Aaron Sarin on China. I can’t vouch for Sarin. Neither can I say he’s not sound. He’s on Quintette, which does close vetting of its contributors.
In any case, there’s lots to chew on here, much of it objectively factual:
Is Washington trying to provoke World War III? Xi Jinping believes so, or at least, he claims to believe so. In recent days, it has emerged that he warned European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen about the US political establishment goading Beijing to attack Taiwan, presumably as part of a grand plan to bring about Chinese collapse. Xi, fortunately, has seen through these schemes, and he is not about to take the bait.
A planned invasion of Taiwan is certainly no American fabrication. In Fujian province, just across the water from Taiwan, the Communist Party is busy building air-raid shelters and emergency hospitals. Military recruitment centres have been opening all over China. Banks, utility firms, and property companies now host workplace militias. Beijing appears to be sanction-proofing the nation’s economy. Over the past 18 months, China’s gold reserves have skyrocketed, reaching an estimated value of $170 billion, while Chinese investment in Saudi Arabia (an indispensable oil supplier) saw a sharp increase from $1 billion in 2022 to $16 billion in 2023. However we choose to interpret them, these are the facts. Read on...
One quick comment is: China gold reserves of $170 billion is like nothing. China's forex reserves, at last count, are $US 3.2 Trillion. So 5% in gold. Who wouldn’t these days be putting some assets in gold. And if China goes ahead and attacks Taiwan, and the global economy tanks, as it would, what’ the worth of gold anyway? There always needs to be a market for it, and what’s the market it you’ve fried the world?
And the memory hole of the Internet. Something I’ve talked about before. The memory hole. Where people no longer know of the Gang of Four. No longer know of what happened in Tibet. No longer know of the Tiananmen massacres of June 4th. All memory holed. And now the internet memory hole:
At the same time as government workers find that the country’s borders have suddenly become the edges of the world, the Chinese internet has also begun quietly shrinking. Nearly all information posted on forums, blogs, and news portals back in the early days (1995–2005) can no longer be accessed. It’s not just the content that’s vanishing. In 2017, there were 5.3 million Chinese sites in existence; by 2023, the figure stood at 3.9 million. “It seems that there is a monster that devours web pages,” says a Chinese blogger, “and it swallows along the historical timeline, from the past to the present.” For millions of Chinese, a shrinking internet achieves the same end as an overseas travel ban: they are losing valuable information sources. Not just information about the outside world, but also information about China.
