China #2
US-China Rivalry Intensifies
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jan2010/pers-j09.shtml
"Last year it was fashionable to talk of an energy 'G2'. The US, the world's largest economy, and China, its rising rival, would come together to resolve global problems - in particular the international crisis wracking capitalism.
These illusions have rapidly evaporated this year, as the Obama administration signals a harder line towards China with a series of provocative moves, including the sale of advanced weapons to Taiwan and a planned meeting with the Dalai Lama.
These significant symbolic steps follow the imposition of hefty US tariffs on a range of Chinese goods from steel pipes and steel grate to tires.
Barely hidden is the growing military rivalry.."
Hi George.
This belongs in International news and politics. I'm going to move it there.
The list of questions I posted - even while the mod was deciding at this early hour to end the discussion - will be (mercifully) reduced to one...albeit a stream of consciousness one.
While we have been presented in the previous thread with a prodigious stream of growing problems to surmount in the increasingly dangerous growth of what will probably become the world's biggest, environmentally most voracious economy - just what can we in Canada propose to do for the worker of China without the further erosion of workers' futures here, and the extension to China of our historical relationship with the U.S. through a comprador PM., selling out the kids' birthrights while playing environmental deniers to world investors?
I put this question because I don't believe that the Canadian worker is going to tolerate dithering on questions of his/her livelihood and future prospects for very much longer...important as international solidarity remains for discussion purposes. I'd hate to see the political right fill the practical void.
NoDifferencePar will recognize his final posting in the previous thread as the initial one in China #2. And I hope that Joey Ramone will recognize his concerns in those I have posted here.
(And please, Fidel, no more lessons from "history". We need you to step forward with policy proposals of direct relevance now...
Welcome to the multi-polar century? I think that the best foreign policy that any country can have is to build democracy in one country first and foremost as an example for other countries to follow. In this way we pave the road to socialism in one country. And if enough countries can eventually be transformed into advanced democracies, perhaps then a quiet revolution around the world will take place and leading to global socialism. Socialism or barbarism? Barbarism is pretty much the road the world has taken, and especially so since 1991. And countries like China and Russia are well aware of the military encirclement of their countries since dissolution of the USSR, and they are acutely aware of the continued financing of the US Military at cold war levels.
China is investing $220 billion into research and development of green energy technologies. I think that is a very good policy and something that can be viewed as a gesture of good intentions by the rest of the world.
THey will sell those technologies to us, Fidel, even while the extraction of resources mounts to a frenzy across Africa and South America.
"Good intentions" your ....ass...umption.
And what will our colonial administrators sell to China that isn't spoken for already by corporate America? We need to work toward creating some form of democracy and sovereign rule of our own country before the CPC will take notice of Ottawa, George. It's no wonder to me why Wen Jiabao scolded little boy Harper for straying too far from his outpost in Ottawa. We need legit leaders of our own to be taken seriously by the CPC.
Certainly not leaders who salivate at the prospect of selling them bitumen from the Tar Patch..... :D
I think the CPC may have secret state of the art weapons labs deep in the mountains somewhere, George. Like Stalin and the Sovs did. And who could blame them. They remember MacArthur and his plan for Asia, we can be sure.
China 'Strongly' Urges US to Immediately Stop Arms Sales to Taiwan
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2010-01/09/content_12782345.htm
"The US arms sales to Taiwan undermined China's national security, He Yafei told Xinhua.
This was the sixth official annoucement made by China over the issue in a week."
China winning the grand chess game in Central Asia Diplomacy mightier than sword
And here I thought that diplomacy without military backup had all the substance of a fiddler's fart? (Pearson's brokerage role in the middle east in 1956 being an exception).
And I believe that this is why Jack Layton says diplomacy is needed in Afghanistan. The Taliban and women's rights are not going concerns for NATO, are they, George? The real issues need hashing out between all countries involved and an exit plan for NATO spelled out in detail for them. We need Jack the diplomat in Ottawa not the vicious toadies that are there and embarrassing Canadians every time they nod up and down in rapid agreement with warmongering plutocrats in Warshington.
You are spiraling into another geographic area, Fidel. Take a break...with your Atlas. Then let's have the latest on Jack on CHINA. Please.
It's all relevant to China, George. Our stooges have put Canadian troops on China's frontier. It's not our neighborhood.
China overtakes Germany as biggest exporter
If the Liberals want to distribute maple leaf flag pins made in China, and now the conservatives want to sell them to unemployed Canadians, too, then where do we draw the line? We can be sure the Chinese are'n't buying national symbols made by Canadian workers.
Yes, that's sort of what I'm also bitter about...the unemployed Canadian workers bit. Not sure where we're poised to invade.
The CPC want Canada's military to kiss Uncle Sam's ass anywhere else but on their front doorsteps. It's an obscene thing to have view from anyone's front window. And I imagine if Harper and Iggy were to do this arse-kissing anywhere in the viscinity of our own Western hemisphere would prolly suit the CPC just fine.
Is that the Communist Party of China, Fidel, or the Conservative Party of Canada. You lost me.
Our own CPC allow supranational energy companies to dictate Canada's national energy policy(see Monbiot's description of Canada as a corrupt petro-state).
Whereas the Asian version of the CPC are competing with western world energy companies for what's left of fossil fuel reserves in fueling that country's unprecedented in world history industrial expansion. With neoliberal globalization of state-capitalism, the emphasis has move more toward hemispheric influence and control than continental. Corporate America has siphoned off most all of our cheapest and easily accessed proven reserves of crude and natural gas. Soon it will no longer be enough to pay them to take it off our collective hands. China is a real country with real leaders, whereas Canada has been a colony and preserve of natural resource wealth for British, French, and now a US corporate empire to raid at will. It's an unwritten rule that Canada's colonial administrators shall not create competition against private enterprise. Asia's state "capitalists" are competing, and they are winning.
Our capitalists are under the illusion that they can rule the world monetarily since abandoning investment in productive labour economy beginning in the late 1970's-80's.
"When money arrives, all is green, bustle and abundance. And when it leaves, all is trampled down, barren and bare" old Chnese proverb
"Where the military is, prices are high" an even older Chinese proverb
This is why I gave up posting in this thread. I'm interested in talking about how to best support the interests of the hyper exploited workers of China and it's colonies, but as long as the gang of corrupt thugs who rule China cynically call themselves the "Communist" Party of China, all such discussion will be derailed by obfuscation about whether their capitalists are more efficient than our capitalists.
I agree, JR. Fidel's may not be "planned" obfuscation, but simply "babble". One could consider not reading it and go for consideration of the workers' in China, but I have no idea where one would start to find exactly where those workers, in their great variety, are at, politically. Do you?
The thread title just says, 'China' And we should support their right to protest working conditions (~60,000 times a year in China) by raising a little cane ourselves. As things are today, Canadians and Americans are afraid to step off the curb or protest outside time limits set by the authorities. Canadians wouldn't say shit if they were neck-deep in it and had a mouthful. Chinese workers become agitated if economic growth falls below six percent. Canadian workers have never been agitatated in such a way, because we've never known a six percent economy in our working lives. In that vein, Canada's army of unemployed and under-employed need some actual working conditions to protest against.
Keep trying JR. It's important and will become more so. Do you know China Labour Bulletin?
Going It Alone
http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/100507
We have 200,000 migrant farm workers from Latin America in Canada who have no rights to EI, pensions, or health care that come with citizenship rights. Many of them have worked in Canada for 20 or more years. This is just an example of what we need to protest against in our Northern Panama in a show of solidarity with workers around the world.
Henry CK Liu writes about capitalism and problems associated with low wages and overcapacity of production:
And China is half way there already with state-owned central bank and investments banks financing infrastructure projects and now a commitment by the CPC to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on universal health care and 30,000 hospitals and clinics across China.
I am familiar with the China Labour Bulletin. Here's an article from the CLB about a brave woman who sued after CPC controlled union rep recommended that she be fired after she was sexually harassed by her boss: http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/100639
Thanks for both!
Union organizing is a crime in China known as "disturbing social order". Worker activists face long prison time. Many activisits who are considered less of a threat to the elites are simply harassed or fired. http://www.clb.org.hk/en/node/100014
Ha. That's a rather puerile glazing on that glass house of yours.
Just trying to emulate your one-liners oh student of rhetoric! :D
I think that our neocolonials at the time would have preferred Chiang Kai-shek and madame taken over China and hacked off pieces of it for the corporatocracy. We - or rather the supranational energy and other companies dictating things to our guys in Ottawa - would have eventually ended up competing with China for world resources whether they are Maoists or Confucian-capitalists beating our brains in with mixed market Keynesianism there anyway. It's the same thing with Russia since they integrated with western economies. That the USSR was a closed economy trading block of nations apparently didn't matter. Because since 1991, a US-led NATO has proceeded to encircle both China and Russia regardless. We could trade freely with Russia and China for whetever it is they have. I think the leaders of those countries realize now it's just a game, and their opponents are very psychotic.
"The workers have no formal organisation and their actions to date have been spontaneous and mostly short-lived. The strikes, protests and demonstrations that have occurred in recent years do, however, reflect problems and injustices encountered by workers across China and have the potential to turn the country's workforce into a more unified public voice." http://www.clb.org.hk/en/files/share/File/research_reports/workers_movem...