“China is the biggest threat to the West” | Triggernometrry

 

Click above to go to the video

I like John Lee. I think he’s sound on China and its challenge to the geopolitical landscape. 
Worth an hour of your time. For a major world issue. China in the East and China in the West. 

Snips (not necessarily in order of his talk):

• “Statistically China is engaging in the greatest re-militarisation of any country in absolute and relative terms in peacetime history”. 
• Importance of Communist Party membership. Now 100+ millions. They include many of the middle class, so the middle class has been suborned. 
• Authoritarian governments like China can rapidly increase economic growth in a poor country. That becomes more difficult as the country becomes richer. (PF: with this analysis, is John subject to some of the same self-delusion that led the west to open up their markets to China in the 90s and 00s, in the hope that doing so would lead them to become more open and liberal? IOW, that authoritarian China might manage to move past the “middle class trap”, in a way that other countries have not? I hope not, but maybe).
• Taiwan: Tied to Xi Jinping making it his legacy. That’s dangerous. Though the Russia experience in Ukraine may have given us a few more years of breathing space. 
• SEA countries don’t want China to dominate. Don’t like its values. 
• China is Leninist. As I’ve often said: an authoritarian-bureaucratic-state. Closer to Mussolini’s Italy than any other country today. Concerned mainly with maintaining power, not so much with making revolution. 
• Uygurs: Why is China imprisoning them? Because Beijing can’t stand differing viewpoints. (PF: agree, but also the issue that China fears they might join the East Turkmenistan Liberation movement. 
• Why China is punishing Australia. The “Fourteen Grievances”. From 43'00
• The West and other open economies need to understand importance of enlightenment structures. Enough of constant self-abasement. (Comes with a first-generation immigrant perspective. Similar to Konstantin Kisin)

From the video intro:

Dr John Lee is a political scientist, specialising in Chinese political economy, at the Hudson Institute. Dr Lee has authored several books about international security including 'Will China Fail?' and 'The Free and Open Indo-Pacific Beyond 2020' as well as writing for some of the world’s most popular publications including The New York Times, The Australian, and Wall Street Journal.

Comment? Dissent? 

China in Europe

Watching a BBC story about Chinese companies doing the “Belt and Road” in Europe. 

One, in Croatia, in construction, has Labour contracts that are cut-and-paste from Middle East contracts. If an employee steals, their hand is amputated. If they kill someone, even accidentally, they are beheaded. Nice, right? 

Labourers are brought in from poorer countries like Vietnam and treated as indentured labourers. IOW, slaves.

BBC asked Five Chinese ambassadors in Europe to comment. All declined.

Shame on China. Slave driver!

(China has been doing the same in Africa, as we saw when we did our Cape go Cairo Africa car trip in 2011. Rampant oppression of local labour).

Zero Covid strikes twice and Biden pays the price

 A “three-fer” of fun stories in the front page of today’s South China Morning Post. 

1.  Top story is about the closure yesterday of the whole of Hong Kong Disneyland. Because one case. Imported. 

2. The second story is also because zero Covid policy: FedEx says it’s pulling out its HQ from Hong Kong because there is “no clear pathway out” of the current  order lockdowns.

As I describe it, this is Hong Kong deciding on the GBA strategy rather than the GFC strategy. 

GBA = the Greater Bay Area of southern China. That is looking inwards to China. Part of Belt and Road. A boring government description of GBA, highlighting civil servants’ ineptitude at PR. Plenty of other descriptions at your favourite search engine…

GFC = Global Financial Centre, which is what we’ve been since the seventies. Which means looking outward to the world. Well, we e made our bed, it would seem. FedEx is just one more in the gathering departure of international companies.

3. The bottom story is Joe Biden asking China for more oil. Because he’s shut down pipelines and halted fracking. Which kind of means no net reduction of emissions due to oil hasn’t really changed, just that the source of the oil has changed. Fracked gas emissions are less than a fifth of oil’s. The escaped methane during fracking issue is largely fixed. Opponents are driven by opposing the good because it’s not perfect. Yet it did allow the US to reduce carbon emissions while increasing renewables. 

Document 9 vs the Enlightenment

/Snip: 

China may not have been at the G7 summit in person, but it was very much there in spirit. We will look back at this long weekend in Cornwall, England as the moment when there was more than just a tacit recognition that China has become our era’s agenda-setting country.

In the eyes of many Western policymakers, China was supposed to become more like the West. The United States was to carry on ruling the waves, while simultaneously crafting the international rules. Yet, in many cases it is now China making the waves – if not the rules – with its ideas and others reacting to them.

Someone called Mark Logan, who seems to fancy himself on China, makes the argument that China is setting the world agenda. Though where the "still" in "... still setting the agenda" comes from is not clear.

Two items are offered: (1) that the west's push to set up an infrastructure fund for poorer countries emulates China's Belt and Road (BAR) initiative. And (2) promoting the virtues of western values is a reaction to China's Document 9. 

I wrote about D9 in 2013, then not again till yesterday. And here it is again, twice in two days! Spoiler alert: Document 9 is a repulsive document, written by hardline communist functionaries, for their boss Xi Jinping early in his presidency. He's using it as his authoritarian guidebook.

It may be that some or all these moves by the west, as represented by the G7, are indeed a reaction to what China's been doing. Then again the west made it WW2 when they reacted to what the new Reich had done. And all that came out of the war -- United Nations, WTO, Marshall Plan, etc.... all were reactions. 

For poorer nations it must be better to have more avenues to infrastructure development, whether or not in reaction to China being irrelevant.

As for western values vs Document 9: check it out and see which you'd rather was running your life, your country. What's set out in Document 9 has no allure for me. Long live Western Values!

PS: just thinking what's going on this week: the G7 meeting in Cornwall. Biden meets Putin in Geneva. NATO has a summit meeting and targets China as its main challenge. France reopens after Covid, while Boris bottles it again. Busy week.

ADDED: But what will Joe (or the west) do if Russia or China test their mettle? Nothing much say Shapiro in “Old Joe Meets the Bond Villain”. Shapiro is crazy in some stuff and plain wrong on other stuff, but I think this reading of the Biden-Putin summit is pretty much spot on. The battle of the autocracies vs the democracies goes in too at personal level, by people voting which their feet. One doesn’t see many clambering to enter Russia or China. 

‘Why in US eyes, China’s maritime ambition can only appear as a threat’ | Jing Lee

Jing's latest article was published as the top piece in the op-Ed page of today's South China Morning Post. 

Arguing for greater knowledge of each other's histories, cultures and geo-political drivers. True dat, but hard, in an age of Twitter…

She’s now a bit of a regular in the op-ed pages. Click on the “Jing” label below for the other writings. Or click here.

I’ll paste the whole article below the fold…

With its ‘wolf warrior’ bullying tactics, China failed to learn from US path to global leadership

This article by Gregory Mitrovich strikes me as being pretty much spot on the money. Bottom line: it's very critical of China and its bullying tactics, with Xi Jinping and the Belt and Road (BAR) mentioned specifically.  As I've been critical too, especially of the bully-in-chief, the guy that sets the tone, the Godfather, Xi Jinping. (Btw, this is our local paper, keeping on keeping on, with robust criticisms of the mainland).
The comments are running almost all against Mitrovich: The US is the true great bully, kills and maims innocent civilians; it set up the post-war order for its own benefit.
There’s the usual gaggle of the “fifty-cent army” among the commenters. The Beijing sock-puppets, though you're not allowed to say so or your comment is blocked. You can tell them though, from their poor English — on an English-speaking site. There are others who are just anti-American in the good ol' Chomskyian sense and so have to support a US rival, even if it's an evil regime like Xi's.
Some facts can't be gainsaid. The post-war order, largely US inspired, has given us a fairer and richer world; US soft power for the last 70+ years has been a powerful magnet for the whole world; as a result, the feet vote by running to the United States, not away, and certainly not to China. 

If we look at China’s rapid rise in the last forty years, the remarkable increase in incomes and standards of living, consider this: that it didn’t happen because of the policies of Xi Jinping and like minded authoritarians. It happened precisely to the extent that China loosened its grip, precisely to the extent that it let people get on with doing their own thing, precisely to the extent that it allowed market forces to work their magic, even today the SOEs, China’s State Owned Elephants, are monstrously inefficient and still gobble up vast quantities of state mandated funds. So talk of the magic of socialism or even “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is way off the mark.

China state interference in its economy makes a sick joke of its slamming Australia wine with nearly  220% import duties on the claim it gets export subsidies*. I used to work in that industry and I know it’s nonsense. Talk about pots and kettles and glass houses. But they’ll get away with it. Probably. Because they’re bullies and they’re a large bully to boot, the lethal combination. 

*ADDED: That story — the one about China blocking Aussie wine — is infested with the “Fifty-cent” brigades in the comments section.  How do I know? 

1. Because there were 176 comments when I went there. SCMP is not like the New York Times or Washington Post which get thousands of comments. The Post does well if it gets a dozen. 176 is almost unheard of. Especially for a post tucked away in the Business section, which took me a while to find. It suggests - to me, at least — that the swarms were directed there. As they have been whenever there’s been an Australia-China story. Bash Australia, Comrades!

2. Their bad English, in an English-speaking paper. Their grammar and tone don’t fit in.

3. They follow a set of talking points — Australia is a “small potato” (xiao tudou), it’s the US’ lapdog, who cares about Australia, they’re a bunch of racists anyway, block all Australian goods, don’t visit or study in Australia. They have a big thing two against the Five Eyes. First Australia, then the rest, Comrades!

Meantime, I just spoke to an old mate who’s lived in China for 35+ years. He tells me that there’s been a boom in wealthy Chinese shifting money to Australia. Amounts have doubled in recent months. So no matter the vitriol from Beijing and the efforts of the vile Fifty Cent-ers, folks on the ground are still wanting out even to as horrid a place as Oz.

Manufactured victimhood in Australia-China relations

Australia-China relations are at an all time low. At least since 1972 and establishment of diplomatic relations. I was in China as a diplomat from 1976, and later did business there for decades. I now live in Hong Kong. I’ve never seen it so bad. We had our differences but always worked through them. The greater good was in ongoing engagement and discussion.

Some of the troubles are down to Australian own goals. We didn’t need to get so firmly on side with the US’ China preoccupations. Things like investigating  the source of the virus, a call which which angered Beijing. Needless provocation? Maybe so. Beijing should certainly be pressured to allow an international investigation, but I doubt Australia’s voice added any pressure, while it provoked more Chinese ire. 

Still. I’m going to call the major provocation as Beijing’s. That Winnie Bear Xi Jinping. There’s the litany of his aggressions since he took over in 2012: incursions in the South China Sea, the BAR, arresting Uygur Muslims…. 

In Australia there’s no doubt Beijing has pushed its influence peddlers. Maybe its Confucius Institutes are complicit, I don’t know about that, while I do know that learning Chinese culture and language is a wonderful and rewarding exercise. But I would not be flabbergasted if it ruined out they had people pushing Beijing’s line, via pressures on Australia’s media and politician. Institutes aside, there are other malign characters we know of. Universities are particular battle grounds. So it’s not surprising that Australia’s government should take the cudgel against them.

Some people, like Su-lin Tan, claim that in today’s Australia you must be critical of China or get “cancelled”. That is self-evidently nonsense. Much of the Australian media is anti the PM Scott Morrison and anti his China policies, including the campaigns to stem Chinese influence peddlers in Australia.

Tan is also obtuse, perhaps wilfully so. She complains the government has not articulated Australian “values” and so she doesn’t know what they are. Get real, Su-lin! Those values don’t need to be “articulated”, they are lived around you. They may involve some racism; every country in the world has racists. But t’s not systemic, and mostly micro level — the “where are you from” variety, usually asked well-meaningly. (I speak here as someone married to a Chinese-Australian).  Moreover Australia is in the least racist category internationally. Yet, here is Tan, wilfully ignorant and bursting with victimhood:

Driving this mania is Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s July statement that – in regards to China – he will never “trade our values”. This confuses me – as an Australian of Chinese heritage – because he’s never articulated what these “values” are, nor do I feel any values are being jeopardised because Australia engages with China. No one has forced me to be a communist. [Link]

And later:

 Together, politicians and some journalists team up to “other” those they don’t understand, particularly minority migrant groups. Does that truly make Australia “the most successful multicultural nation in the world”, a popular catchphrase Canberra likes to use but for which we don’t have any evidence? [Link]

It’s not true we “have no evidence”. Here is plenty out there, including multiple international comparison polls. And the Chinese-Australian community in Australia is part of that, being one of the earliest immigrant community and amongst its most successful. Phooey to Su-lin Tan’s manufactured, or deluded, victimhood. 

An emboldened Beijing: conquering Covid and powering economy

Xi Jinping in his best Winnie the Pooh mode
Surrounded by “those appalling old wax works“

Trigger alert: I’m going to say something nice about China!

Which to some makes me a China apologist, a Chicom running dog. I’ll have to write something nasty about Beijing soon to balance, something about the egregious Winnie the Xi, perhaps. But for now — putting treatment of Uygurs, Tibetans, corruption and censorship, into a box on one side, to come back to later — I’m posting a couple of links to articles noting recent Chinese successes.

I’ve been meaning to write something about how  China did so well handing the virus and have been collecting views from in and outside China. After all, whatever one thinks about the nasty side of the regime, it surely has done well in crunching Covid.

I’ll get to that in due course. But for now, an article yesterday by Zhou Xin, arguing that China has done well in controlling the pandemic (it has) and is rebounding  fast (it is), making it a good investment bet.

Buried towards the end is something more worrying to me: reference to Xi Jinping’s comments on the 70th anniversary of the Korean War. By the way, what we in the west know as the “Korean War”, China knows as the “Oppose America, Support Korea” war, 抗美援朝, Kang Mei Yuan Chao. Then again, United Nations forces, led by the US, were also supporting “Korea”… The one that 70 years later has comprehensively trounced its northern namesake in every single area of human endeavour, save for the starving of its people and brutalising of its citizens. North Korea: another tiki torch in the triumph of Socialism! Supported by Beijing! Yay! (Oh dear. I can’t write too long without getting crabby at Beijing).

Back to the article. Zhou paints Xi’s Korean (“Oppose America”) War comments as defensive, as do other China apologists: Xi is quoted as saying “China will not back off from challenges, from Taiwan to the South China Seas”. But it was Xi who set China on a more aggressive posture the moment he became Chairman of the Party in 2012: on Taiwan, in the South China Sea, in Xinjiang, in Tibet, via his Belt and Road initiative, his  “Wolf Diplomacy”, his railing against freedom of speech, democracy and western values. It was Xi who single handedly, by his gross bullying, boosted the anti-Beijing, pro-independence parties in Taiwan. It was likely Xi-inspired meddling that boosted anti-China sentiment in Hong Kong, fanning the protest fires.  It strikes me as a bit rich therefore to be talking now about “defence”. What, is this supposed to be counted-attack as self- defence?

All that said, here is another article in the strong Chinese rebound, by Yale faculty member Stephen Roach, contrasting China’s handling of Covid with the US’. That’s my second China positive link, re its Covid control and economic recovery. 

On the other side of the ledger: have China’s Covid cases been as low as reported? Not quite. Because until recently China did not. count positive but asymptomatic cases as confirmed cases. Even now, they are listed separately, though we now know that they are contagious. China is the only country in the world to count cases like this and is not in keeping with WHO recommendations, as Josephine Ma explains. 

China is the only country in the world to adopt a different definition than that of the World Health Organization, which defines a confirmed case as someone who tested positive.…

Data shows that asymptomatic cases comprise a significant percentage of the total positives and such patients spread Covid 19.

Australia-China relations

China throttles Aussie wine imports. And suspend Barley

Australia-China relations have been much in the news lately, especially here in Hong Kong but also in other MSM, like BBC and Bloomberg. 

Fair to say, I think, that the main theme is that Australia is cutting off its nose, if it stands too tough on Beijing.  

It’s a struggle. And one in which Australia has the “disadvantage of democracy”.

This is what I mean:

‘The Emperor’s New Road: the inside story of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative’ | SCMP

Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka. Now owned by China

In our 2011 African jaunt from Cape Town to Cairo, we came across many Chinese projects. Some the people liked, some they resented. 

Xi Jinping was not yet president, so they were just bilateral initiatives, though I guess by now they've become absorbed into Xi’s signature “Belt and Road Initiative” The BRI swallows all, Xi’s very own Blob. Or, from the review of the book above: “Belt and Road” has become a brand name to be attached to just about anything.
No doubt some of the projects are terrific. We drove along a brand new highway in Sudan, up the mountains and along the Nile. A fabulous day's driving. Built by the Chinese. And you can see so clearly in Africa: where roads go, there too goes development. And where roads don't go, there's no development. And the people do like development, whatever ante-diluvian greenies may say.
But no doubt some are deeply resented. As in Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port, above, in Malaysia and Pakistan, "debt trap" infrastructure projects — where the country gets so deep in debt for the project the Chinese take it over, in massive debt-for-equity swaps.

Conclusion:

…as Hillman makes clear, to many of them the belt now appears to be a noose, and the road a road to nowhere.

This book sounds like a good take on the subject, by Jonathan Hillman.

No mere desk-bound theoretician, he provides personal accounts of visits to key projects across Africa and Asia, struggles with bureaucracy and mutual suspicion at China’s borders, bringing all their logistics to life. Contrary to the dreary enthusiasm of official accounts, he sees ports without ships, trains without passengers, airports without flights, and free trade zones largely free of trade.