China 2

krop..

..i've seen that video before. i wasn't impressed by it. i see in my head a meeting taking place as petrochina is wondering whether of not to invest in bc lng. i'm certain the question came up what about the aboriginal issue. not to worry is the response. we have the ndp on our side and the liberals. and of course the rcmp will clear the path. this is the face of state capitalism. how many other countries has that happened i wonder.

..china who wanted to be seen as a market economy at the wto just like the us. just like the european union. and who has been propping up american wars by carrying their debt for a very long time. while you see the current tensions between the us and china you are ignoring the collaborations at the global economic level that have been going on for years. the economics of capitalism. china very much fits in to your, definition of the evil empire. not equivalent to the us but neither is the euro. 

..then there's the change within china. the move to a harder line.     

Colonialism is real and has been affecting China without a break for centuries. The idea that the victim and the oppressor belong in the same dialogue as equals tells me that colonialism is not seen as the root of the problem by the people talking. When a wife fights back against her abusive husband some people decry the fact that she has a nasty tongue and hits her kids and they hit each other. As a community we should ensure that she can live safely without being abused by the husband not focusing on her. We need to do that because misogyny like colonialism is real and must be the focus when talking about abuse. Power makes the difference in every relationship and those imbalances must form the basis for any discussion. I don't demand that people fighting colonialism are perfect I also don't like when the victims of systemic imperialism are lumped in as imperialists for fighting back with some of the same tools as the oppressors. Where are you going to get your capital from for your local projects? Capital is not evil it is only capital that is not democratically controlled that is evil. Unfortunately there are few places on the planet where capital is controlled by the people.

Your analysis of the Chinese model and what I have read tells me that unlike our elite they are not just tied to oil and gas projects they will invest in any infrastructure. If Canada was trying to rapidly transition to a green economy I am sure that Chinese companies would be glad to invest but that is not what the political elite in Canada want to build. In Canada we are doubling down on a fading industry and China is still willing to invest, imagine if we told them that instead they could invest in alternate energy projects, as a junior partner.

I for one am sure that if as a country we wanted to go green we could but we would need a democracy of some sort to get there. In the meantime my Village, like all municipalities, have strict borrowing rules to stop them from going bankrupt. As a society we have no pool of capital to build anything that is not within the financing limits set by the bankers. I think a focus on China is just more distraction from the real problem of controlling our own fucking elites. If we can stop our leaders from terrorizing the world for a couple of decades maybe other countries might transition to alternate models of governance. Hell if NATO was not actively trying to promote regime change around the globe maybe they could ease their security measures when the threat abated. I know that is a far fetched dream but maybe we should get our "democratically" elected governments in NATO to try that first because we are the good guys.

I feel like what HUAC would call a fellow traveler, Ban the Bomb, dupe for siding with China .

New Law Liberates Hong Kong From Interference

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/07/new-law-liberates-hong-kong-from-u...

"After the US instigated riots in Hong Kong last year the central government of China saw a necessity to intervene. In light of other anti-China measures the US has taken the reputational costs of doing so had become less important. Yesterday the Chinese parliament, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, added a national security law to the Basic Law that governs Hong Kong's special status. The law is designed to end foreign interference in Hong Kong."

"A full-scale McCarthyite witch-hunt is underway in the West, imported from Trump's rogue state. It is racist and aimed at a non-existent 'threat' from China. Reality is inverted..." John Pilger

https://twitter.com/johnpilger/status/1277348051867168768

US War Drive Against China Accelerates

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/08/pers-j08.html

"...Confronting a deep social and economic crisis at home, with growing opposition in the working class to the reckless back-to-work drive, the Trump administration is seeking to divert social tensions outward at an external enemy. Trump, backed by the Democrats and the media establishment is seeking to whip up a climate of war fever through a relentless campaign and anti-China propaganda based on lies and disinformation.

The focus on China reflects the view in [North] American strategic circles that China's extraordinary economic expansion represents the chief threat to the continued global dominance of American imperialism. All the preparations for a US war against China, which would rapidly escalate into a catastrophic conflict involving the whole world, are very advanced..."

Disintegrating US-China Economic Symbiosis and the New Inter-Imperial Rivalry

Today, there is a lot of talk about a “New Cold War” between China and the U.S., a Cold War between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. But we all know that China did not become authoritarian just two years ago. The whole establishment of the U.S. has been very happy about Chinese authoritarianism for a long time.

Just two weeks after the June 4, 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square, on Jun 20, President George H. W. Bush wrote a secret letter to Deng Xiaoping. The letter said that the U.S. was not so mad about the Communist Party sending the army to shoot its people. Bush told Deng that the U.S. was only a two-hundred years young country, and China was a five thousand years old country [sic] with great contributions to world civilization, so the Chinese leaders were wise and knew what was best for the Chinese people. Bush assured Deng that Tiananmen was not going to stand in the way of the great commercial relationship between the U.S. and China. If there were an ideology-based Cold War between the U.S. and China, it should have started thirty years ago.

In my ongoing research, I look at the origins and dynamics of the transformation of US-China amity into rivalry by examining U.S. corporations’ exposures to China over the last three decades. I also look at the lobbying activities of these firms on behalf of China. I discuss how these firms shaped U.S.-China policy over the years. This is a historical materialist explanation for the changes in US-China relations. This shift was ultimately driven by a huge shift of corporate American’s disposition toward China.

Back in the 1990s and 2000s, there was always a vocal voice in the U.S. intelligence-diplomatic-military establishment to try framing China as the next major competitor of the U.S. after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This talk about a new Cold War with China has never ceased ever since the end of the Old Cold War.

quote:

Then in 1993-94, a power struggle emerged between the State Department and Wall Street over this US-China trade policy. In 1993, Clinton brought in Robert Rubin from Wall Street to become the first director of the newly created National Economic Council. And at some point, Robert Rubin and Winston Lord feuded openly through the media over China policy. Robert Rubin said adding human rights conditions to China’s low tariff access to the U.S. market was unwise, while Lord said it was working, and that the U.S. should keep the human rights conditions. In the end, the State Department lost the fight, and Wall Street took control of China policy.

Wall Street would not have won this battle over US-China policy had it not been for the aggressive U.S. corporate lobbying mobilized by the Chinese government. Back in 1993, China was in an economic crisis. Its economy was overheating, and there was a balance of payment crisis. The inflation rate hit 25%, and the foreign exchange reserve of China was evaporating. Zhu Rongji was the vice-premier of China at that time and was the person who ran the economy.

quote:

In the 1990s, a lot of China’s state-owned enterprises privatized and floated in overseas stock markets like Hong Kong and New York. They relied on Wall Street banks, accounting, and auditing firms for their IPOs. It was a huge business for Wall Street firms. So the privatization of Chinese SOEs over the 1990s was grounded on a CCP-Wall Street synergy. This explains why Wall Street was the earliest and keenest advocate for the CCP’s interests in Washington after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989.

quote:

Another example is AT&T. China enlisted the AT&T to lobby for its trade interest by promising that AT&T was going to have a big role to play in China’s telecommunication market. These corporations, motivated by the promises of Beijing, lobbied in earnest against the human rights conditions for Chinese goods’ low-tariff access to the U.S. market. They successfully forced the Clinton administration and congressional Democrats to turn on themselves in 1994, revoking the human rights conditions on China trade that they enthusiastically supported just a year ago. From then on, Chinese exports enjoyed unconditional low-tariff access to the U.S. market, paving the way for China’s eventual accession to the WTO in 2001. Up to 2000, many U.S. corporations were motivated by the promises and expectations Beijing offered them to become a huge countervailing force against any instinct of the intelligence-diplomatic-military establishment to cast China as an enemy and to start a new Cold War with China.

After China got what it wanted in terms of U.S. policy, China changed its policy to make sure foreign companies like AT&T could not have majority stakes and leadership in China’s telecommunication sector. And Beijing started to cultivate its state-owned telecommunication giants like China Mobile and China Telecom to dominate the market and marginalize foreign countries. This situation became much more apparent in 2010 and thereafter.

For example, one company I was tracking had been lobbying against any Congress bill that accused China of currency manipulation from the early 2000s until 2009 and 2010. But after 2010, it found itself the target of China’s mercantilist policy and a victim of China’s forced technology transfer policy. It suddenly changed its position in its Congress lobbying. The same company suddenly started to support the Congressional bill that accused China of currency manipulation. There were many other examples like this.

Many companies shifted their position around 2010. A legal scholar said there was an “anti-China corporate insurgency” in the U.S. In some cases this took a more passive form of not actively lobbying against China. Many corporations that previously lobbied vocally against bills that they saw as violating China’s interests now sat on their hands and did nothing to help China anymore. This is why in recent years, so many bills that irritated Beijing, like all the bills in support of Taiwan and denouncing human rights abuses in Xinjiang, managed to pass in a polarizing Congress with a unanimous bipartisan vote.

The databases I am assembling contain many indicators that consistently show that 2010 is the turning point. The question that follows is: why 2010? In the end, it was the global financial crisis in 2008 and the stimulus in China in 2009 and 2010 that triggered the shift. For example, Caterpillar used to have a large share of the construction machines market in China. Then the leading Chinese state-owned construction machine-making companies, which used to have joint venture relations with Caterpillar, copied the design of its products and became its competitor.

In 2012, Washington began the Pivot to Asia policy, reorienting large part of U.S. military and diplomatic forces to Asia in response to China’s increasing aggressiveness in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. Obama-Clinton also pushed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade agreement.

The whole purpose of the TPP was to isolate China economically and to put pressure on China to change its economic policy if it wants to join. When Trump got elected, many people in China, including the nationalist tabloids and official scholars, were excited and glad that it was not Hillary Clinton who was going to continue the Pivot to Asia policy and the TPP. They expected that Trump would reset the US-China policy and strike a deal with China that could relieve the U.S. pressure on China.

In the end, it was much worse. The underlying structural change in US-China relations remained the same, though the method is different. Obama was using the TPP as a carrot to lure China to change its economic policy for the sake of U.S. corporate interests. Now Trump is using the stick of tariffs. But the goal remains the same. Behind the increasing willingness of the U.S. to counter China’s economic and geopolitical expansion from the Obama to Trump administration is the same structural condition confronting American corporations.

quote:

The dynamics of US-China rivalry is an inter-imperial rivalry driven by inter-capitalist competition. Competition for the world market could soon turn into intensifying clashes of spheres of influence and even war. It is not new. It resembles a lot of the dynamics as described in Lenin’s Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In the book, published in 1917, Lenin talked about the competition between German and British banks to lend to Latin American countries to build railroads and to ensure the projects would rely on German or British supplies. This is just like talking about the competition between China and the U.S. to offer credits to Belt and Road countries to build infrastructure. In the early twentieth century, inter-capitalist competition led to inter-imperial rivalry culminated in two world wars.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/europe-must-wake-up-to-china-threat-w...

China Calls For Emergency Stockpiles, Lessons Learned from Fighting Virus: Experts

https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1205451.shtml

"China is mobilizing families to build up stockpiles of emergency supplies this winter ahead of a possible new COVID-19 epidemic engulfing the country, a lesson learned from previous outbreaks. However, military experts shrugged off rumors that said this was a preparation for war..."

https://thebreaker.news/news/caca-lipont/

China Uproots Hong Kong's US-Backed Opposition

https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2020/12/china-uproots-hong-kongs-us-b...

"China finalised its campaign against protests in its Hong Kong territory when it expelled opposition politicians from Hong Kong's government for endangering national security. Following this move, opposition politicians still in office resigned in protest, leaving the territory's government firmly pro-Beijing.."

josh wrote:

China’s ‘tainted’ cotton

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/nz0g306v8c/china-tainted-cotton

Another state media outlet. I thought you did not like state media? Your Exceptionally American xenophobia is on full display.

Its a good thing she is not facing the legal system that Julian Assange is caught up in. He has been in "jail" for ten years and faces the potential of a death sentence for his reporting. Three of the most "democratic and open" governments in the world Sweden, the UK and the US are engage in a legal process that is all above the board and the kind of legal system you and others are demanding that China install. A charge that carries a maximum 5 year term is nothing compared to what a reporter gets for pissing off the US.

Good question

https://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/alberta-diary/2020/12/why-did-chinas-go...

[quote=josh]

Almost every single candidate that ran in the 2020 opposition Hong Kong primary has been reportedly arrested. This is the largest mass arrest of pro-Democracy figures by the CCP under Hong Kong's new national security law.

https://twitter.com/KareemRifai/status/1346637618944094214?s=20

[quote=NDPP]

ps Kareem Rifai, co-founder Students for Biden.

50 HK anti-govt figures arrested over illegal 'primary election' accused of subversion

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1211942.shtml

https://youtu.be/OVV5ov0y5HM

That's tough, NR. Can't imagine why. Maybe Uncle Joe or Hunter could have a word with their CCP contacts?

Or to put it slightly differently, almost every person who took part in an illegal election, designed to undermine the Legislature, has been arrested. I think I just read some stuff posted by our US imperial crowd about the definition of sedition. Then again to an American Exceptionalist if you are trying to overthrow a sovereign government that the US wants changed it is not sedition. It is only sedition when the power of the US oligarchy is threatened.

On Wednesday, my elected representatives, Kwong and Wu, were arrested in a massive police sweep that rounded up nearly every prominent progressive legislator in Hong Kong, along with a handful of well-known feminist, migrants’ rights, disability rights, and labor organizers.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/democracy-hong-kong/

Adrian Zenz: 'Independent Researcher'

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/12/21/china-detaining-millions-uyghurs-prob...

"China detaining millions of Uyghurs? Serious problems with claims by US-backed NGO and far-right researcher 'led by god' against Beijing. As Washington ratchets up pressure on China, Zenz has been lifted out of obscurity and tranformed overnight into a go-to pundit  on Xinjiang..."

Of course 'proof' doesn't matter to minds already made up and put to sleep by msm and prejudice. Liberals mostly follow the lead of the prevalent propaganda. Nothing else matters and no amount of contradictory evidence will change stupidity.

China's economy powers ahead while the rest of the world reels

https://archive.fo/eGHA7

"China is the only major economy expected to report growth for 2020, helping it close the gap with the US and lifted by its quick recovery from COVID-19, it has also expanded its role in global trade and shored up its position as the world's factory floor."

Instead of his well known, embarrassing propensity for brownosing American presidents and antagonizing Chinese ones, perhaps in the interest of not totally trashing any possibility of a Canada-China trade relationship just to please Warshington, Justin Trudeau should reconsider the latter. Releasing Meng Wan Zhou would be a good start.

China Is Not the Enemy — Neoliberalism Is

BY

ISABELLA WEBER 

HAO QI 

ZHONGJIN LI

China’s united response to COVID-19 is often painted as a reflection of authoritarian “Asian values.” But the collective mobilization relied on real public support — a temporary social truce that today threatens to fracture.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/05/china-coronavirus-covid-response-wuhan-hubei

NY Times 'Pseudo-Expert accusing China of genocide Worked for Far-Right Cult Falun-Gong's Publicity Arm

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/01/28/ny-times-uighur-china-genocide-falun-...

"The New York Times recycled flimsy claims by a right-wing apocalyptic extremist to accuse China of 'genocide', in an op-ed by an American with 1/8th Uighur heritage who worked for Epoch Times, a far-right pro-Trump outlet backed by cult Falun Gong."

"The US is in the middle of a deranged full on drive for war on China and *now* is the time that you want to air your 'nuanced' critique of China citing propaganda by US-funded think-tanks? Most of you 'leftists' aren't actually leftists - you are chauvinistic imperialists*."

https://twitter.com/qiaocollective/status/1355573887669399553

*Present company excepted, of course...

BBC World News is Ousted! Why?

https://twitter.com/CGTNOfficial/status/1359903997595840513

"...BBC's only mission has turned to wage information war on China. When attacked, China defends itself."

Global economic giants between 1980 - 2030 - China takes the lead 

China’s Market Reformers

While China is often seen as an outlier from neoliberal trends, its transformation in recent decades was not at odds with tectonic shifts in the global system of growth but an essential part of it....

quote:

Weber’s core story is the battle between two groups of young economic advisers to China’s top leaders. The first group, defined by its support for gradualist reforms, was led by Chen Yizi and Wang Xiaoqiang and composed of urban intellectuals who had spent years living in the countryside as part of the Mao-era campaigns that sent youth from the cities to labor alongside peasants. This group played a central role in first investigating and then generalizing the ad hoc experiments in rural reform that had emerged in the late 1970s, which led to the decollectivization of agricultural production. After the spectacular success of these reforms when they were implemented nationwide in the early 1980s, members of this group went on to conceptualize and defend a dual-track price system that had emerged out of piecemeal market reforms.

Under the planned economy, all producers had been responsible for an output quota that was sold to the state at set prices. The central plan coordinated the flows of raw materials and finished goods; market transactions were considered illicit. In the early reform period, enterprises still had to meet production quotas at lower state prices, but they were permitted to profit by selling any over-quota production on the market at higher prices. The consumer goods sector was fully liberalized fairly quickly, but goods considered essential—grain, cotton, steel, coal—were kept on state prices for some time. This dual-track system allowed the state to gradually increase the sphere of the economy ruled by market relations while maintaining overall stability.

The second group, which was fiercely critical of the dual-track system and advocated shock therapy to end it, included Wu Jinglian, Zhou Xiaochuan, Lou Jiwei, and Guo Shuqing. Wu went on to become China’s most prominent free-market commentator, while the latter three assumed some of the most powerful economic policymaking positions in the country. They had come into economics through formal schooling and were drawn to the systematizing elegance of dissident Eastern European economists like János Kornai and neoclassical economists like Milton Friedman. Theoretically rather than empirically oriented, they rejected the messy gradualism of the first group in favor of immediately ending the state’s active role in shaping the market. The centerpiece of this program was a “big bang” price reform that would realign prices with market values overnight, combined with austerity to counteract the inflation that would follow a sudden increase in prices at the core of the economy. A few years later, Russia and other Soviet bloc economies would apply this formula to disastrous effect.

Each of the two groups found older patrons within the state. The gradualists connected with economic policymakers whose formative experience was the hands-on management of the wartime and immediate postwar economy. They had overseen the Communist Party’s successful efforts to bring hyperinflation under control and revive growth with stunning speed by linking the value of money to the economy’s crucial commodities and by using the state purchase and sale of goods to balance market volatility and drive speculators out of business.

The shock therapists were aligned with a slightly later generation of top academics who had formalized Stalinist economic orthodoxy in the early years of the People’s Republic and established its economics educational system. Both groups contended for the favor of Zhao Ziyang, who, first as state premier and then as general secretary of the Communist Party, led economic policymaking from 1980 to 1988.

quote:

Today the Chinese leadership, like elites around the world, has been deeply shaken by the economic dangers and popular discontent that are the downsides of the neoliberal growth model. Despite the superficial appearance of social stability and state authority, since 2008 Chinese society has been roiled by the same forces upending the rest of the world: declining growth and productivity rates, huge real-estate bubbles, the dangerous expansion of shadow banking, volatile financial markets, broad anger over corruption and inequality, hunger for personal and collective purpose beyond making money, rising fears of foreign threats, and intensifying pressure on those who are different to conform to a national ideal.

To overcome the social and economic fragmentation of neoliberalism and revive growth and legitimacy, the Chinese leadership is experimenting with post-neoliberal forms of nationalism, combining belligerence in foreign relations with a domestic policy of economic levelling and violent assimilation targeting ethnic minorities and political dissidents. On both sides of the Pacific Ocean, this nationalism is imagined as setting China apart when in fact it makes China similar to the other major powers.....

China cuts US Treasury holdings in Aug to lowest since 2010 amid financial risks

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202110/1236735.shtml

"Given the US economic situation, global concerns about a potential US debt default are rising, which also led to a reduction of US debt holdings.

As of early September, the US federal debt exceeded $28.7 trillion. The decline of the US dollar's hegemony is only a matter of time, analysts warned.

Apart from economic considerations, some financial institutions could sell off US Treasuries out of concerns about deteriorating China-US ties..."