn. And the naïve masses will follow. Luttwak is already voicing their deepest agenda: the real war is on China, and China “will lose”

At least some non-neocon players around the Biden combo – like Burns – seem to have understood the Empire’s massive strategic blunder of publicly committing to a Forever War, hybrid and otherwise, against Russia on behalf of Kiev. This would mean, in principle, that Washington can’t just walk away like it did in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yet Hegemons do enjoy the privilege to walk away: after all they exercise sovereignty, not their vassals. European vassals will be left to rot. Imagine those Baltic chihuahuas declaring war on Russia-China all by themselves.

The off-ramp confirmed by Luttwak implies Washington declaring some sort of “moral victory” in Ukraine – which is already controlled by BlackRock anyway – and then moving the guns towards China.

Yet even that won’t be a cakewalk, because China and the about-to-expand BRICS+ are already attacking the Empire at its foundation: dollar hegemony. Without it, the US itself will have to fund the war on China. Chinese scholars, off the record, and exercising their millennia-old analytical sweep, observe this may be the last blunder the Empire ever made in its short history.

As one of them summarized it, “the empire has blundered itself to an existential war and, therefore, the last war of the empire. When the end comes, the empire will lie as usual and declare victory, but everyone else will know the truth, especially the vassals.”

And that brings us to former national security adviser Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski’s 180-degree turn shortly before he died, aligning him today with Kissinger, not Luttwak. “The Grand Chessboard”, published in 1997, before the 9/11 era, argued that the US should rule over any peer competitor rising in Eurasia. Brzezinski did not live to see the living incarnation of his ultimate nightmare: a Russia-China strategic partnership. But already seven years ago – two years after Maidan in Kiev – at least he understood it was imperative to realign the global power architecture”

Destroying the “Rules-Based International Order”

The crucial difference today, compared to seven years ago, is that the US is incapable, per Brzezinski, to “take the lead in realigning the global power architecture in such a way that the violence (…) can be contained without destroying the global order.” It’s the Russia-China strategic partnership that is taking the lead – followed by the Global Majority – to contain and ultimately destroy the hegemonic “rules-based international order”.

As the indispensable Michael Hudson has summarized it, the ultimate question at this incandescent juncture is whether economic gains and efficiency will determine world trade, patterns and investment, or whether the post-industrial US/NATO economies will choose to end up looking like the rapidly depopulating and de-industrializing post-Soviet Ukraine and Baltic states or England.”

So is the wet dream of a war on China going to change these geopolitical and geoeconomics imperatives? Give us a -Thucydides – break. The real war is already on – but certainly not one identified by Kissinger, Brzezinski and much less Luttwak and assorted US neocons.

Michael Hudson, once again, summarized it: when it comes to the economy, the US and EU “strategic error of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive, so total, that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Pepe Escobar.

In September 2013, on a visit to Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, President Xi advocated the establishment of a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” A month later, addressing the Indonesian parliament, he proposed a “Maritime Silk Road of the 20th Century. The trans-continental corridor links China with Southeast Asia, South Asia, Russia and Europe by land. The new sea trade route connects Chinese coast regions with southeast and south Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East and Eastern Africa, all the way to Europe.

BRI was later extended to include Latin America and initiatives to Polar regions through the “Silk Road on Ice” in the Arctic, a Digital Silk Road and another to outer space via the Space Information Corridor. Lastly, special mention should be made of The Green Silk Road, the scope of which includes reducing climate emissions, reducing pollution and protecting biodiversity. This is part of China’s prioritizing sustainable development under the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In sum, the BRI seeks to promote economic globalization, multipolarity, poverty reduction, livelihood improvement, cultural diversification and environmental protection.

The BRI is China’s signature foreign policy effort, in Xi’s words, to help achieve a “community of common destiny” which encompasses a “commonality of shared interests” as it “complements other economies” on the way to providing “one home for man.” Tang Qifang, a scholar at the China Institute of International Studies, describes BRI as “The concept of a community of common destiny transcending all sorts of differences in human society and targets the greatest possible benefits for all.” This embodies, “The Chinese aspiration to share power and development with the world.” (When Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought about the China-proposed “human community with a shared future, he replied “That’s exactly what we need.”)

And, Xi has repeatedly stressed that the nation’s destiny is “interwoven with that of another dialogue rather than confrontation, partnerships instead of alliances should be the pursuit of all nations in a win-win project.” [1] In keeping with this sentiment, China will transfer its competitive productive capacity as its industries possess a competitive edge. 

In a 2018 speech Xi said,

To respond to the call of the times, China is ready to jointly promote the Belt and Road Initiative with partners. We hope to create new drivers to power common development through this new platform of international cooperation; and we hope to turn it into a road of peace, prosperity, openness, green development and innovation. And a road brings together different civilizations.” [2]

On numerous occasions, Xi has stressed that “We Chinese love peace. No matter how strong it may become China will never seek hegemony or expansion. It will never inflict its past suffering on any nation.”

It’s not lost on the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America that when colonizers built infrastructure it facilitated outward-bound routes whereas the Chinese infrastructure serves internal connections within the continent. W. Gyude Moore, former Minister for Public Works in Liberia, didn’t mince words when he said, “China has built more infrastructure in Africa than the West did in centuries.” [3]

As of January 2023, 152 countries and 32 international organizations had signed a Memorandum of  Understanding (MOU)  and this includes 75% of the world’s population and half of the world GDP. Some economic forecasts predict that by 2027, BRI’s worldwide projects will number 2,600 valued at $3.7 trillion.

 The banishment of selfishness from foreign policy. What a concept. Brotherhood in action.

Further, data show that the cumulative value of trade in goods between China and countries along the BRI routes reached nearly $11 trillion between 2013 and 2021, with a two-way investment reaching more than $230 billion.

According to a 2022 World Bank forecast, if only the BRI transportation infrastructure projects are eventually carried out, by 2030, the BRI will generate $1.6 trillion in revenues for the globe or 1.3 percent of global GDP. And up to 90 percent of the revenues will go the partnering countries. [4]

Thousands of projects (3,000 in Africa, alone), initially focused on roads. ports, railways, pipelines, power stations. More recently, there are cross-border fiber optic cables, space networks, schools, hospitals, solar panels, health care and financial services. Projects range from the Sudanese Railways Authority receiving a first installment of 21 locomotives which will significantly improve rail capacity, and 620 Lifan taxi cars in Montevideo, Uruguay to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. At a cost of $95.5 billion, it involves a port, highways, airport, fiber optic cables, railways and power plants.  Many of the latter are running on solar, hydro and wind power.

 In June, 2023, Egypt and China announced a BRI investment deal worth more than $8 billion for the Suez Canal Zone which will allow Chinese companies access to African and European markets, while taking advantage of the canal’s strategic position. Another notable project, the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail in Indonesia at at cost between $6-8 billion encountered logistical problems after being scheduled to begin service in July, 2023. The Chinese would be the first to acknowledge that BRI is not a miracle worker, success is not invariably guaranteed and although it originated in China, BRI belongs to all the members.

Recent BRI projects in Latin America include the $1.52 billion Fourth Bridge over the Panama Canal and the $5 billion Bogota metro line 1 in Colombia. In early June, 2023(, in official visits to Beijing, Honduran President Xiomara Castro expressed interest in joining BRI and signed 17 trade agreements with China and Argentina agreed to projects involving infrastructure, energy, economy and trade. Other projects are underway in Chile, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. At the end of 2021, Chinese investments in Latin America exceeded $450 billion.  It should be noted that the U.S. has expressed its pique over BRI projects, especially in Panama, and has warned Latin America about Chinese BRI deals that were “too good to be true.”

Clearly, Latin America will not be amenable if China exhibits neo-imperial behavior and begins contradicting Xi’s pledge of “providing harmony, security and prosperity to both China and its neighbors” and seeks to impose its influence. Seemingly recognizing this, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has taken pains to emphasize that BRI “should not be viewed “through the outdated Cold War mentality.” [5]

Addressing and expanding this concern, Peng Guangquin, a retired major general and advisor to the Chinese National Security Commission, writes that:  “BRI does not limit the nature of a given country’s  political system, is not underline by ideology, does not create tiny circles of friends, does not set up trade protectionism, does not set up economic blockade, does not exercise control of other countries’ economic lifelines or change other countries’ political systems. [6]

Finally, more than 700 million of the globe’s extremely poor people live along the BRI’s and addressing the wealth disparity of the international order imposed on the Global South is a BRI priority. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, is now free of extreme poverty after it was eradicated for 850 million people. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has said that the Belt and Road initiative had accomplished this for 40 million people. This number accords with a World Bank study from four years ago that concluded BRI could lift 32 million out of moderate poverty and 7.6 out of extreme poverty.

Will BRI flounder and fizzle out? Back in 2017, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres praised BRI’s “immense potential,” lauded it for having “sustainable development as the overarching objective” and pledged the “United Nations system stands ready to travel this road with you.” [7] In 2022, China’s engagement through financial investment and contractural cooperation in 147 countries was USD 67-8 billion on over 200 deals. This was about the same as in 2021 and for 2023, and more BRI engagement is expected because strict COVID restrictions were lifted.

We do know, from a report issued by Ernst & Young that Chinese trade with BRI countries in Q1 of this year was U.S. $31.66 billion, an increase of 9.2%. It should be mentioned that there is no budget line for BRI in the Chinese government’s budget, rather, it remains a platform for launching a multitude of projects from vision to reality. In the future, we should expect less bilateral arrangements and more emphasis on bringing other countries into a quasi-governance structure, something on the order of BRI steering committee. And also more collaboration with the UN acting as an umbrella-type body. [8]

In 2017, the BRI was written into the Chinese Communist Party’s Constitution as an indicator of its importance. Australian Professor Jane Colley, who has studied BRI from its inception, believes “They are absolutely still advancing it” and as far as outside pressure, she adds that, “Any idea of containing them or forcing countries to pick a side — it’s a very risky game to play.” [9] And after a comprehensive look at BRI, the mainstream publication Euromoney, concedes that,“The BRI is neither dead nor dying but is quietly mutating into something much larger and — whisper it — perhaps better.” [10]

Will the BRI prove to be a platform that offers an alternative to the capitalist world order?  The most comprehensive and objective  attempt at predicting what BRI will resemble in 2035 contains various scenarios. The most optimistic, the “international BRI,” assumes the world will have entered a new phase of globalization. This world will be less Chinese, although the renminbi RMB) will be widely accepted as a reserve currency.

This BRI will incorporate “Chinese values” but this stage will be neither Western nor Chinese nor will it lead to China as the new hegemonal state. There will be increased cooperation, the option China committed to at the 75th UN General Assembly. [11] In short, it will be a “thoroughly hybrid paradigm of global cooperation. [12] One factor, that might tend to mitigate that optimistic rendering is that the amount of finance available to for BRI projects might be constrained by the need to focus on domestic economic priorities.

U.S Opposition to BRI

In 2011, two years before President Xi unveiled BRI, Yan Xuetang penned an opinion piece in the New York Times, titled “How China Can Defeat America.”

Yan, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars and Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, offered his explanation for China’s eventual rise and the slow decline of the United States. By interrogating the particulars of national leadership in China’s past, Yan concluded that morality might well play a key role in competition between the two great powers.

Yan identifies  himself as a political realist, a school which assumes international international politics is a zero-sum game. But unlike most scholars in this field, Yen argued that “morally informed authority”can play a key role in shaping international competition between the China and the United States. This “humane authority,” creates a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad” and in the international competition between the two great powers, this will win hearts and minds and “separate the winners from the losers.” [13] One gets the sense that Yan is implicitly implying that the U.S. will fail in this competition but he’s also challenging his own government to take advantage of this opportunity.

Eight years later, in his 2019 groundbreaking book “Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers,” Yan wrote that “moral actions help [a rising power] to establish credibility.” Yan never abjures the existence of power hierarchies and that anarchy prevails in relations among nations. However, morally informed leadership can determine the outcome of the competition — without resorting to military confrontation. This moral realism “with Chinese characteristics” can be described as a form of enlightened self-interest.

This “morally informed leadership… the side that wins the most international support will win the competition.” This should be a prime consideration in conducting foreign policy gains and “enables its leadership to become favorable to the majority of UN members.”

When the BRI was first announced by China in 2013, it did not immediately set off alarm bells in Washington. But later, a study done for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, an organization which sets the American empire’s imperial agenda, warned that “The BRI is here to stay and poses significant risks to U.S. economic and political interests and to longer term security implications.” [14]

After the BRI had been in existence for seven years, it was characterized as China’s “means of weaponizing globalization to create commercial and political order centered around dependence on China.” [15]  Both of these succinct summations reveal that the U.S. view of the BRI cannot be divorced from how U.S. oligarchs and the military industrial complex perceive China more generally and here we return to the aforementioned realist school of international relations.

American political scientist Hans Morgenthau’s book Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, became the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy for at least four decades. It’s fair to say that Morgenthau was the father of the realist school and his book was adopted as the primary text in colleges and universities across the country. My undergraduate political science professor had been one of Morgenthau’s graduate students at the University of Chicago and my copy of Politics Among Nations was heavily underlined in preparation for class discussion and exams.

In brief, the political realist assumes that all people are by “nature” greedy, aggressive and fiercely competitive. Morgenthau counseled that “Politics is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.” [16] Further, “The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an unavoidable fact of experience.” As such, the realist concludes that states, the actors on the international stage, must focus on power. No universal morality exists and power politics is amoral.

At the time his book was published, the outcome of the Chinese Revolution was still a year away but in an essay written in the 1960s, Morgenthau predicted that “China may well in the long run carry the gravest implications for the rest of the world.” Given this likelihood, he advised that U.S. strategy should be to establish an island chain running from Japan down to the Philippines so that one power could not attain a hegemonic position in Asia. [17] It should noted that prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be extremely careful in determining the national interest. It was on that basis that he was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War. Whether Morgenthau would find common cause with those willing to go war over Taiwan remains an open question.

John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago political science professor and arguably the most influential realist today, asserts that “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually to dominate the system.” [18] In terms of geopolitics “The U.S. will have no choice but to adopt a realist policy, simply because it must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia.” Further, he explains that,

The U.S. does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated in the 20th century, it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the U.S. can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer capable of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence, the U.S. is likely to behave towards China much the way it behaved towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

A contemporary and highly influential iteration of the realist school is defense analyst Elsbridge Colby’s Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. [19] Colby, grandson of former CIA Director William Colby, was the primary architect of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy. Colby’s effort is the best example I know of that lays out, chapter and verse, how the U.S. foreign policy elite is preparing for possible limited war with China and if necessary, nuclear war. Reaction from other realist strategies is typified by Robert Kaplan’s book cover blurb in which he gushes that Colby “reaches a level of theoretical mastery akin to Hans Morgenthau’s “Politics Among Nations.”

To maintain U.S. global domination, Colby  states the following about China:

We are facing a peer superpower — a generational challenger…China’s first step is a hegemonic position over Asia…then from that position they will be able to gain global predominance from which China will be able to essentially hold sway or influence over the entire world, including of course, Europe, but also the United States.

To prevent this outcome,

Requires that we ruthlessly focus, and that take controversial and aggressive steps ready ourselves now to avoid worse outcomes later. The problem is that we have not been doing nearly enough of these things. On our current course we are courting disaster.

And further, if all else fails, “If China is willing to use nuclear weapons and the United States is not, Beijing will dominate over whatever interests are at stake — whether Taiwan’s fate, that of another U.S. ally or free American access to Asia more generally.” And in a dire warning, Colby asserts that “If China succeeds we can forget about housing, food, savings, affording college for our kids and other domestic needs. The end of ordinary citizen’s property will be here. China would make American society worse off and more susceptible to intense disputes over a stagnant economic pie.”

Prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be careful in circumscribing the “national interest.” It was on that basis that Morgenthau was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War which he felt lay outside U.S. national interest.

Given the preceding, it’s my sense that U.S. realists view BRI as vast and growing phalanx of Trojan Horses out of which will emerge the means to challenge Washington’s unipolar position. A system that features peaceful development and the promise of “common prosperity” can’t be accommodated within the realist school. As Mearsheimer asserts, irrespective of ideology, “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually dominate the globe.”

The BRI is seen as part of a zero-sum game in which Washington’s unipolar world dominance will be eliminated along with a “rules-based international order. ” Speaking on the CBS program 60 Minutes (May 2, 2021), U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “Our purpose is…to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re doing to stand up and defend it.” In truth, this order is one which the United States imposed on the world to perpetuate its hegemony. This elusive set of rules, a copy of which ordinary Americans have yet to see, has been thoroughly dissected by Kim Petersen who notes: “It is a given that the rules-based order is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve it as a global hegemon.”

BRI notions of win-win outcomes and a common destiny for mankind simply can’t be accommodated in the mindset of the realist practitioners within the U.S. national security state.  They only see it as a geopolitical tool, wielded by China, who CIA Director William Burns claims, is the “most important geopolitical threat facing” the United States and if not stopped will eventually challenge American global hegemony.

Given the preceding, it’s unwarranted to surmise that a decade of BRI’s positive contributions to national development and the promise of more to come, is even viewed as more of a threat to U.S. monopoly capital’s interests than China’s rapidly growing military preparedness. That is, BRI is a type of normative power that might allow for the creation of a new international order with multilateral institutions that replace the existing ones without engaging in military conflict with the United States, thus “killing two birds with one stone.” For the realist, intent on defending the U.S. empire:

It goes without saying that this counter-hegemonic geopolitical endeavor is much more threatening to the United States than the geo-strategic actorness of China than the territorial empire which is mainly limited to military actions in China’s maritime vicinity. [20]

This is because BRI’s projects in the Global South stand in sharp relief to their collective memory of the American empire’s history brutal exploitation at the expense of other, of military intervention, giving covert support to opposition groups, stealing natural resources, regime change, CIA coups, assassinations and, of course, the prolongation of structural violence. And even after achieving independence, sometimes after years of liberation struggles, the only development option available has been the capitalist one with its mandated austerity measures that further hastened widespread misery.

The U.S. and its European vassals cannot compete in terms of scale, financing or political will and therefore have nothing to offer but more of the same. Biden’s “Build Back Better” and the EU’s “Global Gateway” are rudderless and lack any domestic support. BRI has no serious competitors. Predatory capitalism is in deep trouble and the window of opportunity to act is closing. As such, the Pentagon may try to sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with all the risks of confrontation between two nuclear powers.

Earlier this year, Air Force General Mike “unrepentant lethality” Minihan predicted a war with China within the next two years. In a memo to those under his command, he stressed preparing “to fight and win inside the first island range, running through Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. And in speech last September for a 16,000 member aerospace convention, Gen. Minihan declared: “Lethality matters most. When you kill your enemy, every part of life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.” It’s not clear to what degree Minihan is an outlier but the Pentagon may try to indirectly sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with of all the risks of a war between two nuclear powers.

This requires fostering public fears and paranoia about China and that explains why the mass media machine’s demonization of China is picking up speed. It seems to be working: A March 20-26, 2023 Pew Research Poll, a large majority (84%) of adult Americans now hold a negative view of China and only 14% a positive view, the lowest share ever recorded. And 4 in 10 describe China as “an enemy of the United States,” up 13 points since last year and a majority say the U.S. and China cannot work together to solve international problems. 75% of young Americans (18-25) have an unfavorable opinion of the country and those with a college degree are more likely to hold an unfavorable view than those with some college or less. It’s my sense that within this fevered smearing of “evil” China is an implicit war-mongering message: Something must be done to stop China’s rise in the world. Whether exposure to relentless Sino-phobia will translate into public support for an actual war should never be assumed. And leaves a very narrow and perhaps only temporary opening for counter-narratives that might preserve BRI as an antidote to Western imperialism while increasing the chances for “a human community with a shared destiny.”

ENDNOTES

1. Xi’s World Vision: A Community of Common Destiny, A Shared Home for Humanity, January 15,2017.

2. Chinese President Xi Jinping, speech at the opening ceremony of the 2018 FOCAC Beijing Summit.

3. W. Gyde Moore, Africa-China Review, August, 2020. China has been involved in Africa since the 1950s. Africa welcomed China’s role as a new source of finance and Beijing generally played a constructive role. Deborah Brautigam provides the comprehensive, definitive and corrective account in, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; also, “Chinese Investors in Africa Have Had ‘Significant and Persistently Positive’ Long-Term Effects Despite Controversy,” Eurasia Review, February 1, 2021; And for a thorough debunking of the “Chinese Debt Trap Myth.”

4. “China’s BRI ‘circle of friends’ expanding,” Helsinki Times, 1/16/2023.

5. Z.Wang, “Understanding the Belt and Road Initiative from the Relational Perspective,” Chinese Journal of International Relations, Vol.3, No.1 (2021). As such the BRI will assist the gradual evolution of the existing system “into a more fair and more inclusive system.” Fu Ying, “Is China’s Choice to Submit to the U.S. or Challenge It?” Huffington Post, May 26, 2015.

6. As found in Nedege Rolland, China’s Vision For A New World Order, NBR Special Report, No. 83. January 2020, p. 40-41.

7. Antonio Guerres, “Remarks at the opening of the Belt and Road Forum,” United Nations, May 14, 2017.

9. Silk Road briefing 2023-05-15 on China’s overseas investments.

10. For more on the subject, see Huiyao Wang, “How China can multilaterialize the BRI,” East Asian Forum, 11 March 2023.

11. “What is going on with China’s Belt and Road Initiative?” 23 May 2023.

12. Ozturk, I (2019) “The belt and road initiative as a hybrid international goal,” Working Papers in East Asian Studies, November 2019.

12. Elliot Wilson, “Not dead yet: The future of China’s belt and road,” Euromoney, September 22, 2022.

13. Yan Xuetang, “How China Can Defeat America,” New York Times, January 12, 2011.

14. “China’s belt and road: implications for the United States,” CFR, Independent Task Force Report No. 79.

15. U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission. 2020 Report to the Congress of the U.S. – Economic and Security Review.

16. It’s no coincidence that the realist take on human nature is congruent with the assumptions underlying capitalism and provide an ideological rationale for its practitioners. For a fact-based refutation, see, Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture and the Brain (New York: Springer Publishing, 2012).

17. Hans Morgenthau, Essays of a Decade: 1960-70. (New York: Praeger, 1970).

18. John Mearsheimer, “Can China Rise Peacefully?” The National Interest, October 25, 2014.

19. Eldridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. For an extensive look at Colby’s family, wealthy connections and the genesis of this book, see, William A. Shoup, “Giving War a Chance” Monthly Review, May 1, 2022.

20. Theodore Tudoroiu, “The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s New International Order,” Munk School, February 14, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

In September 2013, on a visit to Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan, President Xi advocated the establishment of a “Silk Road Economic Belt.” A month later, addressing the Indonesian parliament, he proposed a “Maritime Silk Road of the 20th Century. The trans-continental corridor links China with Southeast Asia, South Asia, Russia and Europe by land. The new sea trade route connects Chinese coast regions with southeast and south Asia, the South Pacific, the Middle East and Eastern Africa, all the way to Europe.

BRI was later extended to include Latin America and initiatives to Polar regions through the “Silk Road on Ice” in the Arctic, a Digital Silk Road and another to outer space via the Space Information Corridor. Lastly, special mention should be made of The Green Silk Road, the scope of which includes reducing climate emissions, reducing pollution and protecting biodiversity. This is part of China’s prioritizing sustainable development under the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In sum, the BRI seeks to promote economic globalization, multipolarity, poverty reduction, livelihood improvement, cultural diversification and environmental protection.

The BRI is China’s signature foreign policy effort, in Xi’s words, to help achieve a “community of common destiny” which encompasses a “commonality of shared interests” as it “complements other economies” on the way to providing “one home for man.” Tang Qifang, a scholar at the China Institute of International Studies, describes BRI as “The concept of a community of common destiny transcending all sorts of differences in human society and targets the greatest possible benefits for all.” This embodies, “The Chinese aspiration to share power and development with the world.” (When Noam Chomsky was asked what he thought about the China-proposed “human community with a shared future, he replied “That’s exactly what we need.”)

And, Xi has repeatedly stressed that the nation’s destiny is “interwoven with that of another dialogue rather than confrontation, partnerships instead of alliances should be the pursuit of all nations in a win-win project.” [1] In keeping with this sentiment, China will transfer its competitive productive capacity as its industries possess a competitive edge. 

In a 2018 speech Xi said,

To respond to the call of the times, China is ready to jointly promote the Belt and Road Initiative with partners. We hope to create new drivers to power common development through this new platform of international cooperation; and we hope to turn it into a road of peace, prosperity, openness, green development and innovation. And a road brings together different civilizations.” [2]

On numerous occasions, Xi has stressed that “We Chinese love peace. No matter how strong it may become China will never seek hegemony or expansion. It will never inflict its past suffering on any nation.”

It’s not lost on the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America that when colonizers built infrastructure it facilitated outward-bound routes whereas the Chinese infrastructure serves internal connections within the continent. W. Gyude Moore, former Minister for Public Works in Liberia, didn’t mince words when he said, “China has built more infrastructure in Africa than the West did in centuries.” [3]

As of January 2023, 152 countries and 32 international organizations had signed a Memorandum of  Understanding (MOU)  and this includes 75% of the world’s population and half of the world GDP. Some economic forecasts predict that by 2027, BRI’s worldwide projects will number 2,600 valued at $3.7 trillion.

 The banishment of selfishness from foreign policy. What a concept. Brotherhood in action.

Further, data show that the cumulative value of trade in goods between China and countries along the BRI routes reached nearly $11 trillion between 2013 and 2021, with a two-way investment reaching more than $230 billion.

According to a 2022 World Bank forecast, if only the BRI transportation infrastructure projects are eventually carried out, by 2030, the BRI will generate $1.6 trillion in revenues for the globe or 1.3 percent of global GDP. And up to 90 percent of the revenues will go the partnering countries. [4]

Thousands of projects (3,000 in Africa, alone), initially focused on roads. ports, railways, pipelines, power stations. More recently, there are cross-border fiber optic cables, space networks, schools, hospitals, solar panels, health care and financial services. Projects range from the Sudanese Railways Authority receiving a first installment of 21 locomotives which will significantly improve rail capacity, and 620 Lifan taxi cars in Montevideo, Uruguay to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. At a cost of $95.5 billion, it involves a port, highways, airport, fiber optic cables, railways and power plants.  Many of the latter are running on solar, hydro and wind power.

 In June, 2023, Egypt and China announced a BRI investment deal worth more than $8 billion for the Suez Canal Zone which will allow Chinese companies access to African and European markets, while taking advantage of the canal’s strategic position. Another notable project, the Jakarta-Bandung high-speed rail in Indonesia at at cost between $6-8 billion encountered logistical problems after being scheduled to begin service in July, 2023. The Chinese would be the first to acknowledge that BRI is not a miracle worker, success is not invariably guaranteed and although it originated in China, BRI belongs to all the members.

Recent BRI projects in Latin America include the $1.52 billion Fourth Bridge over the Panama Canal and the $5 billion Bogota metro line 1 in Colombia. In early June, 2023(, in official visits to Beijing, Honduran President Xiomara Castro expressed interest in joining BRI and signed 17 trade agreements with China and Argentina agreed to projects involving infrastructure, energy, economy and trade. Other projects are underway in Chile, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. At the end of 2021, Chinese investments in Latin America exceeded $450 billion.  It should be noted that the U.S. has expressed its pique over BRI projects, especially in Panama, and has warned Latin America about Chinese BRI deals that were “too good to be true.”

Clearly, Latin America will not be amenable if China exhibits neo-imperial behavior and begins contradicting Xi’s pledge of “providing harmony, security and prosperity to both China and its neighbors” and seeks to impose its influence. Seemingly recognizing this, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi has taken pains to emphasize that BRI “should not be viewed “through the outdated Cold War mentality.” [5]

Addressing and expanding this concern, Peng Guangquin, a retired major general and advisor to the Chinese National Security Commission, writes that:  “BRI does not limit the nature of a given country’s  political system, is not underline by ideology, does not create tiny circles of friends, does not set up trade protectionism, does not set up economic blockade, does not exercise control of other countries’ economic lifelines or change other countries’ political systems. [6]

Finally, more than 700 million of the globe’s extremely poor people live along the BRI’s and addressing the wealth disparity of the international order imposed on the Global South is a BRI priority. China, with a population of 1.4 billion, is now free of extreme poverty after it was eradicated for 850 million people. Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has said that the Belt and Road initiative had accomplished this for 40 million people. This number accords with a World Bank study from four years ago that concluded BRI could lift 32 million out of moderate poverty and 7.6 out of extreme poverty.

Will BRI flounder and fizzle out? Back in 2017, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres praised BRI’s “immense potential,” lauded it for having “sustainable development as the overarching objective” and pledged the “United Nations system stands ready to travel this road with you.” [7] In 2022, China’s engagement through financial investment and contractural cooperation in 147 countries was USD 67-8 billion on over 200 deals. This was about the same as in 2021 and for 2023, and more BRI engagement is expected because strict COVID restrictions were lifted.

We do know, from a report issued by Ernst & Young that Chinese trade with BRI countries in Q1 of this year was U.S. $31.66 billion, an increase of 9.2%. It should be mentioned that there is no budget line for BRI in the Chinese government’s budget, rather, it remains a platform for launching a multitude of projects from vision to reality. In the future, we should expect less bilateral arrangements and more emphasis on bringing other countries into a quasi-governance structure, something on the order of BRI steering committee. And also more collaboration with the UN acting as an umbrella-type body. [8]

In 2017, the BRI was written into the Chinese Communist Party’s Constitution as an indicator of its importance. Australian Professor Jane Colley, who has studied BRI from its inception, believes “They are absolutely still advancing it” and as far as outside pressure, she adds that, “Any idea of containing them or forcing countries to pick a side — it’s a very risky game to play.” [9] And after a comprehensive look at BRI, the mainstream publication Euromoney, concedes that,“The BRI is neither dead nor dying but is quietly mutating into something much larger and — whisper it — perhaps better.” [10]

Will the BRI prove to be a platform that offers an alternative to the capitalist world order?  The most comprehensive and objective  attempt at predicting what BRI will resemble in 2035 contains various scenarios. The most optimistic, the “international BRI,” assumes the world will have entered a new phase of globalization. This world will be less Chinese, although the renminbi RMB) will be widely accepted as a reserve currency.

This BRI will incorporate “Chinese values” but this stage will be neither Western nor Chinese nor will it lead to China as the new hegemonal state. There will be increased cooperation, the option China committed to at the 75th UN General Assembly. [11] In short, it will be a “thoroughly hybrid paradigm of global cooperation. [12] One factor, that might tend to mitigate that optimistic rendering is that the amount of finance available to for BRI projects might be constrained by the need to focus on domestic economic priorities.

U.S Opposition to BRI

In 2011, two years before President Xi unveiled BRI, Yan Xuetang penned an opinion piece in the New York Times, titled “How China Can Defeat America.”

Yan, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars and Dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing, offered his explanation for China’s eventual rise and the slow decline of the United States. By interrogating the particulars of national leadership in China’s past, Yan concluded that morality might well play a key role in competition between the two great powers.

Yan identifies  himself as a political realist, a school which assumes international international politics is a zero-sum game. But unlike most scholars in this field, Yen argued that “morally informed authority”can play a key role in shaping international competition between the China and the United States. This “humane authority,” creates a desirable model at home that inspires people abroad” and in the international competition between the two great powers, this will win hearts and minds and “separate the winners from the losers.” [13] One gets the sense that Yan is implicitly implying that the U.S. will fail in this competition but he’s also challenging his own government to take advantage of this opportunity.

Eight years later, in his 2019 groundbreaking book “Leadership and the Rise of Great Powers,” Yan wrote that “moral actions help [a rising power] to establish credibility.” Yan never abjures the existence of power hierarchies and that anarchy prevails in relations among nations. However, morally informed leadership can determine the outcome of the competition — without resorting to military confrontation. This moral realism “with Chinese characteristics” can be described as a form of enlightened self-interest.

This “morally informed leadership… the side that wins the most international support will win the competition.” This should be a prime consideration in conducting foreign policy gains and “enables its leadership to become favorable to the majority of UN members.”

When the BRI was first announced by China in 2013, it did not immediately set off alarm bells in Washington. But later, a study done for the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, an organization which sets the American empire’s imperial agenda, warned that “The BRI is here to stay and poses significant risks to U.S. economic and political interests and to longer term security implications.” [14]

After the BRI had been in existence for seven years, it was characterized as China’s “means of weaponizing globalization to create commercial and political order centered around dependence on China.” [15]  Both of these succinct summations reveal that the U.S. view of the BRI cannot be divorced from how U.S. oligarchs and the military industrial complex perceive China more generally and here we return to the aforementioned realist school of international relations.

American political scientist Hans Morgenthau’s book Politics Among Nations, first published in 1948, became the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy for at least four decades. It’s fair to say that Morgenthau was the father of the realist school and his book was adopted as the primary text in colleges and universities across the country. My undergraduate political science professor had been one of Morgenthau’s graduate students at the University of Chicago and my copy of Politics Among Nations was heavily underlined in preparation for class discussion and exams.

In brief, the political realist assumes that all people are by “nature” greedy, aggressive and fiercely competitive. Morgenthau counseled that “Politics is governed by objective laws that have their roots in human nature.” [16] Further, “The struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an unavoidable fact of experience.” As such, the realist concludes that states, the actors on the international stage, must focus on power. No universal morality exists and power politics is amoral.

At the time his book was published, the outcome of the Chinese Revolution was still a year away but in an essay written in the 1960s, Morgenthau predicted that “China may well in the long run carry the gravest implications for the rest of the world.” Given this likelihood, he advised that U.S. strategy should be to establish an island chain running from Japan down to the Philippines so that one power could not attain a hegemonic position in Asia. [17] It should noted that prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be extremely careful in determining the national interest. It was on that basis that he was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War. Whether Morgenthau would find common cause with those willing to go war over Taiwan remains an open question.

John Mearsheimer, University of Chicago political science professor and arguably the most influential realist today, asserts that “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually to dominate the system.” [18] In terms of geopolitics “The U.S. will have no choice but to adopt a realist policy, simply because it must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia.” Further, he explains that,

The U.S. does not tolerate peer competitors. As it demonstrated in the 20th century, it is determined to remain the world’s only regional hegemon. Therefore, the U.S. can be expected to go to great lengths to contain China and ultimately weaken it to the point where it is no longer capable of ruling the roost in Asia. In essence, the U.S. is likely to behave towards China much the way it behaved towards the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

A contemporary and highly influential iteration of the realist school is defense analyst Elsbridge Colby’s Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. [19] Colby, grandson of former CIA Director William Colby, was the primary architect of the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy. Colby’s effort is the best example I know of that lays out, chapter and verse, how the U.S. foreign policy elite is preparing for possible limited war with China and if necessary, nuclear war. Reaction from other realist strategies is typified by Robert Kaplan’s book cover blurb in which he gushes that Colby “reaches a level of theoretical mastery akin to Hans Morgenthau’s “Politics Among Nations.”

To maintain U.S. global domination, Colby  states the following about China:

We are facing a peer superpower — a generational challenger…China’s first step is a hegemonic position over Asia…then from that position they will be able to gain global predominance from which China will be able to essentially hold sway or influence over the entire world, including of course, Europe, but also the United States.

To prevent this outcome,

Requires that we ruthlessly focus, and that take controversial and aggressive steps ready ourselves now to avoid worse outcomes later. The problem is that we have not been doing nearly enough of these things. On our current course we are courting disaster.

And further, if all else fails, “If China is willing to use nuclear weapons and the United States is not, Beijing will dominate over whatever interests are at stake — whether Taiwan’s fate, that of another U.S. ally or free American access to Asia more generally.” And in a dire warning, Colby asserts that “If China succeeds we can forget about housing, food, savings, affording college for our kids and other domestic needs. The end of ordinary citizen’s property will be here. China would make American society worse off and more susceptible to intense disputes over a stagnant economic pie.”

Prudence was a key concept in Morgenthau’s theory and the wise leader should be careful in circumscribing the “national interest.” It was on that basis that Morgenthau was an early and active opponent of the Vietnam War which he felt lay outside U.S. national interest.

Given the preceding, it’s my sense that U.S. realists view BRI as vast and growing phalanx of Trojan Horses out of which will emerge the means to challenge Washington’s unipolar position. A system that features peaceful development and the promise of “common prosperity” can’t be accommodated within the realist school. As Mearsheimer asserts, irrespective of ideology, “The ultimate goal of every great power is to maximize its share of world power and eventually dominate the globe.”

The BRI is seen as part of a zero-sum game in which Washington’s unipolar world dominance will be eliminated along with a “rules-based international order. ” Speaking on the CBS program 60 Minutes (May 2, 2021), U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “Our purpose is…to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to. Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re doing to stand up and defend it.” In truth, this order is one which the United States imposed on the world to perpetuate its hegemony. This elusive set of rules, a copy of which ordinary Americans have yet to see, has been thoroughly dissected by Kim Petersen who notes: “It is a given that the rules-based order is an American linguistic instrument designed to preserve it as a global hegemon.”

BRI notions of win-win outcomes and a common destiny for mankind simply can’t be accommodated in the mindset of the realist practitioners within the U.S. national security state.  They only see it as a geopolitical tool, wielded by China, who CIA Director William Burns claims, is the “most important geopolitical threat facing” the United States and if not stopped will eventually challenge American global hegemony.

Given the preceding, it’s unwarranted to surmise that a decade of BRI’s positive contributions to national development and the promise of more to come, is even viewed as more of a threat to U.S. monopoly capital’s interests than China’s rapidly growing military preparedness. That is, BRI is a type of normative power that might allow for the creation of a new international order with multilateral institutions that replace the existing ones without engaging in military conflict with the United States, thus “killing two birds with one stone.” For the realist, intent on defending the U.S. empire:

It goes without saying that this counter-hegemonic geopolitical endeavor is much more threatening to the United States than the geo-strategic actorness of China than the territorial empire which is mainly limited to military actions in China’s maritime vicinity. [20]

This is because BRI’s projects in the Global South stand in sharp relief to their collective memory of the American empire’s history brutal exploitation at the expense of other, of military intervention, giving covert support to opposition groups, stealing natural resources, regime change, CIA coups, assassinations and, of course, the prolongation of structural violence. And even after achieving independence, sometimes after years of liberation struggles, the only development option available has been the capitalist one with its mandated austerity measures that further hastened widespread misery.

The U.S. and its European vassals cannot compete in terms of scale, financing or political will and therefore have nothing to offer but more of the same. Biden’s “Build Back Better” and the EU’s “Global Gateway” are rudderless and lack any domestic support. BRI has no serious competitors. Predatory capitalism is in deep trouble and the window of opportunity to act is closing. As such, the Pentagon may try to sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with all the risks of confrontation between two nuclear powers.

Earlier this year, Air Force General Mike “unrepentant lethality” Minihan predicted a war with China within the next two years. In a memo to those under his command, he stressed preparing “to fight and win inside the first island range, running through Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. And in speech last September for a 16,000 member aerospace convention, Gen. Minihan declared: “Lethality matters most. When you kill your enemy, every part of life is better. Your food tastes better. Your marriage is stronger.” It’s not clear to what degree Minihan is an outlier but the Pentagon may try to indirectly sabotage BRI by other means, including provoking China into a military confrontation, possibly in the South China Sea, with of all the risks of a war between two nuclear powers.

This requires fostering public fears and paranoia about China and that explains why the mass media machine’s demonization of China is picking up speed. It seems to be working: A March 20-26, 2023 Pew Research Poll, a large majority (84%) of adult Americans now hold a negative view of China and only 14% a positive view, the lowest share ever recorded. And 4 in 10 describe China as “an enemy of the United States,” up 13 points since last year and a majority say the U.S. and China cannot work together to solve international problems. 75% of young Americans (18-25) have an unfavorable opinion of the country and those with a college degree are more likely to hold an unfavorable view than those with some college or less. It’s my sense that within this fevered smearing of “evil” China is an implicit war-mongering message: Something must be done to stop China’s rise in the world. Whether exposure to relentless Sino-phobia will translate into public support for an actual war should never be assumed. And leaves a very narrow and perhaps only temporary opening for counter-narratives that might preserve BRI as an antidote to Western imperialism while increasing the chances for “a human community with a shared destiny.”

ENDNOTES

1. Xi’s World Vision: A Community of Common Destiny, A Shared Home for Humanity, January 15,2017.

2. Chinese President Xi Jinping, speech at the opening ceremony of the 2018 FOCAC Beijing Summit.

3. W. Gyde Moore, Africa-China Review, August, 2020. China has been involved in Africa since the 1950s. Africa welcomed China’s role as a new source of finance and Beijing generally played a constructive role. Deborah Brautigam provides the comprehensive, definitive and corrective account in, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009; also, “Chinese Investors in Africa Have Had ‘Significant and Persistently Positive’ Long-Term Effects Despite Controversy,” Eurasia Review, February 1, 2021; And for a thorough debunking of the “Chinese Debt Trap Myth.”

4. “China’s BRI ‘circle of friends’ expanding,” Helsinki Times, 1/16/2023.

5. Z.Wang, “Understanding the Belt and Road Initiative from the Relational Perspective,” Chinese Journal of International Relations, Vol.3, No.1 (2021). As such the BRI will assist the gradual evolution of the existing system “into a more fair and more inclusive system.” Fu Ying, “Is China’s Choice to Submit to the U.S. or Challenge It?” Huffington Post, May 26, 2015.

6. As found in Nedege Rolland, China’s Vision For A New World Order, NBR Special Report, No. 83. January 2020, p. 40-41.

7. Antonio Guerres, “Remarks at the opening of the Belt and Road Forum,” United Nations, May 14, 2017.

9. Silk Road briefing 2023-05-15 on China’s overseas investments.

10. For more on the subject, see Huiyao Wang, “How China can multilaterialize the BRI,” East Asian Forum, 11 March 2023.

11. “What is going on with China’s Belt and Road Initiative?” 23 May 2023.

12. Ozturk, I (2019) “The belt and road initiative as a hybrid international goal,” Working Papers in East Asian Studies, November 2019.

12. Elliot Wilson, “Not dead yet: The future of China’s belt and road,” Euromoney, September 22, 2022.

13. Yan Xuetang, “How China Can Defeat America,” New York Times, January 12, 2011.

14. “China’s belt and road: implications for the United States,” CFR, Independent Task Force Report No. 79.

15. U.S. Economic and Security Review Commission. 2020 Report to the Congress of the U.S. – Economic and Security Review.

16. It’s no coincidence that the realist take on human nature is congruent with the assumptions underlying capitalism and provide an ideological rationale for its practitioners. For a fact-based refutation, see, Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture and the Brain (New York: Springer Publishing, 2012).

17. Hans Morgenthau, Essays of a Decade: 1960-70. (New York: Praeger, 1970).

18. John Mearsheimer, “Can China Rise Peacefully?” The National Interest, October 25, 2014.

19. Eldridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. For an extensive look at Colby’s family, wealthy connections and the genesis of this book, see, William A. Shoup, “Giving War a Chance” Monthly Review, May 1, 2022.

20. Theodore Tudoroiu, “The Belt and Road Initiative and China’s New International Order,” Munk School, February 14, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

• US calls China “aggressive”
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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.

The 39-year-old Shanghai lawyer-turned social media reporter was one of a handful of journalists, bloggers and writers who slipped into Wuhan – the epicenter of the pandemic – in early 2020 as the Chinese censorship juggernaut crushed on-the-ground independent reporting, hastening the spread of the virus that the World Health Organization says has since killed more than 6.9 million people worldwide.

Zhang’s defiant reporting and activism earned her a four-year prison sentence in December 2020. She has been on several hunger strikes since then and her family and supporters have been worried for her health.

“Her mother thinks that if Zhang is able to draw on the envelopes or letters, it seems to suggest that her mental state has changed,” human rights lawyer Li Dawei said.

Pictures of the letters were posted on Twitter last December by her brother.

They have since been deleted.

• A screenshot of Zhang’s drawings from a now-deleted tweet by her brother
  
  Li told Deutsche Welle that Zhang’s mother, who underwent cancer surgery last year, is also allowed to call her daughter once a month. Little is known, however, of Zhang’s physical condition. At her trial, she was too weak to stand because of her hunger strike.

“She went on a hunger strike to protest against the lockdown and published many articles and video interviews about the life of Wuhan residents under the lockdown,” says Murong Xuecun, a writer who also went to Wuhan to chronicle the COVID outbreak.

Other would-be investigative reporters in the city around the same time were Chen Qiushi, Li Zehua and Fang Bin. After their Chinese social media accounts were blocked, they posted vivid accounts from overflowing hospital emergency rooms and nighttime cremations on YouTube and Twitter to show the extent of the government’s concealment of the truth. Foreign social media platforms are banned in China but accessible with Great Firewall circumvention technologies.

Inevitably, these reporters were all swept up in China’s digital social control dragnet. Murong escaped to write a book, “Deadly Quiet City,” and now lives in Australia. He devotes a whole chapter to Zhang, whom he interviewed in Wuhan. She was forcibly quarantined in a Wuhan neighborhood before her arrest. “When her community banned residents from entering and exiting freely, she repeatedly pushed down the fence that closed the road, and was threatened, humiliated, and even beaten for this,” Murong told me.

“She was the only citizen journalist left in Wuhan after Fang Bin, Li Zehua and Chen Qiushi disappeared. The authorities punished her not only for her reporting of the truth, which was also what Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua had done, but also for her courageous resistance and her outspoken criticism of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and the Chinese government.”

It’s perhaps hard for those of us in liberal democracies to understand the courage of these truth-seekers in a Leninist dictatorship like that of President Xi Jinping. China has been among the world’s top jailers of journalists since CPJ began its annual prison census three decades ago.

“We rarely mentioned Xi Jinping in conversation, even in private gatherings, because of the potential for very serious consequences,” Murong explains. “We used a gesture – a thumbs up with the right hand – in place of his name. The situation is even worse now, with few people daring to give interviews to the Western media.”

What struck Murong about the residents of Wuhan was a characteristic of other autocratic countries – even though people suspect they are being manipulated, they believe some of what they are told thanks to pervasive propaganda.

“One of the most important things I learnt from interviewing and writing this book is, people who have lived under the CCP’s rule for a long time often have complex and contradictory views on the government and its policies… They often expressed their support for the CCP but also showed their doubts and fears to its policies.”

However, skeptics who ventured outside with a camera after lockdown did not last long.

Fang Bin was a resident of Wuhan. He uploaded his first video on January 25, 2020 and was detained several times before disappearing into the state security apparatus on February 9, after lamenting the death of whistle-blowing physician Li Wenliang.

Chen Qiushi arrived in Wuhan on January 24, 2020, the day after the city went into lockdown. He managed to keep reporting until February 6. Li Zehua posted his first YouTube video on February 12 then filmed his own arrest 14 days later. Zhang lasted 104 days.

These and other chroniclers who called themselves citizen journalists could not do deep investigative reporting in Wuhan. Truthful official sources were non-existent. Some reporters tried but failed to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the government laboratory which became the focus of speculation abroad of a lab leak rather than animal-to-human transfer as the source of the virus.

But they did tell the stories of Wuhan residents who watched loved ones die in hospital corridors or who were locked down in their own homes. This went against Beijing’s attempts to conceal the scope of the pandemic from the world as it pumped out stories about how its system of government was superior to that of the West in coping with the outbreak.

This approach of denial, obfuscation, and lies proved to be a disaster for the planet. 

“This not only led to more infections and more deaths, but also enabled the virus to infect the world more easily and more quickly,” Murong notes. “We all should be aware that it was the CCP regime that turned a manageable incident into a huge disaster of the century. Without its concealment and censorship, there wouldn’t have been so many deaths.”

No one knows the true infection rates or death toll from COVID because authoritarian governments systematically covered up the extent of the pandemic to mask their own incompetence and unpreparedness – something I and co-author Joel Simon covered in our book, “The Infodemic: How censorship and lies made the world sicker and less free.”

We are still living with the results of this censorship. And Murong believes it could happen again. “If there is another disaster like this, the Chinese government will continue to block out the truth and drag the world into the abyss once again,” he said.

Meanwhile, Chen Qiushi is free, having emerged after 20 months of detention in October 2021. He has remained largely silent, living inside China. Li Zehua fled to the United States after his release. Fang Bin was unexpectedly released on May 2 this year. Murong moved to Australia, fearing arrest.

Zhang, however, still has more than a year of her sentence to serve for the crime of reporting.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Robert Mahoney.

I asked Wei Ling Chua, the author of Democracy: What the West can learn from China and Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence, his forecast for the Chinese economy.

Kim Petersen: In a recent article, “Why China Can’t Pull the World Out of a New Great Depression,” strategic risk consultant F. William Engdahl writes, “… in real physical economic production, China has left the USA and everyone else in the dust. Therefore, the future course of industrial production in China is vital to the future of the world economy.”

He writes that steel production is “the single best indicator of a growing real economy” for which China crushes the competition. China leads in coal production, rare earth mining and processing, motor vehicle production, as supplier of essential cement for construction, aluminum production, and copper consumption. Engdahl adds, “The list goes on.”

Then Engdahl identifies a problem: “A huge problem with China’s economic model over the past two decades has been the fact that it has been a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation beyond what the economy can digest.” He points at the inflated housing market, rising unemployment, the dubiousness of official figures for total state debt, and the lack of transparency for financial information.

It is expected that there would be bumps along the road in the development of what was once, not so long ago, a very poor country compared to the economic colossus that China has become today. In addition to the commodities exported worldwide, China has also garnered much skepticism for its growth and development over the years, and yet China has always managed to steam ahead. China has a planned economy, and assuredly the mandarins have contingency plans for the unexpected.

What is your take on the Engdahl article?

Wei Ling Chua: I think the author lacks an understanding of the CCP series of policies and reforms, and he relies too heavily on the crusader agenda-based line-of-thinking.

Unlike western, Japanese, USSR development that relied heavily on imperialism, expansionism and looting

1) In the first 30 years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the sources of finance were mainly from the agricultural sector, and the hard work, delegation and sacrifices of the entire population to rebuild the nation.

The Mao era was the hardest era in the history of the PRC, as the country just managed to hold together the entire nation with virtually nothing (no technology, no money, a 90% illiteracy rate, a divided population, a population hungry and in poor health with a super short average life-expectancy of 36 years, a hostile international environment (Korean war, Sino-India war, USSR border war, plus western sanctions, and in the 1960s USSR sanctions as well).

However, Mao managed to win the Korean war with mainly foot soldiers armed with rifles and hand grenades, helped Vietnam to chase away the US occupier, and defeated India and the USSR in skirmishes. China worked herself into the UN to replace the nationalist government as the only legitimate government of China. It also completed the first stage of the Chinese industrial revolution with all types of light industry (self-made household appliances, processed food), an active agriculture sector, fisheries, etc, and heavy industry such as producing trucks, cars, buses, trains, atomic bombs, satellite, missiles, and all type of other military weapons, construction technology…

2) over the next 30 years, China financed her economic reform via opening up with massive foreign investment plus massive land mortgage financing to fund all types of infrastructure across the country.

But, unlike the rest of the developing countries, China used cheap land and labor to attract foreign investment to build factories, and used her own land allocation as a guarantee to print money and provide loans for building infrastructure, commercial and residential property, and therefore, not incurring too much foreign debt. So, most of China’s debts are domestic and are outside of foreign control.

3) Since Xi came into power, his zero tolerance towards corruption and successful anti-corruption policy very much ensured the country’s continued smooth operation with high efficiency and less waste. This is a most vital element in any nation’s development and future prosperity (whereas all western countries are down down and down at the moment due to legalised corruption in the name of lobbying, political donations, speech bureaus, privatisation, etc)

Xi’s centralised medicine approval strategy has successfully reduced all drug prices by up to more than 90%, and hence china was able to introduce sustainable nationwide medicare coverage. Such a policy freed up people’s savings for domestic consumption. This economic generator is a pillar of any advanced country.

Under Xi, the average wages of the nation basically more than doubled.

Yes, like the rest of the world, the real estate market and tax on property transactions are major sources of government revenue. But Xi knew that if the real-estate market was allowed to continue being controlled by a handful of billionaires to reap speculative profits then the housing prices would keep rising. So, he openly told the nation that housing is for people to live, not for speculative profit. He cracked down on irresponsible real estate giants controlling too much real estate and using them to mortgage and buy more. Finally, this caused some collapse in overheated pricing. But unlike the US, there is no too-big-to-fail company in China; Xi froze these troubled giant companies from issuing dividends to shareholders, and made the owners sell their own assets to repay the interest and loans, sell their overseas companies and assets, and then domestic assets to repay the loans. And when the state bails out a company, all those assets return back to the people; i.e., state control.

The author also failed to take in a lot of things that have taken place in China.

4) Yes, there are debt issues in China, but debts should be distinguished between good debt and bad debt:

Across the west, they keep printing money to give away to political donors in exchange for personal benefits at the expense of the taxpayers, they also give away money to voters to win votes. These are bad debts as they produce no future return for the masses.

But, for China, the debts transform into infrastructure domestically and overseas. The outcome is apparent: more and more regions and countries with Chinese investment enjoy economic prosperity; hence, they help China to continue enjoying prosperity despite western decoupling policies.

The winning of trust and friends across the world will only pave the way for China’s Belt and Road win-win strategy to ensure mutual prosperity even without the West. We are now witnessing that the BRICS’s GDP is bigger than that of the G7, and the Chinese economy has been bigger than the entire EU (the combined GDP of 27 countries) since 2021.

Besides, the rise of China’s high-tech economy are obvious: due to China’s superiority in EV car technology, China has just replaced Japan as the world’s biggest new car exporter (the world number 1 in EV car exports), solar technology exports as well, infrastructure exports, ship building etc, and lately, overtaking the US in military armament exports to places like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Thailand… etc. Consider also the growing popularity of the RMB as a reserve currency. It is important to note that China managed to achieve these feats without firing a single shot; its all about investment in education, R&D, development of infrastructure, and a policy of win-win.

China’s future is very bright with the coming development, export of chips, nuclear power plants, and reunification with Taiwan. At this moment, the world has seen China managing to finally create a peaceful and Chinese-friendly Central Asia, Russia, Middle East, and ASEAN (excluding the Philippines under Marcos). We also notice that almost all African countries and Latin American countries are also very much preferring China over the West. This peace dividend will help create an entire region surrounding China to move towards the world’s biggest economic block developing in peace and harmony. It will become a magnet for the rest of the world.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

Illustration: Liu Rui/Global Times

Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the phone at the invitation of the latter on Wednesday afternoon. The two sides exchanged views on China-Ukraine relations and the Ukraine crisis. Xi pointed out that China’s readiness to develop relations with Ukraine is consistent and clear-cut. Regarding the Ukraine crisis, Xi reiterated China’s consistent position and proposition, stating that China will send the Special Representative of the Chinese Government on Eurasian Affairs to Ukraine and other countries to have in-depth communication with all parties on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis. Zelenskyy welcomed China to play an important role in restoring peace and resolving the Ukraine crisis through diplomatic means. He also noted on social media platform that the talk was long and meaningful, which will strongly promote the development of bilateral relations.

From this conversation, it is not hard to see that China’s position and attitude toward China-Ukraine ties and the Ukraine crisis have been consistent. First of all, “China’s willingness to develop China-Ukraine relations” and “mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries” have not changed due to the full-scale escalation of the Ukraine crisis. Second, China’s core position of urging peace and talks in the Ukraine crisis has remained unchanged. China takes a visionary and pragmatic attitude toward this issue and demonstrates strong stability and continuity, which has increasingly clear and loud echoes in the world.

This conversation is also the latest effort by China to push for a ceasefire and the restoration of peace as soon as possible. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, China’s efforts to promote a political resolution of the Ukraine crisis have never stopped. After the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis, President Xi successively proposed four points about what must be done, four things the international community must do together and three observations. On this basis, China has also issued a position paper titled “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis.” At the same time, China maintains good communication with all parties, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as European powers including France, Germany, and Italy. There are even communications with the US side, and other emerging powers such as Brazil, which are committed to promoting peaceful resolution of the conflict. Among these efforts, head-of-state diplomacy has played a significant guiding and driving role.

Different from the “duel” approach advocated by some in the US and the West, China provides a different path full of Eastern wisdom. It sees the Ukraine crisis as a complex and difficult-to-untangle web, but not all of the knots are dead ones. It is possible to slowly untangle the knots one by one, and ultimately achieve a comprehensive “escape” from the crisis. Gradually decomposing complex contradictions, patiently and steadily reaching the core of the problem requires enormous political wisdom, patience, and perseverance, but it is also the best solution that people can currently see. In fact, as time goes by, many countries, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as others in Europe, have gradually recognized or partially accepted China’s proposed solution. There is also an increasing number of voices within the US that are saying, “The world should listen to China’s voice.”

China is neither the creator of the Ukraine crisis, nor a party to it. However, as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and a responsible major power, China’s desire to promote a political solution to the Ukraine crisis is sincere and selfless. China has always firmly stood on the side of peace, dialogue, and the right side of history. This can withstand the test of facts and history, and represents the power of people’s will. Now, both Russia and Ukraine have welcomed China’s efforts to promote peace and talks, and European powers such as France and Germany, as well as EU leaders, also expect that China will play a greater role in promoting peace and talks. After the call between the leaders of China and Ukraine, the White House also expressed its welcome to the call and said it is “good thing.” This further highlights the special value of China’s efforts in the current complex and ever-changing situation in Ukraine. China is able to communicate directly with all parties involved, seek consensus, and receive positive responses, precisely because China has always adhered to an objective and fair position and demonstrated its role and responsibility as a major power. This role and influence cannot be replaced in today’s world.

Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict over a year ago, the world has suffered a great deal of shock. As time goes by, the international community has engaged in more cool reflection on this hot conflict. Especially, the willingness to negotiate among all parties is rising, and more rational voices are emerging in various European countries. In a sense, the window of opportunity for promoting a political solution to the Ukraine crisis has emerged. Now it is important to seize the opportunity and accumulate energy to jointly open the door of peace for the international community. Compared to simply adding fuel to the fire, the Chinese side believes that there is no simple solution to complex problems, and dialogue and negotiation are the only feasible way out. Seeking long-term peace and stability for Europe through dialogue is the fundamental way out. What is even more encouraging is that this position is gaining more support, and the forces urging peace ad talks are constantly growing.

It should be noted that since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the US and Western public opinion has thrown a lot of mud on China, even creating rumors in an attempt to drag China down. But a clean hand wants no washing. As time goes by, those accusations are self-defeating, and the image of China as a peaceful builder is becoming clearer and clearer. Both Russia and Ukraine can see this, so can other countries and the international community. Justice will prevail.